Fools of Fortune or Gamblers and Gambling, John Philip Quinn

Of all the vices which have enslaved mankind, none can reckon among its victims so many as gambling. Not even the baneful habit of drink has blighted so many lives or desolated so many homes. Its fascination is insidious and terrible, and its power is all the more to be dreaded in that it appeals to a latent instinct in nearly every human breast. In view of these considerations it appears strange that English literature contains no authentic work specially devoted to this subject; while there exists literally no exposition of its allurements and its dangers written from the standpoint of one on the inside.

It is to fill this vacant place in literature that the author offers this volume to the public. For a quarter of a century he has witnessed and practiced every variety of gambling known to the professional. From the shores of the Atlantic to the canons of Colorado, from the frozen lake of the North, drained by the mighty Mississippi, to the sunken bayous that skirt its delta, he has journeyed to and fro, plying his nefarious calling. At times realizing the success of his schemes, at times a penniless wanderer, he has tasted all the joys of a gambler’s career and drained to the dregs the wormwood which lurks at the bottom of the cup of illusive, hollow happiness. No art of the fair gamester is unknown to him, nor is there any device of the sharper with which he is unacquainted. With shame and remorse he confesses his fault, and it is in the hope of measurably atoning for his wrong doing, that the present volume has been prepared.

On the general question of the evil of gaming, there is no difference of opinion among reflecting men. The problem is, how to check the alarming increase of the vice? The pulpit fulminates denunciations of its sinfulness; the press points out its folly; and the legislators affix penalties to its practice. Yet gambling houses multiply and flourish, and the yawning jaws of the “tiger” are daily closing upon fresh victims. The clergy are powerless to restrain young men from tasting for themselves the fascination 8of the green cloth; the public prints serve but to whet and stimulate curiosity; and the professional gamblers openly set at defiance laws which have long since become dead letters upon the statute books.

Where, then, is the remedy? In the opinion of the author, it is ready at hand. Gaming-hells cannot prosper without new victims; show men that success is impossible in an unequal contest between inexperience on the one hand and skill and chicanery on the other, and the ranks of the victims will soon be thinned through the lack of new recruits.

Curiosity has ever been peculiarly a characteristic of youth since the day when the arch tempter wrought the downfall of the race through an appeal to the desire for “knowledge of good and evil.”evil.” Young men are anxious to investigate, to discover, to “find out for themselves.” Give them a certain knowledge that loss is the inevitable consequence of entering upon any designated path, and they will hesitate long before entering upon that path. Satisfy their curiosity as to what is concealed behind a closed door, and the chief temptation to open that door will be removed.

Herein consists what the author cannot but believe will make these pages a powerful agency for good. In them are faithfully portrayed the vicissitudes of a gambler’s wretched life, while at the same time they present a full and true disclosure of all the dishonest artifices employed by professionals to delude and victimize their dupes. It is not only a thirst for excitement that leads men to gamble, another powerful incentive is the hope of winning. Convince any man, young or old, that instead of having a chance of winning he is confronted with a certainty of loss, and he will place no wager. This is the conviction which must be brought home to the intelligence and reason of every thoughtful man who carefully reads the exposition of dishonesty which this book contains.

No graver responsibility can be conceived than that which rests upon the shoulders of the parent to whom is intrusted the training of a young man. Upon the manner in which is fulfilled this sacred trust, depends not only the economic and moral value of the future citizen, but also the welfare, for time and eternity, of a priceless human soul. The gaming resort opens wide its doors, the entrance to which means ruin, of both body and soul. Of what vital importance is it, therefore; that around the youth of the Republic every safeguard should be thrown, and that they should be shielded from temptation by exposing its fatuous character. “Forewarned is forearmed.”

9The volume is not only a recital of personal experience and an embodiment of the lessons to be derived therefrom. It also presents a history of gambling from remote antiquity, and a description of the vice as practiced in every clime. The latter portion of the work is the result of careful and painstaking research among the best sources of information available, and is believed to be at once authentic and complete. It has also been the aim of the author to add to the interest of Part II by imparting to it, as far as practicable, a local coloring through incorporating a succinct view of the vice of gaming, as conducted at the chief American centres of civilization and commerce.

Rev. Professor David Swing, of Chicago, the eminent thinker, has contributed an interesting chapter on the nature and effects of gaming, and Rev. Robert McIntyre, of the same city, who has held spell-bound so many audiences throughout the land, has added one in which he eloquently and forcibly portrays the moral aspects of this soul-destroying vice.

The author desires to return heartfelt thanks to those who have aided him in his self-imposed task. He acknowledges his indebtedness for the words of encouragement which he has received from the many eminent clergymen and educators who have endorsed his work.

It is now several years since I first met Mr. John Philip Quinn, the author of this book. During my contact with him in a professional way, I became well acquainted with him. During the necessary association of professional duty, I became convinced that there were many good qualities in Mr. Quinn, and all that was necessary to make a worthy citizen of him was to induce him, if possible, to overcome the effects of early experience and eschew, the indulgence of pernicious habits. With no indications of inherent badness, he had supinely drifted into indulgences that blunted his moral perceptions and weakened his will power. Chief among these was the vice of gambling. As is well known to all reflecting men, there is no more enervating and morally disastrous vice than this. It seems to have, when enthralling a man peculiarly susceptible to its fascinating allurements, a strength and tenacity surpassing all the other vices to which society is a prey. It insidiously lures its victim in the track of exciting indulgence, until every emotion and passion of the soul becomes subject to its control and mastery. In its final assumption it becomes a most relentless tyrant, making the will powerless to resist. I found Mr. Quinn completely under the control of this vice, and recognized the herculean effort he would be required to make to break from its thralldom. However, I appealed to him to make the effort, and he finally decided to attempt it. Circumstances were favorable to the success of the effort, though at the expense of privation and disgrace. Some time after Mr. Quinn’s determination to reform, having found it difficult to make a living in St. Louis, he was induced to accompany a traveling show in a tour through the Middle States. While stopping at a town in Indiana, he met a couple of his former associates at one of the hotels. A few days before this a farmer in that locality had been swindled out of a large sum of money. These parties were arrested as also was Mr. Quinn, and though he was only partially identified by 27the victim, he was taken into custody, tried, convicted and sent to prison at Jeffersonville, Indiana. He was so confident of his innocence that he made no preparations for a defense. He was not aware of the unreasonable prejudice that frequently exists in the jury box against one charged with a certain kind of offence, be he ever so innocent. There was no legal evidence warranting his conviction, but several offences of like character of that charged against him had been lately committed in that region of the country, and the community demanded a victim. He was made one. I knew nothing about it until a week or more after it occurred. His wife called upon me and related all the facts. I immediately undertook an investigation of the case, and discovered without the shadow of a doubt that Mr. Quinn was innocent of the crime of which he had been convicted. I even traced the guilt home to other parties, and they were arrested and brought to trial in the same locality where Mr. Quinn was tried, and only escaped by a disagreeing jury, caused by the former statement of the prosecuting witness. But the community in which these trials took place were convinced of the wrong done Mr. Quinn and were anxious to make reparation. In due time, as soon as the facts in full force and tenor could be laid before Gov. Gray, of Indiana, he promptly accorded the justice of a pardon to Mr. Quinn. Of course it was an outrage that should never have occurred. The sufferings of Mr. Quinn during his period of incarceration were most unendurable. Aside from the degrading punishment and consequent disgrace, he suffered from the poignant reflection that he was innocent and unable to have that justice and protection given him which is the boast of our system of government. But notwithstanding his unfortunate condition he seems to have kept a courageous heart and turned his attention to his surroundings, drew instruction therefrom, and will give to the world a graphic account of prison life, which may be of benefit to the philanthropist and the legislator. A more elaborate and unique work, perhaps, is his book on the gaming vice, to which it is my desire these words should be prefixed. It is peculiarly interesting to me, and replete with information. The subject is considered in a way that leaves little, if anything to be said, either of instruction or suggestion. This book should be in the hands of every young man in our land. As a usual thing injustice of this kind sours the temper of men and discourages them from striving to accomplish higher and nobler aims in life. In Mr. Quinn’s case it had the opposite 28effect. Since his release he has shown by his work and conduct this fact. He seems stronger to-day in his determination to carry out his decision of reformation than ever. Transferring his residence to another sphere, he has already gained the confidence and esteem of his fellowmen, and is fast broadening his field of usefulness. He is worthy of encouragement in his work; my sincere wish is that he will liberally receive it.

I am intensely interested in Mr. John Philip Quinn’s book on Gambling. I met Mr. Quinn several years ago in St. Louis. I became convinced that this book is the fruit of an earnest purpose to set before the young men of this country the radical evils which so closely cling to the gambling habit. I was especially pleased with the practical notions which Mr. Quinn entertained respecting the wisest methods of reaching and eradicating the evil. While he is himself convinced of the immorality of gambling, he is conscious that the mere presentation of the moral aspect of the vice will do little to arrest its growth in American society. For the social gambler appeals to the theory of the absolute right of the individual to dispose of his own property as he sees fit. Such a man says: “Have I not just as much moral right to stake my money on the turn of a card, as I have to use it in any other form of harmless enjoyment?” This argument will be effective and even conclusive so long as society entertains its present loose notions respecting the obligations of wealth. But Mr. Quinn approaches the matter from another side. He shows the evil and disreputable associations into which the gambler is inevitably thrown. He speaks of the reckless use of money which the gambling habit engenders, and shows how helpless the average business man really is in the hands of the professional gambler. I claim to be a man of fair intelligence, and yet I felt intellectually humiliated when Mr. Quinn demonstrated to me, how easily I might be tricked out of my money, by the shallow devices to which he says the ordinary gambler resorts when he cannot rely upon what he calls “luck.” For illustration, he showed me what appeared to be an ordinary pack of cards, but by the simplest method in the world these cards had been so changed that he was able to tell the denomination of every card by glancing at the back. Of course the social gambler always asserts that he “plays with gentlemen,” 30but the easiness of cheating offers a constant temptation on the part of gentlemen, who are pressed in money matters, to resort to this method of relieving themselves of their financial embarrassments.

I am convinced, then, that Mr. Quinn’s book will be of the utmost value among the young people of this country. I am sure that the gambling habit is doing more to undermine the character of our young men than any form of vice in which they are likely to fall. The drinking habit has been measurably controlled. Drunkenness has grown to be disreputable. But in thousands of respectable, cultivated and virtuous households, in this land, fathers and mothers are quite unconsciously educating their boys into that pernicious habit of gambling, which will, if not arrested, destroy the very roots of commercial life.

