Bulldog Carney

by William Alexander Fraser

Shipley was a bird of passage, at present nesting in the Gold Nugget Hotel. Carney knew of him just as a machinery man, a seller of compressed-air drills, etc., on commission. He was also a gambler in mine shares, for during the game he had told of a clean-up he had made on the "Gray Goose" stock. The Gray Goose Mine was an ill-favored bird, for its stock had had a crooked manipulation. Shipley's face was not confidence-inspiring; its general contour suggested the head piece of a hawk, with its avaricious curve to the beak. His metallic eyes were querulous; holding little of the human look. His hands had caught Carney's eye when he came into the shack first and drew off a pair of gloves. The fingers were long, and flexible, and soft-skinned. The gloves were the disquieting exhibit, for Carney had known gamblers who wore kid coverings on their hands habitually to preserve the sensitiveness of their finger tips. He also had known gamblers who, ostensibly, had a reputable occupation.

If the Stranger had been winning Carney would not have been so ready to eliminate him as the villain of the play. He was almost more difficult to allocate than Cranford. He was well dressed—too well dressed for unobservation. His name was Hadley, and he was from New York. Beyond the fact that he had six thousand dollars in Seth Long's iron box, and drank somewhat persistently, little was known of him. His conversation was almost entirely limited to a boyish smile, and an invitation to anybody and everybody to "have a small sensation," said sensation being a drink. Once his reticence slipped a cog, and he said something about a gold mine up in the hills that a man, Tacoma Jack, was going to sell him. That was what the six thousand was for; he was going to look at it with Tacoma, and if it were as represented, make the first payment when they returned.

Watching the Stranger riffle the cards and deal them with the quiet easy grace of a club-man, the sensitive tapering fingers slipping the paste boards across the table as softly as the falling of flower petals, Carney was tempted to doubt, but lifting his gray eyes to the smooth face, the boyish smile laying bare an even set of white teeth, he changed, muttering inwardly, "Too much class."

It was puzzling; there was something wrong; the game was too erratic for finished poker players; the spirit of uncertainty possessed them all; the drawing to fill was unethical, wayward. Even when Carney had laboriously built up a queen-full, inwardly something whispered, "What's the use? If there are better cards out you'll lose; if not you'll win little."

Carney's own fingers were receptive, and he had carefully passed them over the smooth surface of the cards many times; he could swear there was no mark of identification, no pin pricks. The pattern on the back of the cards could contain no geometric key, for it was remarkably simple: seven blue doves were in flight across a blue background that was cross hatched and sprayed with leaves.

Then, all at once, he discovered something. The curve of the doves' wings were all alike—almost. In a dozen hands he had it. It was an artistic vagary; the right wing of the middle dove was the thousandth part of an inch more acutely angled on the ace; on the king the right wing of the second dove to the left.

It would have taken a tuition of probably three days for a man to memorize the whole system, but it was there—which was the main thing. And the next most important factor was that somebody at the table knew the system. Who was it?

Seth had won; but a strong run of luck could have accounted for that, and Seth as a gambler was a joke. The Stranger, if he were a super-crook, hiding behind that juvenile smile, would be quite capable of this interesting chicanery—but he had lost.

Cranford, the Engineer, who had played with the consistent conservativeness of a man sitting in bad luck, was two hundred loser. The man of machinery, Shipley, was two hundred to the good; he had played a forcing game, and but for having had two flushes beaten by Seth would have been a bigger winner. These two flushes had troubled Carney, for Shipley had drawn two cards each hand. Either he was in great luck, or knew something.

Carney debated this extraordinary thing. His courage was so exquisite that he never made a mistake through over-zealousness in the fomenting of trouble; the easy way was always the brave way, he believed. In the West there was no better key to let loose locked-up passion than to accuse men of cheating at cards; it was the last ditch at which even cowards drew and shot. He took a handkerchief from his pocket, wiped his eyes, and dropped it into his lap. At the next hand he looked at his cards, ran them together on the very edge of the table, dropped one into the handkerchief, placed the other four, neatly compacted, into the discard, and said, "I'm out!"