"I'm at your service."
"Then we'll play unlimited."
And we did.
It was a warmish little game. There is something about unlimited poker which appeals to one. The spirit of the gamble gets into one's veins like the breath of the battle into the nostrils of the soldier. One feels that it is a game for men, and that the manhood which is in one has a chance to score. Archie evidently meant going for the gloves. He never bet less than a hundred, and a thousand--in pencil on a scrap of paper--was as nothing to him. If we wanted to be in that game we too had to treat thousands as if they had been sovereigns. At the beginning the luck went round to him--possibly because it took some little time to make his methods ours. He bluffed outrageously. With a pair one was not disposed, at the commencement, to pay a thousand to see his cards. The result was that he scooped pool after pool. When he had made it plain that, if we wanted him to show, we should have to pay, we began to pay.
And luck began!
The ante was fixed at a tenner. I was ante. The other two had come in. Making good, I drew three to a pair of sevens, without improving my hand. Pendarvon opened with a hundred, Archie promptly making it five. I had not had a sight--I had had no cards--for the last five hands. This time, the devil entering into me, I made up my mind that I would find out what sort of game Archie was playing, and have a view if it broke me. I saw his five hundred. Pendarvon saw it too. Then Archie turned up a pair of knaves. I yielded without showing, and to my surprise, Pendarvon did as I had done. A pair of knaves seemed hardly worth fifteen hundred pounds. It looked like easy earning.
The same thing went on time after time. Archie could not be induced to see a man while he could keep on raising. The very next hand, when we had both come in, Archie started with a five hundred bet. So Pendarvon and I let him have the entries. And we had a twenty pound pot.
We had gone right round and come back again to pairs, when Pendarvon announced that he could open. He made it a hundred to enter. Archie and I went in--though, so far as I was concerned, I had an empty hand. Pendarvon took two, Archie stood pat, and I drew five, finding myself in possession of a pair of aces. Pendarvon started with five hundred pounds; we seemed to be getting incapable of thinking of anything under. Archie raised him nine thousand five hundred pounds, tabling his IOU for a round ten thousand. I retired; a pair of aces was not quite good enough for that. If I was to be broken, I might just as well be broken for something better. Pendarvon looked at Archie as if he would have liked to have seen right into him.
"Have you the Bank of England at your back?"
"What are you going to raise me?" inquired Archie.