Early education, family training, and circumstances often apparently accidental are potent influences in the formation and moulding of character. Yet not infrequently an event of seemingly little consequence may overturn the best considered plans for a successful career and alter the entire tenor of a man’s life. The invisible power “that shapes our ends,” to-day, lifts one born in a humble station to a pinnacle of fame and power, while to-morrow, it casts down from his exalted position the man intoxicated by the fumes of the incense of popular adulation. The Scottish bard puts this truth in those oft-quoted words:

This aphorism may be significantly applied to the lives of thousands. It is true of my own career. However upright may have been my intentions at the outset of life, they were early turned aside through the influence of my surroundings and of a seemingly inborn propensity for gambling. After a long and eventful experience, I have turned to a better life. My past has not been without interest to those with whom I have been brought in contact. It is here reviewed, not in a spirit of braggart egotism, but with the earnest hope that it may prove a warning to many, who are now bent upon a similar journey.

Biography is usually a simple and suggestive record, pointing its own moral, and treating, as a rule, of the scenes and actions of that everyday life, of which the subject forms a part. An autobiography should be, of all others, sincere and candid, and its writer should

To those who may think that the publication of the life of so obscure an individual as myself, and one, too, who for so many years has been a social pariah, can be productive of neither interest nor profit, I would say, that the eye of the fly is in many respects a more interesting study than that of the eagle, and the light-house of more service to humanity than the pyramids. A great artist once painted a wonderful picture. Of one of the faces in that immortal work, it was said, to him: “that countenance is ugly and revolting.” Thoughtfully gazing upon it, the artist replied: “There is more of beauty in every human face than I can comprehend.” 34So, in the life of every human being, there is at once more of tender charity and vicious selfishness than can be portrayed in words.

If the record of my life shall prove an example to deter even a few of those who are sporting upon the outer waters of that whirlpool whose vortex is destruction;—if its recital shall serve to open the eyes of but one of that vast host who are staking fortune, friendship, family affection, honor, even life itself, in the vain pursuit of an illusive phantom, this sketch will not have been written in vain.

I was born on the 19th day of March, 1846, three miles east of Roanoke, in Randolph County, Mo. My father was a prosperous farmer and stock raiser. He was a man of sound judgment, indomitable pluck, tried courage, generous disposition, and staunch integrity, kind and charitable to his neighbors, and a man whose “word was as good as his bond.” He was deservedly held in high esteem in the community, which he represented in the State Legislature during 1861-3. He owned some twenty slaves at the time of President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. No sooner had it appeared than he called them together, read the proclamation aloud, and informed them that they were at liberty to go or stay. A slave trader named John Robertson, who was present, at once offered fifteen hundred dollars in gold for four of the men, which my father promptly refused. The trader then offered each of the former slaves fifty dollars to go with him, but my father peremptorily declared that a million dollars could not buy one of them unless he or she voluntarily chose to return to servitude.

My mother was a “gentlewoman” in what has been, to me, the best sense of that often-abused term. Faithful to all her duties as a wife and mother, her tender devotion to her children was the controlling impulse of her life. Her generous self-sacrifice and her all but unlimited capacity to forgive, none can know so well as the wayward son, who numbers among his most bitter regrets to-day the recollection of the years of anxiety and grief which he brought upon that mother’s head and of the numberless pangs which he caused that mother’s heart.

The only early educational advantages that I enjoyed were those incident to an irregular attendance upon an ordinary border State, district school, presided over by a pedagogue whose scholastic attainments were, directly, in an inverse ratio to his zeal as a disciplinarian, and who seemed to think that ideas which could not find a lodgment in the head might be forced to germinate from the back by dint of persistent application of the rod. As a boy I was mischievous and wayward; a ringleader in all “scrapes,” and the terror of the orderly. Indeed, my reputation as an evil doer was so well established, and my name so thoroughly synonomous with every species of boyish deviltry, that I was often compelled to bear the blame of escapades which I had not conceived, and in which I bore no part.

35At the time of which I am speaking, the principal diversions in country districts in Missouri were horse-racing, card playing and other amusements to which the element of a wager lent excitement. It was naturally easy for a restless boy of my temperament and disposition to contract the habit of gaming for such small sums of money as I could command, or for other property of trifling value. But the passion of gambling, above all others, fattens on what it feeds upon, and I soon began to find my native village too narrow a field for the realization of my ambition, and the few pennies of my schoolmates too small stakes to satisfy my desire for acquisition. At the age of fourteen years, accordingly, I left home without my father’s consent or knowledge, with a view to enlarging my sphere of operations. I took with me one of his horses, which might not only serve as a means of transportation, but also stand me in stead in the unknown world with which I felt myself well qualified to grapple. My life and habits, even as a child, had been so erratic, that my absence from home excited no comment; indeed, it awakened no anxiety, except in the tender breast of my gentle mother. Upon reaching Kansas, I sold the horse, and entered boldly upon the execution of my project, to lay the foundation of a colossal fortune, through the (to me) alluring career of a gambler. Then followed what might have been expected. Having watched the manipulations of a three-card monte man, until I had satisfied myself that I could beat him at his own game, I staked my all and—lost it. My only recourse then was to apply to my father for relief. He sent me money with which to return home, and in the same letter informed me of the serious illness of my sister Laura. Like the prodigal, I returned to find a welcome, but in time only to receive my sister’s last farewell.

The impression on me created by her death was but fleeting. I soon recommenced gambling with the boys of the neighborhood, at first playing poker for pennies, though the “ante” soon increased and the stakes sometimes amounted to a dollar, which was considered high play for boys in the country. Of course, I soon learned the slang of professional gamblers and was otherwise rapidly fitting myself for my subsequent career of knavery and disgrace.

Among those with whom I associated and played poker at Roanoke in those days, were Ed. and Dod White, John Pruitt, Whit Tyrell, Tom Walton, Bill Drinkard, Bob Holley and the Finney boys, all well known in Randolph County.

About this time occurred an incident which made a lasting impression upon me and aided in my initiation into the tortuous ways of the confidence man and cheat. As I was leaving the village one morning for a squirrel hunt, I fell in with a man who professed to be a billiard player. He invited me to accompany him to Fayette, where he would—to use his 36own expression—“throw a man off to me.” I assented with alacrity, went with him to Fayette, and was there “thrown off” myself for all that I was worth. The game was played in Charley King’s saloon and billiard hall, and the man who played it was Sam Majors, afterward a prominent lawyer and Member of Congress from Missouri.

I spent that night at Fayette, and on reaching home next morning found that every spring and well on my father’s farm had been poisoned, and that the entire family were violently ill from drinking coffee prepared from the contaminated water. This villianous attempt at wholesale poisoning resulted in the death of my only remaining sister Roma, the manner of whose taking away, no less than the sad event itself, cast a pervading gloom over our little family circle. For a time I was deeply impressed; solemn thoughts of my past and future crowded upon my brain, and I resolved to abandon my evil course, and to enter upon a new life. But I was young; my nature was volatile; I was keenly alive to the fascination of gambling; and even at that early age the habit had acquired over me a power not easily broken. My surroundings, moreover, were not of a nature either to promote reflection or encourage better impulses. That portion of Missouri was at that time over-run by bush whackers. Assaults and depredations were the rule, while robberies and murders were of frequent occurrence. Bands of from ten to twenty armed men were wont, from time to time, to ride through the streets of Roanoke, and the clatter of horses’ feet, the firing of guns, and the yells and oaths of demons in human form, converted a peaceful settlement into a pandemonium.

Among other notorious characters who visited our village, I well remember one desperate gang, armed to the teeth and flushed with pillage, who one night alighted at my father’s grocery store for rest and recreation. Among that band were the James boys, Bill Anderson, the Younger brothers, and Tom Hunter. The party was quiet, even “gentlemanly,” as that designation was then applied, inasmuch as they departed without killing or robbing anyone. They played poker, and I can well recall the cupidity awakened in my breast at the sight of the roll of bills which they staked upon the game. The play ran well up into the thousands, and never before had I seen such piles of money upon a table. I was much impressed, nor was I able to divest myself of the idea that money fairly won at cards was honestly earned. And, indeed, as compared with the outrageous robbery of unoffending, defenceless citizens, by marauding bands of armed ruffians which I saw constantly going on about me, gambling seemed an innocent recreation. Over and again, during those memorable years of the war, have I seen such gangs of desperadoes forcibly enter my father’s homestead, and with a pistol leveled at his head demand his cash. My father was determined, resolute and 37brave, but more than once have I seen him forced to purchase his own life and the lives of his family by partial submission to these threats.

I recall another incident of my early life, which occurred during the war, and which is worthy of mention only so far as it may serve to illustrateillustrate to what a degree of intensity my passion for gambling had developed. The battle of Silver Creek, which was a short but spirited engagement, was fought at night. In the morning I was sent with needed supplies for the wounded to the Union camp, which was located only three miles from my father’s store. After distributing the supplies, I opened a game of poker with a party of soldiers in a store kept by one Jas. T. Wallace. The appalling sights witnessed in the midst of the dead and dying were powerless to restrain or curb a passion which was even then stronger than death.

At the close of the war I felt myself a man and qualified to engage in business. So at the age of twenty, I went to Keytsville, in Chariton Co., Mo., and started a hardware store. I found myself unable, however, to forego the amusement of gaming, nor could I reconcile myself to the abandonment of my hopes of winning a fortune at the card table; I therefore combined gambling with business (sadly to the detriment of the latter), I divided my time between my own store and Dan Kellogg’s saloon and gambling resort. Among my associates there were such well-known gamblers as Bill and Tom Binford, Rives Williams, Jube Hurt, French Blakey, besides many others. I remained at Keytsville for a year, but failing to make any money by either legitimate or illegitimate methods, I closed out my business and returned to Roanoke.

Here, in my native village, my next venture was to start a tonsorial and bathing establishment. I had one bath-tub and one assistant. As I knew nothing about shaving (except at cards), and one of the rules of the shop was that when a customer was cut he need pay nothing, I was glad to confine my operations to transient callers, relegating regular patrons to the tender mercies of my assistant. As might have been expected, no profits materialized, and after the business had dragged its miserable length along for some twelve months, I spontaneously and cheerfully abandoned it.

