"Sort of endless chain, wasn't it?" put in the American.
"Well, if you want to put it that way," said the Englishman. "And worse still, the man got my guineas at my own game. If it had been poker, now, I wouldn't have minded so much, for I never could master that queer game, and I don't believe there's anything in it, anyhow. But nap! Chap beat me clean at nap, that I've been playing ever since I was at Harrow. Odd, too, that I beat him easily at first and had all the luck, and was probably fifty guineas ahead of him. Then suddenly the luck changed, you see"——
The American smiled.
"What the deuce are you grinning at? The luck changed, as I say, and, by Jove, the fellow positively couldn't lose. If my daughter hadn't become ill on the fourth day out, I dare say I might have lost quite a bit of money, and"——
"Unquestionably you would have," put in the American. "So that in one respect your daughter's illness—which I trust was not serious—was really a blessing to you. It's queer to me that no Englishman I have ever met in ocean voyaging is able to perceive that when he is playing at cards with a stranger who permits him to win easily and heavily at first, it is time for him to make his devoirs, more or less respectful, to the stranger, and proceed to take a constitutional on the main deck, henceforth abjuring cards with said stranger. Now, an American is able to see into that game right away. If he is playing with a friend, and the friend is a winner from the go-off, as we say over here, all well and good. The American voyager who is up to snuff puts his friend's initial winnings down to the chances of the game. But when he gets into a game with a stranger, and the stranger simply shoves money from the outset over to his side of the table—well, do you know what the American of to-day does under those circumstances? He simply awaits the moment when the luck begins to change, and then he has an imperative appointment with his wife in the cabin. He thus picks up quite a bit of cigar money from a man who he instinctively knows is a sharper."
"Fancy now," said the Englishman. "If I had only known that"——
"But you didn't know, and, as I say, I never came across the Englishman who did. Why, the ocean voyaging card sharpers have become so well aware of this little shrewd habit of American passengers with whom they sit down to a game that of late years they have altogether abandoned that old, old trick of permitting their victims to win with ease at the outset. They only work that trick nowadays on Englishmen. Fact is, I think there ought to be a rule on all transatlantic steamships, English and American, absolutely prohibiting British subjects from playing cards at all aboard ship."
"Tommyrot!" said the Englishman.
"Not so much so as you might imagine," said the American. "Of course, I don't mean that literally, and yet I don't know but what, after all, it might be a good thing. I have watched the wake of a steamer on the trip across the Atlantic fifty-two times—that is, I have made twenty-six round voyages—and I suppose that on these voyages I have seen as many as a thousand men plucked at cards. I will venture to assert that 80 per cent. of them were Englishmen. So you will perceive there is some justification for what I said about your countrymen playing cards aboard ship.
"I've seen some clever men of your country badly done by the ocean-going card sharpers, too. At the time your Lord Lonsdale came to the United States—Violet Cameron incident, you know—he was a pretty young man, even if he did at that period of his life stand in urgent need of a guardian with a heavy club. Well, amid the newspaper uproar over his landing in this country with the Cameron, the fact did not come out that Lonsdale was plucked of $12,000 on the trip over by Ned Turner, one of the most notable of the older clique of steamship sharpers. But it's a fact, all the same. I was not only a board the steamer at the time, but I was one of a number of men who endeavored to pound some sense into young Lonsdale's head while the plucking was going on. But he was a stubborn chap and would listen to no one, and even when he was quite convinced that Turner was a sharper, at the end of the voyage he stood for his big loss like a little man, and became genuinely angry at some of his English friends aboard who recommended him to stop payment on the checks he had given Turner to cover the greater portion of the plucking.