“They are all equally strangers to me.”
“You are not aware, then, that you are playing with sportsmen?”
“No, but I am very glad to hear it. I am something of a sportsman myself—as fond of dogs, horses, and guns, as any of the three, I warrant.”
“Ha! Monsieur, you misapprehend. A sportsman in your country, and a sportsman in a Mississippi steamboat, are two very distinct things. Foxes, hares, and partridges, are the game of your sportsman. Greenhorns and their purses are the game of gentry like these.”
“The men with whom I am playing, then, are—”
“Professional gamblers—steamboat sharpers.”
“Are you sure of this, Monsieur?”
“Quite sure of it. Oh! I often travel up and down to New Orleans. I have seen them all before.”
“But one of them has the look of a farmer or a merchant, as I thought—a pork-merchant from Cincinnati—his talk ran that way.”
“Farmer—merchant, ha! ha! ha! a farmer without acres—a merchant without trade! Monsieur, that simply-dressed old fellow is said to be the ‘smartest’—that is the Yankee word—the smartest sportsman in the Mississippi valley, and such are not scarce, I trow.”