My next business move was the formation of a partnership with one James Bird, familiarly known as “Slim Jim.” The firm was to manufacture and sell piano dulcimers, for which, at that time, there was a great and constantly increasing demand throughout that entire section. I was the senior partner, and furnished the capital; Jim was the practical man and had the experience; we united the two and the result may be very briefly told. To facilitate delivery of the goods, I purchased a carriage, horses and harness. I then went to St. Louis to buy materials to be used in the manufacture of the instruments. Upon my return, I found 38that “Slim” (it should have been “Slick”) Jim had been to Sedalia, Mo., where he had sold out the horses, carriage, etc., pocketed the proceeds, and had secured a tolerably fair start on his way to California. I trust that I may not be regarded as unduly revengeful if I frankly admit that when, thirteen years later, my quondam partner was arrested by Detective Henry Hutling while playing three card monte along the line of the Chicago and Alton Railroad, I hastened to the scene of his misfortune, and relentlessly made him disgorge by way of settlement, seventy-five dollars in money, a gold watch and chain and a diamond pin.

In the year 1868, in company with my uncle Tom, my brothers Sidney and Robert and a man by the name of Keen Viley, I went as far west as the southern portion of Dakota. For several months we located ourselves at Benton City, on the North Platte River. Here the mayor of the “city,” one A. B. Miller, in conjunction with a man named Charles Storms, conducted what is known in gamblers’ parlance as a “brace” faro game; that is to say, players could win nothing except at the option of the proprietor, and the latter lost only such trifling sums as might serve as an allurement to continued and heavier play. In this establishment I held the position of “case-keeper;” in other words, I kept the record of the game. This was my first regular employment in a gambling house. Life in the territory at that period was primitive in its comforts, but decidedly exciting in its uncertainty. Our party slept in a canvas tent, lined with slabs to about the height of three feet as a protection against the stray bullets, which came, with unpleasant frequency, from whence no one knew and went none could tell whither. During the progress of the fusilade, no sleeper in any tent ever thought of raising his head from his pillow, and the wisdom of lying perfectly still was abundantly demonstrated by the many bullet holes in the upper part of the canvas.

From Dakota I again gravitated to Roanoke, where I once more embarked in business, this time in the custom shoe trade. Being utterly ignorant of that, or any other business, I employed a shoe-maker who, after the manner of his kind, made it a point of honor to fill himself with whiskey every time he lasted a pair of boots. Naturally the business languished, and I soon sought a more congenial pursuit.

Going to Columbia, Mo., I opened a saloon; not from any desire to indulge my appetite in this direction, inasmuch as I can truthfully say that I never drank any intoxicating liquor in my life. My chief aim was to conduct a gaming establishment, for which the sale of liquor might serve as a blind. While at Columbia I used to gamble—chiefly at faro or poker—with the Hume’s boys, of whom there were six or seven with Dr. Ed. Compton, Sam Reader, James I. Brewitt, the Jacobs boys, Arthur Charleston, Jesse Forshay, Alex Bradford, Billy Booth, and many others who have since attained local prominence.

39Like other young men, I was not unsusceptible to feminine charms, nor, wicked as I was, was I incapable of appreciating true womanly worth. I first felt the afflatus of the “divine passion” when I met Miss Fannie White, a fair maiden of Roanoke. For a time it seemed to me as though the sun shone only through her eyes. I prosecuted my suit with all the ardor of a first attachment, but the young lady’s parents promptly and forcibly interposed. My reputation was notoriously bad and a marriage between their daughter and myself was, they said, not to be thought of. Thus the affair was nipped in the bud. For a time I felt the blow keenly, and bitterly realized the disgraceful position which I occupied as a suitor rejected for such a cause. Time, however, and a sort of sullen resentment came to my aid. I succeeded in tearing from my heart the hopes which I had formed, as an idol is wrenched from its pedestal, and entered upon the vice of gaming with redoubled vigor.

But a few years later I formed an attachment for a beautiful and captivating lady, the accomplished daughter of Dr. Wm. C. and Mrs. L. A. Harvey, who enjoyed a position of social pre-eminence in the community.

Little May Harvey was a girl suited to fill the ideal conception of a far better man than I. Of attractive form and feature, she was modest, truthful, and a universal favorite with her acquaintances. That I should presume to lift my eyes to such a girl was enough to excite the apprehension of her parents, who at once became most bitter and unyielding opponents. But, fortunately or unfortunately, I had a powerful advocate in May’s own heart. In affairs of the heart young people are not always disposed to brook parental interference. They are apt to regard themselves as best qualified to judge of what will be for their own happiness, and to constitute themselves the sole arbiters of their own destiny. My affection for May was deep and true, and, which is a no less vital point, it was thoroughly reciprocated. An engagement to May followed as a matter of course; and, also as a matter of course, there followed an insistent demand on the part of Dr. and Mrs. Harvey that the engagement be suddenly and finally broken off. A most plausible excuse was found in my arrest on an utterly false charge for highway robbery.

The facts connected with this episode in my life may prove not uninteresting to the reader. A farmer by the name of Jesse B. Hudson, living about five miles east of Roanoke, had been robbed of a large sum of money by bush whackers. One of the robbers rode a horse belonging to John Emery, which he had taken from a hitching post in the town while Emery was on a spree. The horse was accidentally shot. Owing partly to the existence of a neighborhood feud, and partly to my bad reputation, I was arrested as a participant in the crime, and taken to Huntsville for trial. There I gave bonds in the sum of $3,000 for my appearance when wanted, two reputable farmers—W. H. Lockridge and Geo. Aulthouse—signing 40my bond. Among the men suspected of the crime were such notorious outlaws as the James boys, Quantrell, Anderson, Hunter, Clingman, Lyons, and others, yet I was the only one arrested. At different times before, while I was living at home, the bush whackers had aroused me at night and ordered me to supply them with liquor from my father’s store. This fact may have given rise to a suspicion that I was a member of the gang, and may have led to my arrest. Be that as it may, my innocence was easily established at the trial, and the jury promptly rendered a verdict of acquittal.

May’s fidelity was unshaken by my arrest, and my vindication was hailed by her with triumph. Shortly afterwards she was sent as a pupil to the Convent of the Visitation at St. Louis, and peremptorily forbidden by her parents to hold any communication with me. Similar instructions were given to the Mother Superior and her assistants. The sisters faithfully obeyed Dr. Harvey’s behest. Under these circumstances I had recourse to strategem. I had followed her to St. Louis, where I had engaged in gambling with many well-known sporting men of that city. Calling at the convent I asked for an interview which was refused by the Mother Superior. I had told the latter that I was from Roanoke, Miss Harvey’s home. I had expected a refusal and was not unprepared. Producing a package, I handed it to the convent Cerberus, and brazenly informed that suspicious individual that I had been commissioned by the young lady’s parents to convey it to her. The package contained a volume of Longfellow’s poems and a pair of kid gloves. In one of the fingers of the gloves was a neatly folded note, written on tissue paper, calling attention to the fact that a letter was pasted between two of the book’s pages. The scheme was well laid, as I thought, but failed to work. The bundle was opened and examined by the Superior; its contents sent to Mrs. Harvey, and the letter burned. My efforts to hold an interview with my inamorata upon the streets proved equally fruitless, it not being permitted to her to take her “daily walks abroad” unless accompanied by a watchful attendant. Despairing of seeing her alone, I started with a small party on a gambling tour to the far west, visiting Colorado and Wyoming. The trip was uneventful, and I returned to Roanoke to find that May had been at home and had been sent to school at Columbia, Missouri. Thither I followed her, only to be again denied an interview. Returning home, I forwarded to her as present from her mother, a box of fruit. A portion of the core of one of the apples had been extracted, and its place deftly filled by a letter written on extremely thin paper. No suspicion was aroused by the receipt of the fruit, which was handed to Miss Harvey. She examined every apple in the expectation of finding a letter from me but failed to discoverdiscover the right one. While sharing the fruit with her schoolmates, one of them, in biting an apple, was surprised 41to find a pin in her mouth; the mystery was solved, and the letter reached its destination.

In due time I received an answer, full of love and encouragement, showing that neither absence nor intimidation could conquer her faithful spirit. To be near her I went to Columbia, where I opened a saloon and resumed gambling. Every Sunday I was made supremely happy by seeing her. About this time she received a letter from her mother severely reprimanding her for encouraging my attentions. Smarting under this rebuke she impulsively returned all my letters and presents, among which was the engagement ring. This blow fairly overwhelmed me. To accomplish what had now become the chief aim of my existence, any and all means seemed to me justifiable. Accordingly, on the following Sunday evening I attended the church at which I knew she would be present. At a favorable moment I sank to the floor in a simulated swoon, and was carried to the hotel by four men, whither was summoned a physician, who made me four visits. Probably he suspected the sham, but he kept his own counsel. The ruse had the effect desired. May’s sympathy was aroused, a reconciliation followed, my presents and letters were again accepted, and the engagement ring once more found a place upon her finger.

To hope for the consent of her parents to our union was, we both knew, to expect the impossible. We therefore laid our plans for an elopement. About nine o’clock on the evening of an August day in 1870 we met at the appointed place of rendezvous. I was accompanied by a friend, Frank Payne, who was to act as witness and best man. May mounted behind me one of my father’s best saddle horses, and our little party set forth in quest of some clergyman or justice of the peace to tie the nuptial knot. After meeting with sundry rebuffs, and riding all night, we reached Renick, a small town in Randolph county, about eighteen miles from Roanoke. Here we found an accommodating magistrate in the person of Esquire Butler. After Payne had sworn that Miss Harvey was eighteen years old on August 24th, and therefore of lawful age, the magistrate consented to perform the ceremony. That evening we returned to the home of my father, who was living alone, my mother having died on Oct 12, 1865.

Great was the sensation which our marriage created in our little village, and greater the indignation of my bride’s parents. Dr. Harvey promptly caused the arrest of Frank Payne for false swearing, and of Esquire Butler for solemnizing the marriage. The prosecution of Payne was soon dropped, but the magistrate did not escape so easily, being sentenced to pay a fine of $300 and to be imprisoned in the county jail for three months. Both these penalties, however, were soon afterward remitted.

42For two years we lived at Roanoke, my wife’s parents refusing to recognize us even on the streets. At the end of that time we removed to Moberly, Missouri, where I lived by gaming, finding all avenues of respectable employment closed against me.

Among those with whom I gambled during this period were Joe Woods, Si. Beatty, Levi Perkins, James F. Wallace, Bill Robertson, Pat Carmody, Perry McDaniels, John Guy, Bill Williams, Dave White, and Judge Worden.

While at Moberly I formed the acquaintance of one Sam Martin, a jovial, good natured man, who first taught me the use of marked cards. I found him a congenial companion, and during the eight years from 1873 to 1881 we were partners in gambling. In the latter year Martin’s health failed and he had recourse to the waters of Hot Springs, where he died in 1885, at the early age of thirty-five.

