"I had the buck when it came my turn to deal again, and so it was a jackpot. I was wishing myself well out of it, and had cold feet, if ever a man did, though I was afraid to say so with so much of my opponents' money in my clothes. My hands probably trembled a little as I dealt that round, and even this fact probably caused them to suspect that I was monkeying with the deck and to watch me narrowly. The man on my left opened the pot for the size of it, and all stayed. When I picked up my hand and saw that I had given myself a clean, pat flush, ace on top, it made me pretty nervous, and before I stayed I did a heap of considering.
"'The best thing you can do, young fellow,' said I to myself, 'is to stay out of this jack altogether, or else throw that straight of yours face up in the center of the table, proving your squareness to these cutthroats, and let them play the jack out among themselves. If you don't do one of these things, you're going to get hurt in just about three minutes.'
"Then I considered some more. Here I had a fine and probably winning hand that I had come by perfectly on the level, and it would be rank cowardice to throw it away, and mighty poor poker, besides.
"'I'll be damned if I do any such thing just to convince these chaps that I'm not a thief,' was my final conclusion; and with that I made it twice the size of the pot to draw cards. They all glowered I tell you what, but they all stayed, every one of 'em. They not only stayed, but they bet and raised each other like the devil, and forced me to out-raise all of their raises every time it came around to me.
"Jim Cathcart, whose beady eyes had been blazing ever since I doubled the value of the pot to draw cards, was as bad-looking a man as I want to see when, finally, the man at my left called my last big raise. There had probably been some signals in knee-rubbing under the table, for the other two cowboys followed the lead of the first and called me in turn. When it got around to Cathcart he slammed his bundle of greenbacks into the pile with an oath.
"'Podner,' said he, looking hard at me with his little red eyes, 'some o' your work here to-night has been so cut-an'-dried lookin' as to excite a whole lot of doubt about your bein' on the level; an' if you happen to have anythin' in that fist o' your'n this time that'll top these here three aces o' mine, then, by hell, you havin' dealt this mess yourself, there won't be no manner o' question but that you're a damned proper crook.'
"Was I scared? Well, the hand just fell out of my paw, face up on the table, I was so scared! I was so paralyzed with fear that I simply couldn't move or say a word, and, what's more, I'm not a particle ashamed to own up to it. When the cards fell out of my hand Cathcart reached over and spread them out with his left hand.
"'Well, by hell, you are a crook, ain't you?' he snapped when he saw the value of the hand that beat his own good one, and as he spoke he whipped out the big gun on the right side of his belt. I was blind with terror, and when I heard the loud report of a gun I gave it all up and figured that I was already three-quarters of the way over the Big Divide.
"When I opened my eyes a second later I saw Cathcart staring at the door, his right arm hanging limp at his side. His gun had fallen on the table without being discharged, and his left arm was in the air. So were the six arms of the other three men, and they also had their eyes glued on the door. I wheeled around to look that way myself. Standing quietly under the lintel of the door, with his two big guns covering the five of us, was the tall, broad-shouldered, long-haired man I had noticed eyeing us before we started the game of poker. The man was Wild Bill, Abilene's celebrated Marshal. The shot I had heard when I had given the whole thing up was from one of Wild Bill's unerring guns. It had pinked Cathcart in the right shoulder just in the nick of time, causing the gun with which he had intended to shoot me to fall from his hand.
"'Slope for your camp, son,' said Wild Bill to me quietly, still covering the four men. Well, for all I know, he might be covering them yet. I do know, though, that I was out of that room like a cat out of a bag, and the way I cut for our camp, over the newly-laid ties, eight miles away, was a warning to grasshoppers.