"I hadn't the least idea in life," she replied, without any sign of relenting, "nor have I at the present moment. I intend, however, to find out who Mr. Conway is at the earliest possible mo"——
The junior partner fell into a revolving chair, stuck his legs out in front of him as far as they would reach, and roared so that he must have been heard all over the building. He roared so loud and long that the performance was infectious, and his wife and his wife's mother and his senior partner, notwithstanding the fact had begun to dawn upon them that they were in a foolish position, had to smile in spite of themselves. When the junior partner was able to splutter he managed to gasp his explanation in short sentences. Bub was a friend of his in St. Louis who followed the races out there, and who had promised to tip him off on the first good thing at a long price that was to be put over the plate at the St. Louis meeting. Bub had kept his promise, and the junior partner was $600 to the good. That was all.
"And if you don't go out and corner the foulard dress goods market to-morrow, Patsy," the junior partner concluded, addressing his wife, "on the strength of what our four-footed pal, Jim Conway, has done for us, why"——
When they had gone, the office boy, in sweeping out the office, picked up the telegram, that had slipped to the floor while the junior partner was laughing.
"Now, w'y couldn't I ha' got a piece o' dat!" said the office boy, disgustedly as he read the telegram. "I bin pickin' dat skate ev'ry day f'r de las' two weeks, and I knowed dis mornin' w'en I seen de St. Loo entries dat he'd win in buck-jump."
[STORY OF A FAMOUS PAT HAND.]
A Game in New Orleans That Makes Modern "Big" Poker Games Seem Tiny by Comparison.
"The shrinkage in the value of poker winnings that get talked about nowadays," said the New Orleans turfman at the beach dinner, "is mournful, that's what it is. A few days ago a man told me that So-and-so, a gilded youth from up the State somewhere, had recently swooped down upon a gentleman's poker club in New York, and had removed himself from the scene of play, after a five-hour séance, with $8500 in winnings. The man who told me this leaned back, after he had sprung the $8500 climax, and waited for my eyes to protrude. He looked a bit miffed and sulky when they didn't protrude.
"'Why, durn it all,' said he, 'I believe you affect your cold-blooded way of taking things. To see you twiddle your thumbs a man 'ud suppose that you had no more sense than to imagine that an $8500 winning at a short poker sitting was the most ordinary thing in the'——
"'Easy, easy,' I had to put in, for he was heating himself unduly. Then, to bring him around to good nature again and to convince him that I wasn't attitudinizing, I was compelled to spend a half hour or so in unwinding a bit of a reel of the days when there were poker giants in this country. He wasn't quite willing, at the finish, to acknowledge that the winner at draw of $8500 was a poker pigmy, but when I happened to mention the occasion when Phil Cuthbert of St. James's parish dropped, in a two-handed game at the St. Charles Hotel in New Orleans, a little bundle of $400,000"——