Perhaps I may be pardoned for relating here a few incidents of our life at this time, which may serve to illustrate both Martin’s character and my own. On one of our gambling expeditions we arrived at Columbia, Missouri, and went to a hotel kept by Jim Hume. Placing a carpet satchel upon the counter, Martin blandly demanded the best room in the house. Being informed that the hostelry was full, he thrust his hand into his empty vest pocket and offered to settle in advance. This audacious piece of assurance won the confidence of the clerk, and we were assigned to the parlor for the night. At the end of a week a bill for $12 was handed to Martin, who excused himself from payment by saying that he had handed all his money to me, and that he would go and find me. It was after dark before he came across me and explained the modus operandi which he had devised. He was to lower the antique satchel from the window of our room by a string upon receiving a signal from me that I was below. I assented to the plan, and returning to the hotel, told the landlord to go out and give the prearranged whistle. This he did, and down came the string with the satchel attached, which was removed by Hume and carried into the hotel office. Here it was opened in the presence of a large crowd of “fakirs” who had been drawn to Columbia by the fair then in progress. Its contents were found to be as follows: item, one deck of cards; item, one pair of socks; item, one dirty collar; item, one rock (for ballast). Sam’s wardrobe was regarded as unique, but of hardly sufficient value to liquidate his bill. One of the amused sporting men present proposed taking up a collection for Martin’s benefit. The proposition was hailed with favor and twelve silver dollars soon jingled on the counter. The landlord joined in the merriment, and in the exuberance of his mirth offered to treat the crowd if someone would fetch Martin to participate in the festivities of the occasion. Sam was soon found, and a general jollification followed. When asked why he 43had not paid his bill, he replied, “What for? Why, I could go to St. Louis and board at the Lindell or Southern by paying for it.”

On the following day we started for St. Louis. On the train Martin formed the acquaintance of an old gentleman, whom he courteously invited to dine with him on reaching the refreshment station. The invitation was accepted. Martin hurried through his meal and politely excused himself to his companion. At the door he was asked for seventy five cents; pointing towards the old gentleman, he said: “Father will settle.” When his traveling acquaintance returned to the car he sought out Sam and took a seat by his side. “Pretty good dinner for seventy-five cents,” said Sam. “I should say so,” remarked the old gentleman. “I paid a dollar and a half for yours and mine, and I want seventy-five cents.” At this Martin started up in great apparent indignation, and in a loud voice asked the conductor, “What sort of a man is that who keeps the eating house? He has collected from both of us for our meal.” Before the conductor could answer, the old gentleman exclaimed, “I want you to give me that seventy-five cents that I paid out for your dinner.” Sam said that he had no small change, but the old man assured him that he could make change for “any sized bill.” I comprehended the situation and quietly remarked, “Mr. Martin, this gentleman ought to be paid. I have not enough money with me to cash your draft, but he should be paid.” My companion at once perceived his opportunity. Producing from under the lining of his hat a draft for $500, he said, “Now give me $499.25 and you are paid.” Thinking that this was an attempt to “bluff” him, the old gentleman reached down and pulled from his boot leg a large roll of bills, from which he triumphantly counted out the “change,” as he called it. Martin gave the conductor $20 to slow up and we jumped off the train. The draft was, of course, utterly worthless, but the old man apparently never made any effort to find either Martin or myself.

At St. Louis we were moderately successful in the prosecution of our nefarious enterprises, making frequent excursions into the adjacent country.

Our next objective point was Texas. At Houston, Martin won nearly $100 from a man by playing with marked cards. The dupe discovered how he had been victimized and related the circumstances to a friend giving a description of the man who had won his money. The next morning a typical Texan called on Martin and said, “I am out making collections this morning, and have a bill against you for exactly $96.50.” Without saying a word, Martin opened his wallet, and counting out the amount demanded, quietly handed it over to the “collector.” As an argument, a six-shooter is more convincing than rhetoric.

44During the Centennial year, Martin went east, visiting Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington. When he said good bye to me at St. Louis, he said that he was going to wear either diamonds or shackles. A few weeks later he wrote that it was shackles; he had been in jail three days.

In September, 1876, I went to Philadelphia myself, to join Martin. On arriving at his hotel I found that he was temporarily absent in Baltimore. The second night after reaching Philadelphia I was invited by the hotel clerk to take a hand in a game of poker. I found the cards were marked, but as the marks were very familiar I said nothing, I found the game exceedingly interesting and rose from the table a winner by $300. I telegraphed Sam to return to Philadelphia at once, which he did. On opening his valise, which he had left at his hotel in Philadelphia, he found some of his cards missing. That afternoon the clerk of the house came to him and apologized for taking a few decks of cards from his valise, they being convenient for use. “That is all right,” said Sam Martin; “you are at liberty to help yourself to them at any time, provided my friend and myself can play in the game. I only carry them with me because they are the Hart brand of cards and are “square.” They are a protection to me when I play for a little amusement. They won’t cheat me.”

Of course, every pack which he had was marked, and had laid the foundation of a great financial success. None but his celebrated “Hart” cards were used in the games at that hotel afterwards, and in less than three weeks we had won at poker something over $3,000.

While in Philadelphia I formed the acquaintance of a man named Anderson, who confided to me his troubles. He told me that he had resided in the coal regions of Pennsylvania, where he had been involved in a terrible fight, and that he was afraid to return. He offered me $100 if I would go down into that section and bring his family to Baltimore. This I did, and in the evening of our arrival in the Maryland metropolis, while Anderson and I were walking about the city together, we were both arrested and locked up. The next morning a gentleman from the place where my new acquaintances resided came to the jail and identified Anderson as the man who had recently fled from that town with $3,000 of his money. Of course, I was discharged. The gentleman from Pennsylvania was profuse in his expressions of regret at my arrest, paid my hotel bill, and gave me twenty dollars. I did not enjoy the experience, however, and as the poker games at the Philadelphia hotel showed decided symptoms of coming to an end, I determined to return to St. Louis.

But to revert to my life at Moberly. In 1874, feeling dissatisfied, I made a trip to Hot Springs, where I passed a few months, but found little opportunity of making money in the only way which I understood. 45Accordingly, in the autumn of that year I went to reside at St. Louis. There I was joined by my wife. Many times had I resolved to quit gambling, but as often had my determination failed. The sight of my wife’s sweet, patient face when I met her at St. Louis rekindled my desire to reform and pursue some honorable vocation. The thought that I had brought her to the shame of being a gambler’s wife was bitter. But I overcame these reflections by arguing with myself after the manner of those gamesters whose desire to reform is half hearted, being founded on impulse rather than on principle. I had tried several kinds of legitimate business and failed in each. Who would trust me in any honest employment? How was I to provide for my wife, to say nothing of myself? To these questions I could formulate no answer, and hence it was that during the six years of my residence in St. Louis I played at any and every game that promised to pay me money. In order to preserve a semblance of respectability at home, I rarely gambled in the city. Excursion boats, country towns, and county fairs formed the theater of my gaming. That description of games known to professionals as “brace” comprised those in which I engaged. My pursuits included the use of marked cards, “squeeze spindles,” roulette, monte tricks, and “bunko steering” for “brace” faro banks. When I could not win the entire stake for myself, I was content to accept a percentage. Thus I lived until April 29, 1880.

On the date last mentioned I was residing with my wife on an upper floor at No. 1517 North Eighth Street. At about eleven o’clock in the forenoon, as my wife was starting from home to carry aid to a former servant who was at that time sick and destitute, her foot became entangled in her clothing as she reached the head of the stairs and she fell headlong to the foot of the flight. She was at once carried to her room and placed upon her bed. Her eyes opened, and during a single moment of consciousness she placed both hands upon her head and exclaimed, “Where is John? O, mother! mother! you won’t forgive—you break my heart!” She then added, “take down my hair; I am dying.” Respiration ceased, and the loving, faithful heart that had for so many years beat only for me was at rest.

That morning, her mother was returning from a three days’ visit at St. Louis to her home in Roanoke; her father had just reached the National Stock Yards at East St. Louis with two car loads of live stock; and I was at Cote Brilliante Park, in training for a foot race with “Hank” Wider, and Jim Bensley for a purse of $10,000. I was not apprised of the great calamity which had befallen me until my return to my desolate home that evening. I will not attempt to depict the emotions of remorse, anguish, almost despair, which struggled for mastery in my heart. There are sorrows too deep for tears and griefs too sacred to be revealed.

46I at once notified Dr. and Mrs. Harvey of the death of the daughter, whose last, agonized cry had been for a mother’s forgiveness. My preparations for the funeral completed, the form that had been so dear in life and was so sacred to me, in its sleep of death was carried to Roanoke and reverently laid to rest in the family burying ground. Revs. Talbot and Johnson conducted the last sad religious rites.

The night following the funeral I passed under Dr. Harvey’s roof, and for the first time in my life, was kindly entertained by my wife’s parents. Soon after leaving the village, I arranged for the erection of a suitable monument to mark the last resting place of my loved one.

The foot race for which I was in training at the time of my wife’s death had been declared off, out of respect for my bereavement, and when I returned to St. Louis I was without anything to engross my thoughts. Then how many good resolutions did I form to abandon the vice, which in the mood of repentance induced by my wife’s death, had grown not only distasteful but actually abhorrent to me. I saw the degradation into which I had fallen, and I resolved to make another effort to raise myself from the slough into which I had sunk.

After remaining in St. Louis for about six months, in the fall of 1880 I went to Little Rock, Arkansas, where I stumbled across the Mabel Norton theatrical troupe, then under the management of John Hogan. The combination had become financially stranded, and I advanced the necessary funds, taking the position of treasurer. After visiting the principal towns in the valley of the Arkansas river, we went to Eureka, where I severed my connection with the company and returned to my evil courses, opening several gambling houses. Here I formed the acquaintance of a number of persons who I initiated into the mysteries of “brace” games with a view to their becoming of assistance to me in the pursuit of my nefarious calling.

While I was at the last mentioned resort I wrote to Mrs. Harvey, recommending the waters for the use of her invalid daughter. Mother and daughter both visited the springs, and while there treated me with kindness and even cordiality. Their visit constituted the second occasion on which I was allowed to associate with any of the family except my wife. I felt that I was never justly entitled to their consideration, yet they always demanded my esteem, if not my affection.

I remained at Eureka Springs for seven months, encountering varying fortunes, when I again returned to my old home in Roanoke.

In the early fall of 1881, I received a despatch from Jem Sanford, a professional gambler, to come to Chicago. The dispatch conveyed a proposition to “take in” the fairs then being held in the surrounding country. The proposal I readily accepted, and going to Chicago I united my fortunes with the redoubtable Jem. Together we visited many county 47fairs in the states of Indiana, Illinois and Missouri. Our outfit consisted of marked cards, dice, spindles, a hap-hazard, and other devices to defraud the unwary. Considered solely from a money making standpoint our jaunt was a successful one. No games involving large stakes were played, but we reaped a constant harvest of small sums from the ignorance and stupidity of the country people.

