In this connection still another poker story. Sam Bugg, the Nashville gambler, was on a Mississippi steamer bound for New Orleans. He came upon a party of Tennesseeans whom a famous card sharp had inveigled and was flagrantly robbing. Sam went away, obtained a pack of cards, and stacked them to give the gambler four kings and the brightest one of the Nashville boys four aces. After two or three failures to bring the cold deck into action Sam Bugg brushed a spider—an imaginary spider, of course—from the gambler’s coat collar, for an instant distracting his attention—and in the momentary confusion the stacked cards were duly dealt and the betting began, the gambler confident and aggressive. Finally, all the money up, the four aces beat the four kings, and for a greater amount than the Nashvillians had lost and the gambler had won. Whereupon, without change of muscle, the gambler drawled: “Mr. Bugg, the next time you see a spider biting me let him bite on!”
I was told that the Senate Game had been played during the War of Sections and directly after for large sums. With the arrival of the rebel brigadiers it was perforce reduced to a reasonable limit.
The “road gang” was not unknown at the White House. Sometimes it assembled at private houses, but its accustomed place of meeting was first Welcker’s and then Chamberlin’s. I do not know whether it continues to have abiding place or even an existence. In spite of the reputation given me by the pert paragraphers I have not been on a race course or seen a horse race or played for other than immaterial stakes for more than thirty years.
IV
As an all-round newspaper writer and reporter many sorts of people, high and low, little and big, queer and commonplace, fell in my way; statesmen and politicians, artists and athletes, circus riders and prize fighters; the riffraff and the élite; the professional and dilettante of the world polite and the underworld.
I knew Mike Walsh and Tim Campbell. I knew John Morrissey. I have seen Heenan—one of the handsomest men of his time—and likewise Adah Isaacs Menken, his inamorata—many said his wife—who went into mourning for him and thereafter hied away to Paris, where she lived under the protection of Alexandre Dumas, the elder, who buried her in Père Lachaise under a handsome monument bearing two words, “Thou knowest,” beneath a carved hand pointed to heaven.
I did draw the line, however, at Cora Pearl and Marcus Cicero Stanley.
The Parisian courtesan was at the zenith of her extraordinary celebrity when I became a rustic boulevardier. She could be seen everywhere and on all occasions. Her gowns were the showiest, her equipage the smartest; her entourage, loud though it was and vulgar, yet in its way was undeniable. She reigned for a long time the recognized queen of the demi-monde. I have beheld her in her glory on her throne—her two thrones, for she had two—one on the south side of the river, the other at the east end—not to mention the race course—surrounded by a retinue of the disreputable. She did not awaken in me the least curiosity, and I declined many opportunities to meet her.
Marcus Cicero Stanley was sprung from an aristocratic, even a distinguished, North Carolina family. He came to New York and set up for a swell. How he lived I never cared to find out, though he was believed to be what the police call a “fence.” He seemed a cross between a “con” and a “beat.” Yet for a while he flourished at Delmonico’s, which he made his headquarters, and cut a kind of dash with the unknowing. He was a handsome, mannerly brute who knew how to dress and carry himself like a gentleman.
Later there came to New York another Southerner—a Far Southerner of a very different quality—who attracted no little attention. This was Tom Ochiltree. He, too, was well born, his father an eminent jurist of Texas; he, himself, a wit, bon homme and raconteur. Travers once said: “We have three professional liars in America—Tom Ochiltree is one and George Alfred Townsend is the other two.”