Now, if you know the game, you are maybe expecting to hear that he had a set of fives, including the joker of course. But it was not Alfred who held them. His four kings were not good. It was the dealer, the man who had dropped out because I had dropped in, who had five fives.
But this I did not know until two days later, not until after I had gone to church again and contributed $5.00 to Mrs. Draper’s fund for buying Christmas candies for her Sunday School kiddies. Alfred’s sister Phoeba, as personal representative of our dear old Sunday School Superintendent, took my contribution with gracious acknowledgment, as though it were not tainted money. And Mrs. Draper—the less chivalrous boys called her “Mother Corkscrew” because she wore her gray hair in ringlets at shoulder length—came to me on the double quick, shrieking her praise of me, and intimated that this generous gift might get me places.
Alfred said that inasmuch as he surmised he had been cold-decked out of the five—thankfully with no aspersion attachment—that I should have at least given the donation in both our names. But that would have been risky. Alfred was a rather white “black sheep” in a very religious family, and Sis would most likely have wanted to know how come? The fact that Sidney and Willard were keeping company with sisters at that time may have had nothing to do with the introduction of that cold deck. And then again it might have. Sidney said the fellow needed “taking down” a bit — and that it was planned to give the losers back their money. A fat chance they would have of getting their money back now.
Until now I had only stood, by and watched a penny-ante game in the new opera house over the Morris store, where the clerks — Dave Clements, Bill McKibbon, George and Chuck Cawood, Bob Graham—and some younger fry, congregated on Sundays. And then, too, as a kid, I had been present on several occasions at a somewhat bigger game in the Neville residence on this same corner. But here I did not have a chance to closely observe the technique of the game—for I was under the table most of the time. The men played altogether then with “shinplaster” money — undersized ten, twenty-five, and fifty cent pieces of U. S. paper currency, and the breeze caused from shuffling the cards would sometimes blow the money off the table. Mr. Jim Neville said I might keep all I could get my hands on — and I think it was a sort of house rule that the players were not to contend roughly with me for the fluttering pieces. Still I think I got more kicks than the law allowed.
Also, I once saw the women playing poker in this same home—and they were using “shinplaster” too—but they were not generous enough to invite me to go down under. I do not wish to name them. Nor would I have mentioned the boys’ names but for the fact all of them have now gone to their reward. And, besides, despite the undercurrent that it was not considered strictly genteel, everybody, more or less, played poker then—even, it was said, Father Bagley, our first High Priest, would take a hand occasionally. There was a regular fellow. For him it was Mass of a Sunday morning, then base ball or horse-racing in the afternoon, without fail.
With this slow and awkward beginning it was a long, long time before I got nerve enough to sit in a private poker game as guest of a friend, in Kansas City, with a player who afterwards became President of the United States. He did not impress me as likely timber then. But, may I say, that when once in the running, he showed ‘em that he was truly from Missouri—and that, surprisingly, he could, in a pinch, run like a scared rabbit. Politics was his forte.
In explanation of the Girl-Papa-Richboy incident: I had sent a boy with a note asking the girl for her company for a dance, a private dance to be given by our select crowd, of which she was a favorite. The boy came back without a written reply—but he said she told him to tell me that she would go with me. This being rather unusual, I asked the -boy if that was all she said? “Well,” he said, “her mother said, ‘Now, girlie, you know what your father will say’ — and the girl said, ‘I don’t care, I’m going with him anyway’.” I had not known about the rich man’s son trying to edge in, and this indicated slap by her papa was a grievous blow to my ego.
I sent the girl another note, telling her in simple words—I always made ‘em simple now since having once, to no avail, slopped over ridiculously — that I had wormed out of the boy the remarks between mother and daughter, and that in consequence thereof I deemed it wise for me to cancel the date, until I could find out what it was all about. I may say I never sent but one formally phrased note to a girl in all my life—and that got me exactly nothing. That literary boy, Ecky Hamel, dictated it for me, and to make matters worse, it was to his girl. And he really wanted it to click—to ward off, in his absence, some dangerous competition.
However, I once got a neatly written acceptance to an ultra-formal and gorgeously phrased note bearing my name, which I didn’t write. I was a new boy in Seneca at the time. I met a lot of girls at the skating rink in the old Armory building on upper Main Street. Ena Burbery, pretty and agreeably alert, was good on roller skates. Ena and four other girls worked as trimmers in the millinery department of the Cohen store. Ena talked. And the girls, all but one, joined in mailing her a note bearing my forged signature requesting her company for a swank party three days hence. Ella Murphy, one of the five, boarded and roomed at the Theodore Wolfley home, same as I did while working on Wolfley’s newspaper, The Tribune. Ella said the note was formal and softly silly, and so did Ena say it was awful — but, she giggled, “I was not going to let that spoil a date, especially for a party like that.” Now, the ridiculous part of it all is, that it was an exclusive party to be given by Seneca’s upper crust, to which I had no invitation. But, even so, it gave me elevated status for a little while, in a limited way. We compromised on the rink. And the girls, whom I never did meet, sent me an apology, through Ella Murphy, for recklessly abusing my name—and getting the girl a date. Ena was the section foreman’s daughter, but that was no handicap. I myself married a section foreman’s daughter, picked her for a winner from a sizable field of promising prospects.
Naturally, I wanted to know more about the status of the rich man’s son—and I got it too, back at the gospel tent the next night. The girl said nothing at all about my poker-playing proclivities. She was too sensible to try to reform a boy. Her idea was to pick ‘em as suited her fancy—and trust to luck. Indeed, she said in rebuttal of her father’s expressed opinion of me, that if her mamma only could have kept her mouth shut everything would have been all right, and that I would have never known. “And besides,” she said, “You don’t drink, and papa does—a little; and you don’t smoke, and papa does, though he does not smoke cigarettes.” A cigarette smoker in those days was considered cheap. How times have changed. The girl had overlooked one of “Papa’s” weaknesses, but for me to have mentioned it to her then would have got me nothing that I was not now likely to get anyway.