At Marion, Indiana, however, while I was running a game of “hap-hazard” on the fair ground, the game was discovered to be “skin.” I was arrested, tried, and fined $25. I paid the fine and left the place without delay.

At the end of the fair season we returned to St. Louis. I had determined to locate in Chicago and thither I went later in the autumn. There I became a member of the commission firm of Stockton, Young & Co., who referred by permission to Wm. Young & Co., then the leading general commission house of that city. I found operating on change different from running a “squeeze spindle,” but the “squeezing” was effectually accomplished in both cases. In the spring of 1882 the composition and title of the firm was changed; Ben Demint was admitted to membership, and the firm name became Stockton, Quinn & Co.

While a member of the firm, I was causelessly arrested for defrauding a Mrs. Morgan out of $700. By way of defence I produced her receipt, and was thereupon honorably discharged.

One day, while business was dull, Demint and I were chatting in our office, when one of us (probably myself) proposed, in a spirit of deviltry, to advertise for a wife. The suggestion was adopted, and the day following the insertion of the advertisement we received fifty-six replies. At the end of a week we had received answers from points as far distant as New York and later from California and New Orleans. From the beginning I regarded the whole project as a mere matter of passing sport. Little did I think how potent an influence it was destined to exert over my future life.

Among my correspondents was a handsome, petite Jewess, named Lily Boas, whose acquaintance I formed, and by whom I was captivated at once. On July 3, 1882, we went together to Milwaukee, where we were married. My former experience in the matter of securing parental consent had not been of a sort to encourage me to ask for it in this instance, and as my fiance was content without it, we agreed to regard it as a needless formality.

I was determined that my second wife should not be subjected to the humiliating circumstances which had embittered the life of May. I determined to abjure gambling then and forever. To remove myself from the temptation, I determined to withdraw from business in Chicago, and once more to take up my residence on my father’s farm. The monotony 48and ceaseless toil of a farmer’s life were irksome to me, but I hoped to find in them a refuge from my overweaning passion. Better the dullness of a plodding routine than the fitful excitement of a gambler’s checkered life; better an aching body than a ruined soul.

For a year I led a rural life, and in September, 1883, I removed to St. Louis. There I found employment with McDonald’s Detective Agency, whose proprietors I faithfully served for two years, retaining their confidence at the termination of our relations. While with this concern, I returned to my former pursuits, running games at fairs, picnics, etc., and on excursion boats.

While living in St. Louis at this time, I became involved in two or three transactions which brought me into some unpleasant notoriety. The first was in connection with the sale of a saloon, known as the “White Elephant,” on 6th Street, near Chestnut. I had an interest in this place, jointly, with a man named Henry W. Huthsing. Huthsing sold out the business to one Fred. Beckerer, of East St. Louis, for $1,900. Payment was made in nineteen $100 four per cent. U. S. bonds, and my partner, finding that the premiums and accrued interest amounted to $375 gave Beckerer his check for that sum, greatly to the latter’s surprise. Becoming dissatisfied with his bargain, the purchaser set up the claim that the bottles and barrels in the place were chiefly filled with water, a statement which was utterly untrue. He brought suit against us and caused our arrest. Our experience before trial was not of a character seriously to impress us with respect either for the administration of justice or for the integrity of some of the legal luminaries of the St. Louis bar. We gave bonds in $1,000 each, signed by Henry W. Godfrey, an old-time gambler and well-known in the courts of that city. We retained as counsel ex-judge Wm. Jones and C. R. Taylor, paying them retainers of $50 and $100 respectively. When the case was first called, Jones demanded $50 additional, having ascertained that Taylor had received $100. The demand was accompanied with a threat of withdrawing from the defense and allying himself with the prosecution, and we complied with his request. The case was continued, and soon afterward we gave Godfrey $300 upon his representation that the prosecuting attorney, R. S. McDonald, had agreed to dismiss the suit. What became of the money I cannot tell, but Godfrey repeatedly told us that he had given McDonald $250, and we supposed that the matter was settled. Several months later we were surprised to learn that the case was about to be called again. Huthsing was obliged to give Judge Jones his note for $100 to appear and defend. The day before that set for the trial Jones wrote to Mrs. Huthsing that the note must be paid at once or he would refuse to appear. The money was not paid and we were accordingly deprived of the valuable services of the “Hon.” (?) Judge Jones. I gave another attorney, 49Col. Nat. Claibourn $10 to move for a continuance, which was granted, and subsequently retained ex-Governor Charles P. Johnson, as our attorney. The case was called on January 16, 1887, and at the request of my counsel, I was granted a separate trial. At the suggestion of Gov. Johnson, the evidence was submitted without argument to the jury, who re-entered the court room in exactly nineteen minutes with a verdict of acquittal. The case against Huthsing was then dismissed. Thus the “White Elephant” was disposed of and the cheerful prophecy of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat came to naught; that paper had said before the trial, “the way things look, it appears that softly the cuckoo is calling for Quinn to come up the road.”

Another unpleasant experience of mine while sojourning in St. Louis was in connection with the Van Hennessey-Wolff “gold brick” swindling case in 1885, in which one U. S. Wolff, of Madison, Indiana, was defrauded of $5,000. The victim offered a reward for the apprehension of the man who had defrauded him. The matter received wide publication and attracted general attention. A detective named Page, came to St. Louis with the papers necessary to secure the extradition of Van Hennessey.

I knew Van Hennessey only too well, and had no reason to regard him with affection. I had advanced to him some $1,200 to embark in the business of running a Wild West show, no part of which sum had been returned, and he had given me a note for $700, which I yet hold. I had pawned my own watch and chain and my wife’s diamond ear drops to obtain the money. The stock was to have been mine, but I discovered too late that Van Hennessey and his brother John had mortgaged it for its full value. While my child was ill I asked John Hennessey for money with which to buy medicine, and was refused, although I knew that he had several hundred dollars in his pocket at the time. When the Indiana detective appeared upon the scene I thought my time had come. I accordingly proposed to point out his game, knowing that the man he wanted was in Tennessee. The result was an arrangement that Page (the detective), one Backenstoe, and my brother should proceed to Tennessee, where they should collect my note and then allow Hennessey to go. The amount to be collected was to be divided equally between Page and myself, after Backenstoe had been reimbursed for the money he was to advance for expenses.

In the meantime, a wealthy man of Nashville, Tennessee, by the name of Oscar F. Noel, had been swindled out of $6,000 by the gold brick scheme, and when they arrived in Tennessee they found that Hennessey was then engaged in a similar enterprise to defraud a man from Marietta, Georgia. They soon found their man, whom my brother captured at the point of a pistol. On their return trip they stopped at Nashville, where 50Hennessey said that he could raise the $700. They placed him under the care of my brother, and Page went out for a little while on “business.” About ten o’clock that evening the latter returned with an officer, representing the authorities of Nashville, to whom he turned over Hennessey, on the charge of swindling Noel, receiving for his services in that connection, it was said, the sum of $1,150. The Indiana requisition was returned and Hennessey was tried, convicted, and sentenced to the Tennessee penitentiary for a term of five years. After serving two years in prison Hennessey was pardoned. He was brought to St. Louis a hopeless consumptive, and died in a few days. The next result of the expedition was that Backenstoe was “out” the money advanced for expenses. I found the amount of my note to be a permanent investment, and my brother was obliged to pawn his pistol to obtain money with which to get home. The detective, after the manner of many of his class, “sold out” not only us, but his state as well, and was probably well satisfied with himself.

This was the era when the gold brick swindlers were reaping a rich harvest, and I was induced, through cupidity and vicious propensities, to embark in that line of operations myself. I soon got into trouble. In September, 1886, in company with a party known as “Doc” Kerns, I was arrested at St. Louis, charged with attempting to sell a bogus brick to one Bob Basket, of Howard County, Missouri. While we were held in jail a Jew named Levi Stortz, a small manufacturer of jewelry, came to the Four Courts and identified me as one of the men from whom he had bought one of these fraudulent articles. A formal charge was thereupon made againstagainst me, and Kerns was liberated. I was released on $1,500 bail, John Vittie becoming my surety. Ex-Governor Johnson being absent from the city, John I. Martin was employed as my attorney on the strength of his representations that he “could influence” the judges. Stortz had sworn that he paid $3,700 for the bogus brick on July 15. Mr. Martin and I went together to St. Paul, Minnesota, where we obtained depositions from the proprietor of a hotel where I had stopped, and from the cashier of the city water works, and several other business men to the effect that I was in that city on July 12th, and for two weeks thereafter.

Several months after my arrest, two men, named Frank Aldrich and “Billy” Adkins called on me, and the former told me that he had been the cause of my arrest. He said that he had induced Stortz to make the charge because he had understood that I was endeavoring to have him sent to the penitentiary. He added that he had offered $100 to a grocer on Jefferson Avenue to go to the jail and identify me as the swindler who had tried to defraud him in a similar way. The latter part of this story was corroborated by Adkins, who said that he had been present at the time. Aldrich also stated that he had endeavored to retain Governor 51Johnson to assist in my prosecution, but that the latter had refused to entertain the proposition. He went on to express his deep regret for all this, saying that he wished to “bury the hatchet,” and as an earnest of his desire to make atonement he handed me two ten dollar bills. Before going to St. Paul I had myself retained Governor Johnson as counsel and he forwarded a letter from Aldrich sent in his care, offering to establish an alibi for me by swearing that I was with him in Chicago at the time named by Stortz. This offer was indignantly rejected. All the facts were brought to the notice of the prosecuting attorney, and as a result the case was dropped.

I now come to the recital of the gloomiest chapter in my life’s history, a chapter of legalized intimidation, of perjury and the subornation of perjury, and of gross and wanton outrage upon personal liberty committed in the name of justice and under the forms of law. I refer to my arrest, trial and incarceration in the Southern Penitentiary of Indiana for a crime of which I was as innocent as any of my readers and the perpetrators of which, were to me entirely unknown. On August 7, 1887, accompanied by “Doc” Kerns and John Forbes, I left St. Louis by way of Terre Haute, at which place our party stopped for a few days. While eating supper at a restaurant, two strangers, who afterwards proved to be detectives, entered and accosted Kerns, who soon called me forward and introduced me. These men, whose names were Vandeveer and Murphy, placed us under arrest and took us to police headquarters, whither Forbes was soon brought by Vandeveer and Chief Lawler.

