"You see, that was a magnificent bluff on Turner's part. The young chap, he knew, would not welch.
"'Oh, if you choose to be insulting'——said Lonsdale, flushing hotly, and he rose from the card-table and left the room.
"Well, a couple of elderly Englishmen aboard who knew Lonsdale and his father before him went to him then and told him that it would be perfectly proper and right for him to stop payment on the checks he had given to Turner, who, they told him in so many words, was nothing short of a swindler.
"'Mind your own damned business,' said Lonsdale. 'I'll do nothing of the sort,' and that was the end of it. It must be confessed that you folks over there have a wonderfully game fashion of sticking to a bad proposition; but I, for one, think it is pure vanity. Turner was kept off the ships of all the lines after that, and I don't know what became of him.
"How they contrived to keep Turner off the ships unless he really wished to remain off is something that I can't explain, for it is simply a plain statement of fact to say that the steamship companies have always found, and probably always will find, it impossible to prevent the card sharpers from running on their boats. They have often tried it. They tried it on one notable occasion, as I remember, with George McGarrahan, in 1881. McGarrahan was the Nestor of the steamship card sharpers, and all the steamship companies knew him. The president of one of the most prominent transatlantic lines sent for McGarrahan—who, by the way, has since died in New York—and told him that he would not be permitted to travel henceforth on the vessels of the line.
"'The deuce you say!' replied McGarrahan. 'How are you going to stop me?'
"'Refuse to give you passage,' answered the president.
"'You will, will you?' said McGarrahan. 'Well, if you do that, I'll get enough damages out of your line to make it unnecessary for me ever to touch a card again as long as I live.'
"His position was correct in law, as the president of this line found out upon investigation. The steamship company, you understand, is not the regulator of the habits of its steamers' passengers. If the passengers don't know any better than to play cards with sharpers, that is their own lookout. And a steamship company cannot decline to sell passage to a man because it claims he is a short-card player. It devolves upon the company to prove that the man is a card sharper, and the steamship people know that this is practically impossible, for no man who is done at cards by one of these men on an ocean steamship is going to rise in his seat and make announcement of the fact to the world.
"Observation tells me that there are not nearly so many of these men on the ships now as formerly. The short-card players who make a business of traveling have found the trains much more profitable, since the officers of the steamers got into the habit of going quietly among the voyagers of a card-playing turn and warning them of the danger of getting into games with such and such men. That was the system, and a pretty effectual one, too, adopted by the steamship companies to squelch the ocean card sharpers. The result has been that the sharper can now only make a general campaign of all the big steamers—and the big steamers are the only steamers they consider worth working—before the officers know them, and then their game is dead practically. So that they find it more profitable to take to the swell trains on the swell runs, making the same trip rarely, and thus preventing their countenances from getting too familiar to the railroad people."