Poker Jim, Gentleman, and Other Tales and Sketches

by G. Frank Lydston

It was in the spring of 1860, that the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania concluded to confer the degree of Doctor of Medicine upon your humble servant. Whether the faculty of that now famous school allowed me to graduate on the principle that actuated the performers in a western band, who implored their audiences not to shoot, as they were doing the best they could, I cannot say, but graduate I did, and as with all other students of medicine, it was then that my troubles began. I was not long in discovering that the piece of crisp parchment which the members of the faculty had endorsed as showing the scientific qualifications of William Weymouth, M. D. and which entitled him to practice medicine, was no open sesame to fame and prosperity.

My parents were at that time living in Kentucky, in a small town that offered little encouragement to a young man beginning practice. The confidence of one’s old neighbors is of even slower growth than the beard for which the young doctor yearns, as a badge of wisdom and learning that he who runs may read.

The country in which I spent my boyhood—I was born in the state of Maine—was even less inviting than the state of my adoption. It is possible that I entertained a little of my mother’s prejudice against Yankeedom in those days. She was a native of Kentucky, and had never become thoroughly reconciled to the country to which my father had taken her soon after her marriage. It was in acquiescence to her homesick pleadings that my father finally moved to Kentucky, and settled in the little town wherein my parents lived for the rest of their days in such happiness as people of modest means can secure only among the warm hearted, generous people south of Mason and Dixon’s line.

Had my home surroundings offered any inducements to the professional career I had planned for myself, I should certainly have returned home to practice. My parents were living alone, and my natural impulse was to return to them and do the best I could at practice, as long as they should live. It was with some twinges of conscience, therefore, that I finally decided against going back to Kentucky to locate.

There were but three of us children, a brother, younger than myself, and a sister, two years older. My sister had married a gentleman from Memphis, and had long since gone to that city to live. My young brother had left home some years before I graduated, and no one knew what had become of him, much to my regret and to the sorrow of his parents, whose favorite, I must admit, the boy had ever been.

Jim had always been a wild lad, and was stamped as an incorrigible almost as soon as he could toddle alone. It was said that a little of the old strain of Indian blood, with which tradition had endowed our family, had cropped out in him. He was one of those rollicking, handsome dare-devils; that everybody fears and loves at the same moment. The very sight of Jim’s curly, black head and mischievous eyes struck the good neighbors with terror. Trouble was expected from the moment that boy put in an appearance—and the good folks were seldom disappointed. Sometimes they would acknowledge that “it might have been worse,” but such occasions were rare.

But all who knew the curly headed little rascal admitted that he possessed two excellent qualities; he was as brave as a lion, and kind-hearted to a fault. He would fight at “the drop of the hat,” and no boy ever heard him cry quits. He was as ready to split a cord of wood for a poor widow, as he was to tie a tin can to her house-dog’s tail, and that’s saying a great deal.

As the boy grew toward manhood, he fell in with evil associates, and as is always the case with boys of his peculiar disposition, he became thoroughly demoralized. Cards, whisky, horses and women—these were the unsubstantial foundation upon which rested the new world that his vicious companions opened up to him.

While living at the old home in Kentucky, I had always had a great controlling influence over little Jim, and even after I left home for college, I maintained a certain degree of influence over him. Gradually, however, our correspondence became infrequent, until we heard from each other only at very long intervals.

Knowing how much I thought of the lad, my parents never alluded to Jim’s discrepancies in their letters to me. I have sometimes thought that possibly they were actuated to a certain degree by false pride; they did not care to expose the failings of their idol to his natural rival in their affections—his brother. Whatever the explanation of the reticence of my parents may have been, I had no intimation of the true state of affairs until after the poor boy had fled from home, never to return.