Some two months before this a farmer by the name of Zach Deputy, living near North Vernon, Ind., had been victimized by three confidence men to the tune of $3,000, and it was this offense which was laid at our door.

Upon our arrival at headquarters, an effort was made to extort money from us under the guise of “a compromise.” Had we been actually guilty, this would, of course, have been an attempt to compound a felony, but for that, these zealous officials, who had been sworn to enforce the law whose majesty they so flagrantly violated, cared little.little. The proposition was declined, and we were searched, when it was disclosed that our entire cash assets aggregated $8.65.

After we had been placed in jail, we were visited by an alleged lawyer calling himself Thomas Harper, who was permitted to interview us by the grace of the police authorities. He wanted $100 for services which he offered to render in the capacity of attorney. We declined his proposal and he indignantly spurned our suggestion that $10 were probably all that his services were worth. On the following Sunday Vandeveer called on us, but we refused to recognize him, and on Monday morning the authorities telegraphed to Webb Benton, a North Vernon detective that 52they were holding the men who had fleeced Deputy. On receiving the telegram Benton took with him a livery stable keeper named Burge and started to convey the tidings to the old farmer. He had previously offered a reward of $200 for the arrest of the guilty parties, and was easily persuaded to enter into a written contract to pay the sum of $300 if Benton and Burge would point out to him the men who had robbed him. This having been done, the trio went to Terre Haute, and the three prisoners were brought before Deputy for identification. After he had looked us thoroughly over, Benton asked him if he recognized us. The old man shook his head, but pointing to Kerns said: “That man looks some like one of them, but he is too small.” Thereupon Chief Lawler and Vandeveer sent for Kerns and advised him to settle the matter by paying $1,500. “Doc” replied that he had nothing to settle. Then the officers suggested $1,000, but Kerns still proved obdurate. In order to secure the $200 reward it was absolutely necessary that Deputy should identify us as the men who had swindled him. To induce him to do this, Lawler and Vandeveer told him that we had just robbed a country bank of $6,000, and that if he would swear that we were the right parties, we would gladly settle with him. This line of argument overcame his scruples and he at once swore out warrants for us. It is, perhaps, unnecessary to add that the $200 reward was promptly demanded and eventually paid.

The next day (Tuesday) we were arraigned for the preliminary examination, Tom Harper, the alleged lawyer aforementioned, who had indignantly shaken the dust of our cells off of his feet a few days before, now appeared in the role of our attorney and asked for a continuance. We promptly repudiated him, and Forbes told the court that we would waive examination. Accordingly we were remanded to jail, and the next day were taken to Brownstown, the county seat of the county in which the crime had been committed. It was a slight mitigation of our condition to be placed in the custody of Sheriff Wicks, whose kindness was in delightful contrast to the blackmailing tactics of the police officials of Terre Haute. Thomas Harper, Esq., who had so magnanimously volunteered to ask for a continuance which we did not wish, easily obtained possession of the watches taken from Kerns and Forbes by the police, and retained them, alleging that he had a lien of $200 upon them for his professional (?) services. They were subsequently redeemed by Al. Burkey, of St. Louis, who paid that amount to the over-zealous practitioner, when the watches were sent C. O. D.

At Brownstown we retained Lon Brenneman, a lawyer of some local reputation. The next morning we telegraphed to Lieut. Governor Smith, of North Vernon, who came to us at once, and agreed to appear in our behalf. The Friday following, we had a preliminary hearing before a justice of the peace. At that examination Deputy, under oath, identified 53Kerns, because he was “bald-headed,” although he admitted that he was smaller in stature and lighter in build than at the time when he alleged that he committed the crime. He explained this discrepancy by swearing that he believed the prisoner’s clothes were stuffed when he first saw him, and added that on that occasion Kerns wore false whiskers. On cross-examination the witness admitted having been instructed by Lawler and Vandeveer to identify us as the men who had robbed him, because he would thus recover his money and also admitted the making of the contract with Burton and Burge. On this evidence we were held for trial on September 12, in bonds of $3,000 each.

Gov. Smith, our counsel, strongly urged us to retain Jason B. Brown, Esq., to which suggestion we assented. He himself went to Kansas City and St. Joseph, Mo., to obtain depositions in our behalf. These were secured from reputable citizens of those cities, and established the fact that we were not in the state of Indiana at the time Deputy swore that we had defrauded him.

The trial came off on the day appointed. Our consciousness of innocence made us confident, and we asked for no delay. Deputy repeated his story as told at the preliminary hearing, adding this time that when he first saw us we all wore false whiskers and wigs and all had our clothes stuffed out until we must have resembled a group of veritable Daniel Lamberts. He not only made the same damaging admissions as before on cross-examination, but also acknowledged that he had agreed to pay the prosecuting attorney $500 in the event of our conviction, or 25 per cent. of any money that we might pay by way of compromise.

Burge, the North Vernon liveryman, from whom the three swindlers had hired rigs, swore that we looked like the precious trio. He also testified to the fact that a gray horse was attached to one of the buggies. In this latter statement he was corroborated by all the witnesses but one, who, however, was positive in his identification of us. Others swore to having seen us in the neighborhood about the time of the robbery. This constituted the case for the state.

For the defence, were read the depositions taken in Missouri, which have been already referred to as establishing an alibi on the part of Kerns, and in addition witnesses were introduced in behalf of Forbes and myself, who swore positively that we were both at St. Joseph, Missouri, on the day when the complaining witness was defrauded. Among these were Harry Trimble, now the clerk of Judge Baker’s court in Chicago, and James Whitten, a responsible real estate owner of St. Joseph, both of whom were well acquainted with me. It is worthy of remark that Mr. Trimble was immediately arrested on the charge of perjury after giving his testimony, but it is needless to add that he was never tried.

54In addition, a number of prominent citizens of North Vernon who had seen and remembered the men who had swindled Deputy were positive that we were not the parties. Among these was a Mr. Curtis, a wealthy stock man and the marshal of the town; another was a responsible merchant, and yet another Mr. Douglas Snodgrass, proprietor of the Snodgrass House at North Vernon, where the swindlers had stopped on the day of the perpetration of the crime, and where one of them had stayed for a week previously. The latter was corroboratedcorroborated by his wife, mother and three sisters.

After being repeatedly urged by me, my counsel, Honorable Jason B. Brown, called for the production of the contract between Deputy and the prosecuting attorney, in which demand he was sustained by the court. The attorney, Douglas Long, rising with flushed face and hang-dog air admitted the existence of the contract but stated that it was not in his power to produce it. This satisfied the court and the matter was not pressed.

While the trial was in progress, I observed in the court room the presence of a man whose name and residence were subsequently learned. He was one Higgins, and he came from Detroit. It was also afterwards ascertained that he had attended in the interest of Charles Stewart, Ed. Rice and “Punch” Mason, the actual robbers. He appeared nervous and deeply interested, and before the proceedings were over left the town, ostensibly for Detroit, saying that he was going for the purpose of raising money to clear the three innocent men then on trial. Although he did not return, this incident furnished a clue to the guilty parties and their whereabouts. After the rendition of the verdict, I laid these facts before Sheriff Byrnes and warrants were obtained for the arrest of the parties named.

Our trial consumed five days, and during its entire progress popular sentiment against us ran very high. In the streets of Brownstown, the demonstrations were almost riotous. Bonfires were lighted in the evening and threats of violence were freely and openly made. The jurymen were undoubtedly aware of these facts and were probably not uninfluenced by them. We were informed that no man charged with crime, however innocent he might be, could be acquitted in Brownstown “unless he brought his jury with him,” and were asked to advance thirty-five dollars to be used in “convincing” seven of the jurors.

After the evidence was all in, my counsel, Col. Brown, addressed the jury in stentorian tones. His plea was alleged to be in our behalf, but at its close I found it necessary to ask him on which side of the case he had been speaking. The prosecuting attorney demanded a conviction (in which he was ably seconded by the howling mob outside), the jury, and the twelve “good men and true” withdrew from the courtroom, 55ostensibly to weigh the evidence, but in reality to formulate a predetermined verdict of guilty. Their foreman announced their conclusion (?) upon their return, and the farce was over. For some unexplained reason Col. Brown had retired from the room, during the absence of the jury, and it devolved upon Lieut. Gov. Smith to make the stereotyped motion for a new trial, which was promptly over-ruled.

The verdict fell with crushing effect upon my wife, who had been at Brownstown throughout the trial, and whose natural grief at the conviction of a husband whom she knew to be innocent, was rendered more poignant by the reflection that she and her only child would be now thrown upon the “cold mercy of an unfeeling world.”

I made a personal appeal to the presiding judges to defer sentence, urging that I would be able to introduce additional and stronger proof of my innocence, and in all probability to trace the parties really guilty. My prayer was of no avail, and we were then and there sentenced to three years’ imprisonment in the penitentiary at Jeffersonville. I forbear to comment upon what I feel satisfied the reader will agree with me in regard to the indecent haste of these proceedings.

That night we passed in the county jail, which was doubly guarded, with a view to our protection against the angry, yelling crowd outside, which surged backward and forward through the streets, rending the air with demoniac shouts and clamoring for our execution by the light of the great bonfire, whose livid flames danced fitfully upon the walls of our prison. The next morning, in charge of Sheriff P. T. Byrnes, one of nature’s nobleman, we started for Jeffersonville. We were permitted to stop at the Snodgrass House, to say good bye to the family who, at the risk of their own popularity and that of their hostelry had so zealously yet fruitlessly identified themselves with our cause. They had kindkind words for us in that hour of our humiliationhumiliation and distress, and their generous sympathy stirred us as nothing yet—not even the murderous mob, thirsting for our blood—had stirred us; we broke down and wept. At Seymour the train was boarded by that matchlessmatchless orator, that eminent jurist, that advocate without a peer, the great, the only Col. Jason B. Brown. Words of honeyed cheer fell from his lips like rain, but alas, they were not as “water to a thirsty land.” We had lost faith in the redoubtable Colonel, and his assurance that he would “have us out of prison in a week” fell upon our ears like the hollow echo of a mocking laugh.

Arriving at the penitentiary, we went through the customary routine. The necessary descriptions were entered, the formal minute of our conviction, the county from which received, the crime charged, length of sentence, etc., etc., was made. We were given the regulation bath, duly shaved by the convict barber, and then we donned the stripes, that badge 56of infamy which burns into the soul as the branding iron into the quivering flesh. We were assigned to labor in the shoe-shop.

