Three gringos in Venezuela and Central America

by Richard Harding Davis

In the cool of the afternoon Mr. Barross sat on the broad porch rocking himself in a big bentwood chair and talked of the civil war, in which he had taken an active part, with that enthusiasm and detail with which only a Southerner speaks of it, not knowing that to this generation in the North it is history, and something of which one reads in books, and is not a topic of conversation of as fresh interest as the fall of Tammany or the Venezuela boundary dispute. And as we listened we watched Mrs. Barross moving about among her flowers with a sunshade above her white hair and holding her train in her hand, stopping to cut away a dead branch or to pluck a rose or to turn a bud away from the leaves so that it might feel the sun.

And inside, young Barross was going over the letters which had arrived with the morning’s steamer, emptying out the money that came with them on the table, filing them away, and noting them as carefully and as methodically as a bank clerk, and sealing up in return the little green and yellow tickets that were to go out all over the world, and which had been paid for by clerks on small salaries, laboring-men of large families, idle good-for-nothings, visionaries, born gamblers and ne’er-do-wells, and that multitude of others of this world who want something for nothing, and who trust that a turn of luck will accomplish for them what they are too listless and faint-hearted and lazy ever to accomplish for themselves. It would be an excellent thing for each of these gamblers if he could look in at the great wheel at Puerto Cortez, and see just what one hundred thousand tickets look like, and what chance his one atom of a ticket has of forcing its way to the top of that great mass at the exact moment that the capital prize rises to the surface in the other wheel. He could have seen it in the old days at the Charles Theatre, and he is as free as is any one to see it to-day at Puerto Cortez; but I should think it would be unfortunate for the lottery if any of its customers became too thorough a student of the doctrine of chances.

The room in which the drawings are held is about forty feet long, well lighted by many long, wide windows, and with the stage upon which the wheels stand blocking one end. It is unfurnished, except for the chairs and benches, upon which the natives or any chance or intentional visitors are welcome to sit and to watch the drawing. The larger wheel, which holds, when all the tickets are sold, the hopes of one hundred thousand people, is about six feet in diameter, with sides of heavy glass, bound together by a wooden tire two feet wide. This tire or rim is made of staves, formed like those of a hogshead, and in it is a door a foot square. After the tickets have been placed in their little rubber jackets and shovelled into the wheel, this door is locked with a padlock, and strips of paper are pasted across it and sealed at each end, and so it remains until the next drawing. One hundred thousand tickets in rubber tubes an inch long and a quarter of an inch wide take up a great deal of space, and make such an appreciable difference in the weight of the wheel that it requires the efforts of two men pulling on the handles at either side to even budge it. Another man and myself were quite satisfied when we had put our shoulders to it and had succeeded in turning it a foot or two. But it was interesting to watch the little black tubes with even that slow start go slipping and sliding down over the others, leaving the greater mass undisturbed and packed together at the bottom as a wave sweeps back the upper layer of pebbles on a beach. This wheel was manufactured by Jackson & Sharp, of Wilmington, Delaware. The other wheel is much smaller, and holds the prizes. It was made by John Robinson, of Baltimore.

Whenever there is a drawing, General W. L. Cabell, of Texas, and Colonel C. J. Villere, of Louisiana, who have taken the places of the late General Beauregard and of the late General Early, take their stand at different wheels, General Cabell at the large and Colonel Villere at the one holding the prizes. They open the doors which they had sealed up a month previous, and into each wheel a little Indian girl puts her hand and draws out a tube. The tube holding the ticket is handed to General Cabell, and the one holding the prize won is given to Colonel Villere, and they read the numbers aloud and the amount won six times, three times in Spanish and three times in English, on the principle probably of the man in the play who had only one line, and who spoke that twice, “so that the audience will know I am saying it.”

The two tickets are then handed to young Barross, who fastens them together with a rubber band and throws them into a basket for further reference. Three clerks with duplicate books keep tally of the numbers and of the prizes won. The drawing begins generally at six in the morning and lasts until ten, and then, everybody having been made rich, the philanthropists and generals and colonels and Indian girls—and, let us hope, the men who turned the wheel—go in to breakfast.

So far as I could see, the drawings are conducted with fairness. But with only 3434 prizes and 100,000 tickets the chances are so infinitesimal and the advantage to the company so enormous that honesty in manipulating the wheel ceases to be a virtue, and becomes the lottery’s only advertisement.

THE IGUANAS OF HONDURAS

But what is most interesting about the lottery at present is not whether it is or it is not conducted fairly, but that it should exist at all; that its promoters should be willing to drag out such an existence at such a price and in so fallen a state. This becomes all the more remarkable because the men who control the lottery belong to a class which, as a rule, cares for the good opinion of its fellows, and is willing to sacrifice much to retain it. But the lottery people do not seem anxious for the good opinion of any one, and they have made such vast sums of money in the past, and they have made it so easily, that they cannot release their hold on the geese that are laying the golden eggs for them, even though they find themselves exiled and excommunicated by their own countrymen. If they were thimble-riggers or Confidence men in need of money their persistence would not appear so remarkable, but these gentlemen of the lottery are men of enormous wealth, their daughters are in what is called society in New Orleans and in New York, their sons are at the universities, and they themselves belong to those clubs most difficult of access. One would think that they had reached that point when they could say “we are rich enough now, and we can afford to spend the remainder of our lives in making ourselves respectable.” Becky Sharp is authority for the fact that it is easy to be respectable on as little as five hundred pounds a year, but these gentlemen, having many hundreds of thousands of pounds, are not even willing to make the effort. Two years ago, when, according to their own account, they were losing forty thousand dollars a month, and which, after all, is only what they once cleared in a day, and when they were being driven out of one country after another, like the cholera or any other disease, it seems strange that it never occurred to them to stop fighting, and to get into a better business while there was yet time.

Even the keeper of a roulette wheel has too much self-respect to continue turning when there is only one man playing against the table, and in comparison with him the scramble of the lottery company after the Honduranian tin dollar, and the scant savings of servant-girls and of brakesmen and negro barbers in the United States, is to me the most curious feature of this once great enterprise.