"He told you, of course, that you were smoking," interrupted the New York man.
"No, he didn't. He asked me if it got into the New Orleans papers. I told him that in 1868 the New Orleans papers were too busy roasting the carpet-baggers to devote any space to such a minor matter as a $400,000 poker game at the St. Charles Hotel, where draw games approximating that in size were generally going on at any old hour of the day or night. There was some rhetoric, I admit, in that 'approximating' statement, but I wanted to set this New York man right. As a matter of fact, a $50,000 game of draw was not at all uncommon in the St. Charles's private poker parlors. After Phil Cuthbert had dropped that mound of $400,000 on one hand, the New Orleans papers did announce that Mr. Philip Cuthbert, the well-known planter of St. James's parish, was about to start on a gold-prospecting tour in the mountains of Honduras; but they were generous enough not to mention, if they knew it, that, with four aces in his hand, he had lost $400,000 to Mr. Joseph Lescolette, shipper, of Havre, Pernambuco, and New Orleans."
"Lost $400,000 on a hand consisting of four aces, am I to understand you said?" asked the New York man.
"The statement was to that general effect," replied the New Orleans turfman.
"Suppose you just lead up to that gradually by telling the story."
"Well, in order to do that, I've got to plead guilty to having been a table arranger and sweep-out boy at the St. Charles at the time the thing happened," said the horseman from New Orleans. "However, having achieved greatness since, I see no reason why I shouldn't be willing to acknowledge that. Besides being table arranger and sweep-out boy, it was one of the functions of my job at the St. Charles to sort o' stand by, as sailor-men say, when games were on in the private parlors, and run errands for the gentlemen playing. There was plenty of high poker play to be had at any of the first-rate New Orleans clubs at that time—too much of it, in fact, for the club games became so open, owing to the too generous distribution of visitors' cards by the club members that many of the high-playing men of the town abandoned club poker playing altogether. When they felt the hunch to get into a game of draw they adjourned to the St. Charles, where, in the seclusion of a private parlor, they enjoyed freedom from the neck-craning gaze of onlookers, and freedom also from that bane of the genuine lover of a game of draw, the chap who stands behind one's chair and keeps up a running commentary of approval or disapproval.
"Phil Cuthbert was a raiser of perique tobacco up in St. James's parish, and he had besides several thousand acres in cotton. His father, who died before the war was well under way, was supposed to be worth from $2,000,000 to $3,000,000, and it all went to his only son, Phil. At the close of the war the estate had dwindled to some $800,000, and Phil started in to flatten it out still more. It was the talk of Louisiana that he had taken a $250,000 crimp in the estate within two years after he had entered upon it, and it had nearly all gone at cards. He wasn't a dissipated man at all, but he just naturally couldn't help but play poker, and he belonged to a family of losers at poker. Before this big game that I'm going to tell you about wound him up I'd frequently seen him win as much as $25,000 in a single night's play at the St. Charles. Instead, though, of making a run for it for his St. James's plantation when he made a winning like this, he'd be back again with a party of more or less solvent friends the very next night, and his winnings and an amount equal thereto that was not velvet, but hard, soil-wrung cash, would float out of his keeping into the hands of his friends. Wherefore, to insert a tiny bit of moralizing on the side, I want to say that your greatest gambler is not the man who possesses the greatest amount of skill in manipulating the cards, dice or wheel, but the man who knows to a T when the psychological moment arrives for him to quit, winner or loser.
"Joe Lescolette—called Joe familiarly because he was under 40, a rounder of French nativity who loved Americans and their nicknames and diminutives of good fellowship—was probably the richest of the New Orleans fruit importers at that time. His father before him had had a line of South American and West Indian sailing packets hauling fruit into New Orleans for the American market, and Joe came into the whole business at the old gentleman's death. To go a little ahead of the story, Joe went to France at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, entered the French Army, and was killed at Gravelotte. He wasn't a hectic flush gambler during the few years that he kept his name pretty constantly in the mouths of New Orleans folks on account of his extravagances, but he was a scientific master of the game of American draw, all the same, and, by the same token, as nervy a little man in a game of cards, or in any other affair of life, for the matter of that, as ever came out of Gaul. He was the original subsidizer of the French opera in New Orleans, by the way, and it was at a performance of 'Aida' that Joe met Phil Cuthbert on the night Phil struck the poker snag that wrecked his estate. The two men were friends of some years' standing, members of the same clubs, and they had had various business dealings with each other besides. On the night of the 'Aida' performance Cuthbert had just struck town from his St. James plantation and he had the poker light in his eye. Cuthbert met Joe Lescolette in the smoking-room of the opera house during the final intermission and slipped his arm through Lescolette's and said:
"'Joe, I desire to accumulate, accrue and win a very large portion of your currency, even unto half of your kingdom, this night. There is too much conversation in a game of four. Suppose, then, when the dying strains of Rhadames are only echoes and this act is finished we slit each other's weazens, pokerishly speaking, over at the hotel.'
"Well, when they came I was the buttons in charge of the parlor they selected for play. Much as they desired solitude, they couldn't achieve it. About half a dozen of their friends traipsed along with them, and took one of the tables in the same parlor and went at a dinky game of $20 limit.