I feel that it would be folly for me to hope to convey to the reader who has never tasted of the bitterness of prison life even a faint idea of the feelings of him who for the first time enters the gloomy gates of a penitentiary to do the State involuntary service as a felon. The overwhelming sense of shame, the sickening feeling of isolation from all that makes life sweet, the bitter memories of the past that crowd, like a horde of mocking demons, upon the brain—all these might well plunge into an agony of despairing grief, a stouter heart than mine. Nor is the unvarying routine of prison life calculated to draw a man from that self-contemplation which is at once the most tiresome and the most dangerous of all mental exercises. I shall never be able to recall without a shudder those wearisome days of bootless toil, rendered all the more unbearable by the alternation of those dark nights of loneliness;—nights whose bleak shadows were deepened rather than dispelled by memories of home, of wife and child, and of all that the heart holds dear. It is out of the utter agony of such a life that the helpless soul turns to its Creator as its sole remaining refuge, or in the bitterness of its torment curses even Him who made it.

After Sheriff Byrnes had safely landed us in the penitentiary, he proceeded to IndianapolisIndianapolis with the warrants for the arrest of Stewart, Rice and Mason, for the purpose of securing requisitions for their surrender. I had had a surfeit not only of Indiana justice but of Indiana lawyers as well. I therefore wrote to St. Louis and retained the services of Ex-Gov. Johnson. He came to the prison and learned from me all the facts of the case. Forthwith he set about securing the extradition of the guilty parties from Canada, whither they had fled.^[A]

It will not be out of place here to recount the heroic and magnanimous (?) zeal which Col. Jason B. Brown displayed in our behalf in due time. Some three weeks after our incarceration he made his appearance at the penitentiary and requested an interview with us. He did not leave us long in ignorance as to the object of his visit. He told us that old Deputy had been in debt to the amount of about $6,000 before that unlucky day, when, at one fell swoop, he lost both his $3,000 and his confidence in mankind. “If,” said the Colonel, “Mr. Deputy’s debt could be squared up, I could arrange to have you pardoned in about ten days.” This generous proposal being “declined with thanks,” he suggested $3,000, and later $2,000 as a sum the payment of which might at 57once convincingly prove our penitence and measurably solace Mr. Deputy under his existing weight of misfortune. Finding his mission fruitless he left us, but subsequently opened a correspondence, in the course of which he offered to accept $1,000, which sum he gradually reduced to $300, as the price which we were to pay in consideration of being pardoned for an offense which we had never committed. These letters, of course, were read by Mr. James Patton, the warden of the prison, who advised us to have nothing to do with Col. Brown, inasmuch as he was quite as likely to oppose our pardon as to champion it.

Meanwhile, requisition papers had been obtained from the Governor and sent to Detroit by Sheriff Byrnes. The Detroit authorities showed great vigilance. A watch was placed upon the houses in that city where the families of the guilty parties resided, as well as upon their accustomed haunts. The result was that one night in November, 1887, Stewart and Rice were arrested at their homes and Mason at a gambling hell. Although a messenger was despatched to Rice to warn him of the impending danger, the police were on the alert, and he was brought to headquarters within a few hours after his confederates. Sheriff Byrnes was notified and went to Detroit at once. For five weeks the rascals fought extradition in the courts, and the sheriff was offered $1,000 to drop the prosecution, an offer which he indignantly spurned.

While in jail, the prisoners were photographed. Rice was obstinate and had to be held during the operation, in consequence of which the picture obtained showed him with closed eyes and open mouth. Poor as the likeness was, however, it was recognized by no less than ten persons as that of the man who had stopped at the Snodgrass House in North Vernon on the day when Deputy had been victimized. The other two were easily identified, and Stewart was recognized as the man who had boarded at that hotel for a week preceding the crime. When the Detroit court finally directed the surrender of the prisoners to the Indiana authorities, there ensued an attempt to rescue them by force, but the officers succeeded in placing them in a wagon in which they were driven to the Indiana State line. Albert Boebritz, a detective, and James J. Houston, a deputy sheriff, both of Detroit, accompanied the party to Brownstown.

The best legal talent of the State, including such eminent advocates as United States Senator Dan Voorhees and John Lamb, of Terre Haute, were engaged for the defense. The trial was had in January, 1888. The accused were positively identified by twenty-three reputable witnesses, among them all the members of the Snodgrass family. The fact of their driving out of town on the morning of the day of the robbery with two of Burge’s teams, was also established, and a liveryman from Kentucky testified to their having hired a rig from him.

58It grieves me to say that the aged Deputy and Colonel Jason B. Brown did not appear in a favorable light in connection with the investigation. Relying upon the assurance that the nature of his evidence should be kept secret, the old farmer went before the grand jury and identified the men then accused, virtually admitting that he had lied while giving his testimony at our trial. It was also learned afterwards that the unsophisticated old man, under the tutelage of the astute Col. Jason B. Brown, had received from Stewart and company $1,000 not to appear as a witness against them at the trial, and had been promised the remaining $2,000 of his loss immediately upon their acquittal. Kerns, Forbes and myself were brought from the penitentiary to testify that we were not within the State at the time the crime was committed. Upon our parole to accompany the officers quietly and make no attempt to escape, we were permitted to go without hand-cuffs in custody of Deputy Warden Barnes and Mr. Lemons, one of the guards. At Brownstown we were kindly treated, occupying a private room in the sheriff’s house.

After the case of Stewart, Rice and Mason had been submitted to the jury and that body had deliberated for thirty-six hours, a ballot showed eleven for conviction and one for acquittal. Finally the jury returned, announcing that an agreement was impossible and they were discharged. It was understood that the final vote was nine to three in favor of conviction. Sheriff Byrnes had predicted a disagreement from the first. He had himself been offered $500 if he could induce the court to reduce the prisoners’ bonds to $1,000 each, and afterward said that he had learned that Philip Davis, one of the jurors, had been promised $300 and an increase in his pension if he would “hang” the jury. It is unnecessary to state that the sheriff rejected the offer, but the judge, Collins, saw fit, of his own motion, to make the desired reduction. The prisoners then gave bail and fled the country, their bonds being declared forfeited at the next term of court.

The officers of the penitentiary now took an active interest in securing our release. A strong petition for pardon based upon the allegation of our innocence, was addressed to Governor Gray and was endorsed by Senator Voorhees and John Lamb, counsel for Stewart, Rice and Mason, who not only wrote to, but also personally called upon, the executive, Governor Johnson of Missouri, rendered invaluable service in securing favorable action upon the petition. He demanded, not clemency, but justice. He had sifted and weighed all the evidence bearing upon the case, and he spoke with no uncertain sound. Words such as his, prompted by the deliberate judgment, unerring instincts and warm heart of one of the greatest criminal lawyers of the Mississippi Valley, could not fail to carry weight. The result was inevitable. The executive of the State in whose so-called courts of justice we had suffered such a grieviousgrievious wrong, 59restored to us our liberty and citizenship by his pardon. But to remove from us the stigma of the felon, to atone for the weary months of suffering which we had undergone, in a word, to put us back where we were upon the morning of that day when we first became entangled in the machinations of that diabolical plot,—these were boons which even this great seal of the Sovereign State of Indiana could not bestow.

In a private letter written by Governor Johnson some months ago in reference to this matter he says:

Of my prison life I care to say but little here. Not that my memory of it has grown indistinct, or that I might not say something that would awaken interest. To dwell upon it in detail in this place would swell to too great dimensions a sketch which has already outgrown my original intention. It is enough to say that I was what is known as a “good” convict, respectful in my demeanor to the officials and yielding unhesitating obedience to every command. I think that I do not exaggerate when when I say that I won and retained the confidence of the officers, from whom I received every kindness compatible with the necessarily inexorable discipline of a penal institution. I shall always recall with gratitude the generous words of encouragement repeatedly spoken to me by the warden and his deputy and by many of the guards, and notably from Messrs. Miller and Wilkinson. In the solitude of my workbench and cell I had ample leisure to reflect upon the follies of my youth, and the graver offences of my maturer years. My wasted life, with its miserable vacillation of purpose, passed before me in all its shameful reality of color. While cleaning out the rubbish from under my bench one day, I picked up a battered Testament, upon the fly leaf of which were written the words, “From your broken-hearted wife.” The entire sacred volume contains no more touching epitome of a blighted existence than was laid before me in this inscription, with its pregnant suggestion of early love, girlish confidence, marriage, womanly love, home, perhaps paternity, crime, misery, punishment, and, at the end, the despair of a broken heart. But I do not intend to moralize. It is enough to say that 60within those four stone walls in which I passed so many sleepless nights, and behind that grated door which so effectually barred all communication with the outer world, I felt the first emotions of what I still believe to have been true penitence. To prove it such shall be the aim of my future life. Acting under these newly found impulses, I became the teacher of a Sunday school class, and was one of the ten convicts who founded, under the supervision of Chaplain Bornhill, a Young Men’s Christian AssociationAssociation within the prison walls. I was made assistant librarian—under Mr. Martin, a lifetime prisoner—and entrusted with the writing of a considerable proportion of prisoner’s letters to their friends.

I entered the penitentiary on Sept. 19, 1887, and just two months afterwards I received the most severe blow of my life. It happened on Thanksgiving day. On the recurrence of anniversaries such as this, one’s mind naturally reverts to thoughts of home and kindred. On this particular day I was lying upon my prison bunk, lost in a day dream of my wife and child, when my musings were suddenly broken off by the abrupt announcement of the death of my darling, my only, boy. The shock of the awakening was too great for me to endure, and I fell senseless on the stone pavement of my cell, nor was I able for days to realize the overwhelming force of the blow that had stunned me.

I have already said that my wife was with me during my trial at Brownstown. She also visited me twice during my imprisonment in the penitentiary, and on both occasions had expressed unshaken confidence in my innocence and had assured me of her unswerving fidelity to her early love. Very precious to me were these pledges of undying constancy, and on my part I had vowed that not even death itself should ever abate my love for her. Her letters, down to April 15, 1888, overflowed with tender sentiment. She gently chided me for even seeming to question her devotion to me in my hour of darkest need. It may conceived, therefore, with what mingled emotions of astonishment and grief I received from her, on May 5, the following letter:

61This blow, following close upon the death of my little boy, well nigh prostrated me. I saw that I was also to lose my wife. Only the Searcher of all hearts knows the depth of my affection for the mother of my child, since whose death she had seemed doubly dear to me. The thought of her had been, next to my newly found trust in an all-merciful Providence, my main-stay amid the misfortunes which had engulfed me; and when I had thought of my release from prison (and at what hour of the day did I not think of it?), I had looked forward to her affectionate companionship as the only refuge and solace of my earthly life.

