“ ‘Twasn’t no use to argue with Pete, though. He were as obstinate as a mule an’ stuck to his notion o’ gettin’ a royal flush like a sick nigger sticks to the Methodist Church. You couldn’t persuade him. One day I says to him, ‘Look a’ here, Pete, a royal flush is most onquestionably a good piece o’ property, but what show hev you got o’ gettin’ one. You put me out o’ patience. Look at the pots you might ’a’ scooped with two pairs an’ three of a kind if you’d only drawed like a Christian,’ says I, ‘instead o’ puttin’ your trust in strange gods, an’ sacrificin’ your good chips an’ the principles o’ the game in a strange an’ foolish endeavour. It’s flyin’ in the face o’ Providence,’ I says to him, ‘an’ you’ll go down to your grave unhonoured, unwept, an’ unhung if you persist in it. More’n that,’ I says, ‘you’ll be dead broke all the days o’ your life.’
“But you couldn’t convince him. ‘There’s four royal flushes in the deck, ain’t there?’ says he, ‘an’ them five cards is just as likely to come as any other five, ain’t they? An’ if there’s anything certain in this here world o’ trouble an’ oncertainty, ’tis that a man’ll get ’em sometime, if he keeps on tryin’. An’ say! When I do get ’em if the Lord spares me till that happy day, I won’t do anything but swat the gang.’
“ ‘The Lord can spare you easy enough,’ says I, disgusted, ‘an’ so can the community if you go on tryin’ to break up our national institutions by propagatin’ sich revolutionary idees. It’s worse’n anarchy,’ I says. ‘It’s ridiculous.’
“But there wa’n’t no movin’ of him, an’ we just had to leave him to the error of his ways, an’ what we thought was the inevitable vengeance of heaven. An’ the boys calculated that bein’ as how he was a self-app’inted vessel o’ wrath, an’ bound to be skinned in the game as long as he continnered to play it, it was a sort o’ missionary work to assist in the skinnin’. Most of ’em devoted themselves to the missionary work, too, with such holy zeal that Pete was broke most of the time.
“He was good grit, though. Nobody never heard him complain, for he seemed to be sustained by a calm confidence in that royal flush, an’ every time he went broke he’d go back to work as chipper as a catfish an’ stick to it till he had a stake to sit into the game with.
“That was another thing I used to talk to him about, while I was trying to show him the error of his ways. ‘Supposin’ you do get a royal flush sometime,’ I says, ‘how can you expect to get a legitimate profit out of it, if you go broke all the time trying to get it? You won’t have no money to bet with,’ I says.
“But all he ever said to that was, ‘Oh! the Lord will provide. You don’t suppose things is goin’ to be so ordered, do ye, that heaven’s richest blessin’ would come to a man, an’ him not have the means to back it up?’ Which was next door to blasphemy as I told him frequent, but he on’y smiled. An’ when the time come, as it did finally, when his faith was justified, an’ he reaped the reward o’ persistency, it were developed that he had good reason to smile, for he had provided for that there contingency with a wisdom compared to which the guile o’ the sarpent was as the babblings o’ babes an’ sucklin’s. Oh! Pete was a polished article even if we did size him up for a deluded fanatic all them years.
“It went on for a matter o’ fifteen year or more, an’ Pete’s royal flush come to be a standin’ joke in town. Fellers would laugh about it every time he set into a game, an’ it were esteemed a great piece o’ wit for some feller to say, ‘I’ll bet a thousand to one in town lots that Pete won’t get a royal flush to-night.’ ’Course, nobody ever took it up, but everybody’d laugh, an’ Pete would laugh with ’em, for he was good-natured, an’ he’d say, ‘I’ll get it sometime, boys, if I don’t to-night.’
“An’ he did. If ever a man won success by long-continued, persistent strugglin’ for it, Pete Kenney did, an’ things fell out about as he’d always said they would. It were a pretty good game from the first, for there was a couple o’ crossroads gamblers who’d come to town lookin’ for blood, an’ it happened that there was two planters just back from New Orleans with their crop money in their pockets, an’ they was lookin’ for excitement. One of ’em knowed Pete an’ liked him an’ ast him to join in the game that was started just about the time they got off at Arkansas City here, an’ Pete havin’ a hundred in his clothes, just naturally did.
“He played lucky from the start. It happened, fortunately, that he didn’t get a chance to make one of his fool draws more’n once in half an hour or so, an’ as his play outside o’ that was fairly good he managed to scoop in some rattlin’ good pots on flushes an’ fulls, besides two or three that he took in on deuces and nerve, or some sich hand.