"Dunwoody was banker and he cashed all of the dead man's chips. Then he took Crowhurst's body back from Omaha to Chicago in a box. Dunwoody handed the $580 the dead man had won from us to his mother, telling her that her son had given him the money to keep for him before turning into his sleeper bunk.
"That," concluded the man who sells bridges and trestles, "is the reason I've cut card-playing on trains for the past seven years."
[QUEER PACIFIC COAST POKER.]
When You Get into a Game of Draw in California It Is Well to Ascertain the Rules in Advance.
"Before sitting into a game of poker anywhere near tidewater out on the Pacific coast you'll always find it a pretty good scheme to make a few preliminary inquiries of your fellow players as to the kind of poker you're expected to mix up with," said a traveling man who had recently returned to the East after a tour on the Slope. "Because I neglected to do this myself on several occasions I got into all sorts of embarrassing situations and all colors of poker trouble all the way from Portland, Ore., to San Diego, Cal., and the fellows with whom I did little stunts at draw—all good people, business men I met with through letters—put me down as the worst jay in a game of cards that ever crossed the Rocky Mountains. The folks out there think we're all jays back here, anyhow, if for no other reason than that we haven't enough brains to migrate in a body to the Pacific Slope, but they complacently told me that I was the worst of the species they had ever seen, simply because I couldn't seem to get the hang of the queer old game they call poker out in that country.
"The game they dub poker out there isn't poker at all, in my opinion. It's a hybrid sort of affair, full of fancy moves that must have been chucked into the original game by early California vaqueros with such a taste for embellishment that they had to tack gilt fringe on to their pants and to encircle their hats with silver cable. Whatever they call it, it's not American draw poker by a darned sight. The kind of poker that I was raised on—the real thing, the article of draw that we play on this side of the Alleghanies—doesn't take any more account of the joker, for instance, than it does of the card case; but out in California they think a man's plumb blind crazy if he registers a kick over having the joker in the deck. I'd as lief play old maid or grab for corn-silk cigarettes as play draw poker with the joker mixed up in it; but out there I had to take the game as it was served up, and, as between poker with a joker and no poker at all, I, of course, accepted the lesser of the two evils and played. But I got dumped on the game for about 2,000 miles of coast line, and that, too, by people who didn't have to count themselves because they were so many at the game. The trouble was that I played the game of draw that I was brought up on and they played their crossbred game, and the result was just about as queer as it would be to see a baseball pitcher chucking up a Rugby football to a cricket batsman with a fence picket in his hands.
"I'll not forget my first run-in with this poker-joker idea. This was my first visit to the slope, you know and, although I'd often heard vaguely that young 'uns, playing draw for beans or tin tags, once in a while shoved the joker into the pack for the fun of the thing. I, of course, never dreamed that rational adult human beings in any quarter of the earth could have the nerve to inflict such a dismal outrage upon the noble game of draw as to slap the joker into a poker deck. But I found out different the very first game of draw that I sat into out in San Francisco.
"It was a four-handed game, and I was the only Eastern man in the bunch. The other three fellows were business men who belong to the Native Sons' organization, which accounts for the weird brand of poker they played. They played what was taught 'em in their youth out there; didn't know any better, and thought, and no doubt still think, that their game is right.
"I was banker, and dished up the first hand. It was 25 cents ante and $5 limit. I gave myself two rattling good pairs, kings up on tens. All of the other fellows stayed, and the man on my right made it a couple of dollars more to draw cards. This let two of 'em out of it, but I thought my two pairs were good enough for a $2 raise, and so I played with the raiser. He drew one card, and so, of course, did I. It was his bet, and he came at me on the double with the limit. I'd caught another king, and had as neat-looking a full house as a man needs to have in any kind of a game.
"'Five more'n you,' said I, and we shuttled the limit back and forth until we each had about $50 in the pot. Said I to myself, 'I've got you beat, my boy, for the percentage of the game is 'way against your holding fours against my full hand, especially on the first clatter out of the box, and, even if you've filled those two pairs of yours—which you probably haven't, for the percentage is plumb against you—you certainly haven't got aces on top.' Now, that was good poker reasoning, the kind of reasoning that has kept me necktie and peanut money ahead of the game anyway for twenty years or so, and I gave him the raise-back just as often as he threw it at me.