“We play two or three times a week,” explained one to Ben, while the African was getting a fresh pack, “and I consider poker the greatest thing in the world to take a man’s mind off his business. Is there any stock in your mine for sale? I wouldn’t mind taking a block if it looked right. So this is your first visit here? Well, we’ll try and make it pleasant for you while you stay, but you must reciprocate if we ever hit your country. Will you show us some shooting?”
It went that way until Ben got to feeling a little easy in his play himself. But he couldn’t lose. Everything came his way, including jackpots, and when the silvery chimes of the clock on the mantel reminded them that it was one o’clock the play came to an end and the man from the West cashed in a matter of $72.
“It was only a friendly game, Nell,” he said, when he woke her up from a sound sleep half an hour later. “They are simply a lot of good fellows and I couldn’t help winning, but they want revenge to-morrow night and then I’ll get some real money.”
“Three thousand miles is a good long walk, Ben,” she said, “and that’s a little tune you want to keep humming to yourself all the time. The easy marks at cards all died during the time of the big wind and only the fly guys are left. You’re in a strange barn this trip, so don’t think that everything you see is hay.”
From playing three nights a week they got down to playing every night, and Ben always came back with a small winning, but he wasn’t getting the money he was after and it got on his nerves.
“It’s only chicken feed I’m winning,” he complained to her one night, “and it just about pays expenses.”
“Well, just you keep your shirt on, for I’m in with some nice old dames who think they are the real ones at bridge, and I’m thinking of getting a little of that same kind of feed myself—the real killing will come later. You never want to be in a hurry about those things, you know, because if you hurry them it’s all off. Get those fellows to play up in the room some night so I can look them over and see their style.”
“I’m next to their play all right,” he said, “They’ll stand to lose so much and no more and there ain’t one of them who would bet a thousand that he was alive.”
“Invite them up, anyway. You’ve been drinking their booze and smoking their good cigars long enough. You ought to put up for them once in a while, and if they are all right you will have a few decent friends, anyhow.”
That’s how it happened that the play came off in No. 723.