"A keen-eyed, big-framed, prematurely gray-haired man was the speaker. As he spoke he reached down from behind the Indian's chair and got two huge hands around the buck's neck. The onlookers formed a clearing. The Chicago youth got himself on the outskirts of the bunch.
"'About three months ago,' said the keen-eyed man, dragging the huge, half-choked Indian to his feet, 'I saw you at The Dalles leave the prints of your dirty fingers on the face of a little whiffet you had just fleeced. I hankered then to confer a few personally conducted slaps of my own make and manufacture on your coppery jowls, but for some reason or other I passed the hanker up on that occasion. Well, the slaps are coming to you now. It's better late than never, and I'm going to slap you into jerked beef just for luck.'
"The buck was finally up against the real thing, and he knew it. I'll bet that his face was whiter than mine is now when the big-framed man, who had the devil of anger lurking in his eyes, suddenly loosed his right hand from around the Indian's neck, and, still clutching him by the left, swept the loose arm back for the momentum and brought his heavy palm smack against the buck's left cheek with a noise that sounded like the explosion of a charge of blasting powder. The slap rattled the Indian's teeth and made his big head joggle from side to side like the head of an automaton. Clutching the Indian's throat again then with his right hand, the big-framed man repeated the slapping performance on the Indian's right cheek with his left hand, and left a welt there that might have been made by a cat-o'-nine tails. The buck was too dazed, in the first place, by the suddenness of it all, to make a move: in the second place, he was too cowardly. The big-framed man—he was an expert mining engineer from Nevada, and his name was Varus Pryor—slapped the Indian's face, first with his right and then with his left, for three minutes, with all his might, and then, getting behind the buck, proceeded to slap him into the street. With first one hand and then the other clutching the collar of the Indian's coat, he slapped him out to the front door of the hotel. Then he gave the buck the knee in the small of the back, and hoisted him across the pavement to the middle of the street, where the Indian spun around and fell for a moment.
"'I don't care what the Indian Bureau says about it,' said the keen-eyed man, standing in the doorway of the hotel. 'God Almighty never intended that white men should stand for such alligators as that copper-mugged swindler, and'——
"'Stand clear, pard, he's going to plug you!' shouted a man from a second-story window of the hotel.
"The Indian, pretending to be hurt, and only half risen to his feet in the obscurity of the middle of the street, had got his gun out, and the yell from the second story reached Pryor just in time. As it was, the buck planted a ball in the front door of the hotel, only two inches above the big-framed man's head. By that time Pryor's gun was working, and he drilled six holes forty-eight hundredths of an inch in diameter plumb through the swindling Umatilla's chest. Forty-five minutes later he was acquitted by a coroner's jury on the grounds of self-defense and justifiable homicide—a two-in-one verdict.
"This," concluded the traveling Inspector of Indian Agencies, "was the finish of just one mentally-burnished buck Indian, and I know of several others."
[THE UNCERTAIN GAME OF STUD POKER.]
Story of a Séance at Stud Between Two Oregon Contractors and the Close Finish Thereof.
"Somehow or another, I don't like the game of stud," said a Government contractor from Portland, Ore. "It's too much of a strain to play stud. There are too many heart-breaking and headache-producing possibilities attached to the mysterious card the other fellow has got in the hole. I'd rather take the chance of guessing what all of his five cards are than to engage in the perspiring business of trying to figure out the horrible possible value of the one blind card, especially if the four cards he has exposed are capable of being amplified into a hand of the topper kind by the addition of that bit of pasteboard in the pit. I can't get away from the impression that it's like putting all of your money in one bet to play stud. Now, there's a good deal to the game of draw besides mere bluffing. In fact, bluffing is almost an obsolete feature of the game among the experts at draw poker. The man that plays his hand in draw will beat the bluffer every time in year-in-and-year-out play.