"But a man who'll lay up alongside of a brace faro layout or a brace wheel need not necessarily be sucker enough to hand his dust over to a smooth duck who's dealing a game that has all the scars, moles, tattoo marks and other perfectly visible Bertillons of a dead open and shut sure-thing layout. Yet I've seen men who were wise in their own business—horse-rustling, for instance—go broke against games that you'd think a ten-year-old would size up correctly without the assistance of an X-ray apparatus.
"I'm thinking of the time that Jink McAtee, afterward one of the foxiest horse-thieves who ever used an upside-down brand in the Southwest, got interested in squeeze-spindle in Guthrie. It was in Guthrie, in May, 1889, just after Oklahoma had been opened up, that the two Reeves brothers, Bill and Al, and Arthur Pendleton started an all-round layout in what was the first two-story shack that had been thrown up in the town. The two Reeves boys are still running the biggest layout in Guthrie, but Pendleton is dead. The Reeves-Pendleton brand of faro, as well as their keno, wheel, stud, and other legitimate games, was perfectly on the level, but in addition they had a few games in operation that was plain cases to most of the patrons of the layout of the sure-thing. The Reeves and Pendleton people didn't club anybody into stacking up against their sure-thing games. They just started 'em going, hired a man named Gately to run 'em, and struck the attitude that if among the sooners and boomers of Guthrie there was people imbecile enough to want to hit up these sure-thing games, it wasn't their funeral.
"The most alluring among these sure-thing games was the outfit called the squeeze-spindle. You used to run across a squeeze-spindle quite often down in the Southwest, but so many of the dealers of that game got shot up and slithered that it has sort o' passed out. It's a lottery game ostensibly, where the player makes what the dealer calls 'conditional' winnings, and the dealer has to have the assistance of 'boosters' to throw confidence into the suckers. It took a good con man to run a squeeze-spindle game. The sucker would put up a hundred to win five hundred; he'd cop the coin 'conditionally'—that is to say, the arrow that flew around in the middle of the box had to point to another number of the sucker's selection before the money would be his to walk away with, and in the event of the arrow pointing to the right number the player would get twice the sum.
"Of course the arrow never went the sucker's way twice hand-running, and equally, of course, it was a game where the dealer got all of the money. The reason it was called a squeeze-spindle was because the dealer had only to squeeze a button beneath the table to stop the arrow at any old point in its flight around the numbers that he wanted to. When a sucker was up against the game, a 'booster' would prance in with a big roll of the house's money, treble it on a couple of straight turns of the spindle, squeezed just his way by the dealer, and then the sucker would conclude that it was only his lack of capital that caused him to lose—just as the pin-head who doubles on favorites at the races tries to convince himself when's he's broke and smoking a punk pipe that he'd have been able to put all the bookmakers out of business if he'd just had the capital to keep on with his system. Once in a great while a squeeze-spindle dealer would let one of his good things get away with a bunch of money, if he felt reasonably sure that the sucker would come back at it with the coin later on; and thus the ingenuous little fiction 'ud go around that So-and-So had pasted a squeeze-spindle dealer for his whole roll, and this would make business.
"Now, here was a game that you wouldn't think a man with the sense he was born with would bet twenty cents worth of zinc money on. But this man Gately, who ran the squeeze-spindle for the Reeves-Pendleton layout on a salary and commission basis, was a pretty smooth gazzabo in his generation, and he landed the good things with his layout right along, and often for sizeable money. He was a quiet, red bearded chap, with a mighty convincing, persuasive way about him, and a man who'd put up a fight, too, in a corner. He had free rein in the running of the squeeze-spindle and two or three other sure-thing devices that formed a sort of side-show to the main Reeves-Pendleton layout, and the proprietors pretended that his outfit was really independent of their plant—that Gately was simply renting space from them and going it alone. But all Guthrie knew differently.
"Well, up against this squeeze-spindle plant goes this here Jink McAtee that I started to tell you about. Jink wasn't then known as a horse-thief. He had been a sooner—he got in long before the trumpet call on a thoroughbred Kentucky horse that he was afterward found to have pinched out of a barn—and he had made a pretty good thing out of the Guthrie corner lot that he had staked off. He sold it three days after the dash for $6000, and then he laid back on his liquor with a whole lot of content. He was a low forehead in looks and manners. He was the veriest duffer in his attempts to make the Reeves-Pendleton combination put up their shutters by attacking their square games, and he lost over $3000 of his corner-lot money at their faro tables. He blew in another couple of thousand of the bunch at the honkatonks around town before his little beady eyes fell on Gately's squeeze-spindle, and he perceived a chance to get all of his money back in jig-time. Gately pointed it out to him just how easy it was.
"Before McAtee put a dollar down on the spindle Gately got Jink's eyes to popping by roping in a booster who pulled $3200 out of the squeeze-spindle in quicker time than a cayuse could make two jumps, and when Gately looked chagrined and sorrowful McAtee bit. Gately knew his man pretty well, and he permitted Jink to not only win $1600 'conditionally,' right off the reel, but he actually passed $400 of Jink's winnings over to him. Then he proceeded to wipe Jink out. When McAtee was all trimmed up, Gately looked sad.
"'You didn't have quite enough along with you, McAtee,' he said, shaking his head real mournfully. 'If you'd had another $200 to cover that $1600 that you'd won and left in the hole, why, you'd had me heading for the Canadian River by this time.'
"McAtee ate this spiel of Gately's up as if it was so much lunch on a counter, and went away filled with the idea that there was riches in the squeeze-spindle if it was hit right, and with enough money to back up the plays. So he went to just eleven of his sooner friends and talked squeeze-spindle to 'em. He put it to them just what a good thing the squeeze-spindle was rightly hammered. He told 'em how near he'd been to pulling out his losings, and more besides, through the medium of Gately's squeeze-spindle at the Reeves-Pendleton layout. They took Jink's word for it, and they all joined the pool that McAtee organized to smash that spindle. They got together $2600, and on the afternoon following Jink's play they walked down to the Reeves-Pendleton plant in a body. Each man had a rifle along with him. There wasn't anything remarkable about that. During the first year of Guthrie's existence every man carried a long-iron over his arm. If twelve men, all with rifles, were to line up in front of the Reeves-Pendleton layout in Guthrie to-day there'd be good reason for the people inside to suppose that they were going to be 'stuck up,' but there was no reason to suppose anything of the kind when Jack McAtee brought along his eleven subscribers to his squeeze-spindle-smashing pool that afternoon. Gately wasn't worried a little bit.
"'My friends is all got a interest in this, podner,' explained Jink to Gately, 'and they come along jest t' see th' play.'