I well knew on what grounds she would demand her divorce. The State of Indiana had branded me as a convict, and this was enough, in the eye of the law, to release her from a yoke which she had come to regard as galling. Defence was impossible. Nor did I hope to be able to move her heart by entreaty. Yet I could not forbear to write to her once again, even if only to say farewell. As this last letter of mine embodies my inmost feeling at the time, I venture to hope that the reader who has honored me with his interest up to this point of my narrative may pardon me if I transcribe it here. It ran as follows:

“Jeffersonville Penitentiary, May 13, 1888.

My Dear Wife:

I feel that I cannot say anything to do justice in this case. But as an act of justice to God and our child in heaven; to you in Chicago, to myself in the penitentiary, I will make this feeble effort.

I am alone in my little home—a cell of 6 by 8 feet,—suffering my own afflictions, and knowing it is far beyond my power to touch your strange heart in sympathy; after what you have done to one you once loved, and one who loves you still.

I do not blame you for trying to get my attorney to impart the sad information to me, for your own conscience’s sake. I know it was a hard trial to tell me what you have written, knowing I am innocent of the crime for which I am placed here.

You tell me you did it with your own free will. Let us not question the cause, but the effect. It is—that much we know. You say: “Heaven knows I pity you.” If this is what you call pity, Heaven forgive those who despise. You say, “I took you from a good home, and from a father and mother who love you.” You ask me to look deep into my heart; that I have done. Never did I forsake a friend while in trouble.

Let me ask you to seek seclusion in your own unhappy reflection. Sit down quietly and let conscience penetrate the deepest recesses of your heart, and you will right this terrible wrong. You act as though God was asleep, and his all-merciful care was dormant.

You say you do not wish any further correspondence with me. Are you so cruel after exchanging so many testimonials of affection with me during the past six years? There is a letter in the office, addressed “Dear Wife” to you. There is a little boy above us, looking down on us both.

You have clung to me in many trials of adversity, and have proved to be a brave, sweet little woman. I have neglected God for you, and it may be better that this has happened now, for the day might come when I would be dependent on you, and you cast me into the poor house.

62When I go out of this prison I shall begin a new life; as the woodsman in the forest hews out a new home. Where, I do not know, but will trust to the kind hand of Providence to direct me. You conclude your letter by saying you wish me “good luck and a speedy release.” I thank you for that. You know I am overpowered, I surrender. I am not a William Tell, and feel that any attempt to keep your affections would be ineffectual.

I have had many trials. I have dwelt in the mansion of sorrow and pain. I have associated with the neglected and forsaken here, and have listened to the sad stories of those whom their wives have forsaken, with tears in my eyes. But the husbands of these wives were guilty.

But that my own dear wife, whom I love so devotedly, should forsake me in the hour of trouble, when she knows I am innocent, is a heaviness of sorrow of which there can be no avoidance,—the severity of a mental torture from which there can be no escape. It forms a complication of horrors that will impel me to a convict’s grave.

Since you have turned from this scene of distress, it has shown me that interest alone moves you, since by your actions you punish misfortune as crime, and raise crime to a level with misfortune. Have you forgotten the last night in the jail at Brownstown, where you said you would never forsake me, knowing that I was not guilty? Did you not tell Mrs. Withy you would never forsake me? No, never; that I had been so good to you? And so many letters I have received to the same effect. Your letter before the last one addresses me as “Dear husband.” * * * Quite a change in so short a time.

Let us hope that mamma, Georgie and papa may some time occupy one of those beautiful mansions prepared by the Friend of sinners, which will prove as happy as the one at 1405 Olive Street, four years ago the 29th of last April, when our child was born. O, wife; if you could only stand at the foot of my old straw bed and hear my cries, you would weep for me.

Did we then think that this would ever happen? No, no, no. If I had thought so, you would have heard the cries and groans, and witnessed the streaming tears, and more than mortal anguish of a broken-hearted husband, who is now in the penitentiary, innocent, yet forsaken by the mother of his child, my wife.

The fatal blow falls hard upon me. In this hour of my deepest woe, weakness seems to have seized upon me for my total destruction. Every poisoned shaft, which malice could invent, has been hurled against me.

Our child has been dead nearly six months, and I have not yet heard the story of his sickness. You began it in one of your letters (now before me) when the doctor came in and told you that he would not live thirty-six hours. You screamed, and the poor little darling put his arms around your neck and said: “Mamma, don’t cry; I won’t die.” You then walked him over and showed him my picture, and asked him who it was. “That’s my papa,” was the reply. * * *

When I realize that you know I am innocent and utterly powerless, I shrink with pain to think that the wound of my child’s death has only began to heal when it is made to bleed afresh from the blow of an iron hammer in the hands of my wife, the mother of my child. * * *

You have filed an application for divorce. Now comes the struggle. I love you too well to oppose it if you ask for it. If you have asked for it because I am in the penitentiary, change your complaint, for you will have to make oath, and you know I am innocent, to which you must swear. * * * Place it upon any other grounds and I will sign the necessary papers.

Of course it is nothing to you now whether I stay here or not. I may tell you that Mrs. Forbes and Mrs. Kerns will be here to meet their husbands at the old iron 63door, and take them back to their affection. Who will meet me and take my hand? I will stand alone. Where will I go? * * * If you won’t come send Fankie (an adopted boy). I will let him tell me what to do.

May God forgive and direct you in the path of virtue and truth, is the prayer of your affectionate husband.

John Quinn.

P. S.—I will say good-bye with the last words of our baby’s prayer: ‘God‘God bless mamma and papa, grandma and grandpa, and everybody. Amen.’”Amen.’”

I was pardoned November 9, 1888, and two days later, when the long hoped for document reached the prison, I was discharged. I was at liberty, but carried in my heart a double desolation. Not for me did the sun shine and the face of Nature smile. In a cemetery at St. Louis was a little grave that held the sacred dust of the being once dearest to me on earth, and in my heart I carried the tomb of a buried hope.

My foreman in the prison shop, Mr. George H. Eastman, welcomed me to liberty, and invited me to his house, where I was most hospitably entertained for a week. I next went to St. Louis, but remained only one day; long enough to gaze once more at the home where I had last lived with my wife and child, now gone from me forever. A sense of utter loneliness came over me; the world seemed strange; my identity was all that I could call my own.

From St. Louis I came to Chicago, where I sought out my old friend and quondam partner, Ben Demint, whose warm greeting was a cordial to my heart, and under the influence of whose genial encouragement I began to look upon the world as not altogether lost.

Two objects were uppermost in my mind. One was to prepare and deliver a lecture, in which I might demonstrate my innocence of the crime of which I had been convicted; the other was to publish a work on gambling, through which I might, by exposing the cheats and frauds of the professional gamester, deter others from entering upon the path “whose gates take hold on Hell.” My first lecture was delivered in the auditorium of the First M. E. Church, at Chicago, on the evening of Monday, May 20, 1889. My book (the present volume) is before the public.

The fact that I was contemplating issuing the present volume became known to some members of the “profession” in Chicago a year ago, and on June 27, 1889, about ten o’clock in the forenoon, I was arrested by detectives Kehoe and Flynn, without the shadow of a charge having been preferred against me. For five hours I was deprived of my liberty. What a commentary upon the nature of the relations existing between the “profession” and the custodians of public morals.

In this connection I desire to return thanks to John Cameron Simonds, Esq., and Mr. Matthew W. Pinkerton, of Chicago, for their generous intervention in my behalf. To their kind efforts I owe my speedy release.

64During my lifetime I have thus far been called upon to mourn the loss of father and mother, three brothers—Dick, Robert and Victor—and two sisters—Laura and Roma. Of eight children, but three of us survive, George Sidney, who still lives in Randolph County, Missouri, where he was born and reared; Hatsel Seldon, at present at Hot Springs, Arkansas, and myself.

To the press of Chicago, which so kindly encouraged him in his early ventures in the lecture field, the author desires to express his grateful acknowledgements. Unknown and friendless, he felt the timidity incident to one inexperienced in public speaking, and who carried in his breast the knowledge of his own past wrong-doing. But the journals of the city in which he made his maiden effort, those leaders and exponents of public sentiment, sustained him, and their words of commendation imparted to him fresh courage.

I hardly know how better to close this recital of a part whose shameful recollections might well overcome a stouter heart than mine, than by the following quotation from an old verse-writer, which have long floated through my memory. They present, in homely language, a truth which strikes a responsive chord in the heart of every man who is not panoplied in serene satisfaction with his own virtues. The lines run as follows:

The foregoing illustration presents, in a form calculated to strike the eye and impress the mind, a view of the gradations in the downward career of a gambler.

Starting out, with high hopes of pleasure to be derived and wealth to be gained through a life devoted to the ruin of his fellowmen, he boldly enters upon the way whose end is death and whose steps “take hold on hell.” Costly is his attire and elastic his step as he at first ventures upon the road whose path is a quagmire and whose downward course is beset with thorns.

As he advances, he finds the declivity growing steeper; his feet are sore and his raiment torn. Too late he perceives his error, and realizes that it is far easier to descend than to climb the tortuous, slippery path. The illusion is dispelled; the glamour has gone out in darkness. No longer the jovial, roystering, “hail-fellow-well-met,”—he has become the midnight prowler, dependent for his very subsistence, upon the scanty earnings which he derives from the percentage doled out to him by more prosperous members of the same villainous craft for betraying the confidence of his friends and luring the unwary to their destruction. He realizes his situation, only to curse it; he would retrace his steps if he knew how, but his chosen sin holds him with a grasp as close as the coil of the deadly anaconda.

66In the figure of the forlorn tramp, a destitute, penniless wanderer, a pariah and an outcast, we see him approaching his wretched end. The pitiless storm that beats in his face is but the sighing of the summer wind as compared with that which rages in his breast. The wind that howls in his ears seems to chant the requiem of home, happiness, hope, honor,—all that men hold dear. And yet he must go on; on, into the blinding sleet; on into the unknown future; on, until he reaches the Potter’s Field; on until he stands before the bar of God.

Certainly it can be no mistake to call such an one a “fool of fortune,” a fool enslaved by his own degraded instincts and besotted passions, a fool who, in the words of Scripture, “has said in his heart there is no God.” But professional blacklegs are not the only “fools of fortune.” The young man, just entering upon the path of life; the middle aged man of family, who squanders at the gaming table the money which should go to buy luxuries, comforts, perhaps even necessaries for those dependent upon him, the old man, who, about to sink into the grave, finds it impossible to overcome the fascination of the vice which has reduced him from affluence to penury—these, one and all, are fools. The savings of a lifetime, dissipated in an hour, the cherished hopes of years blighted by the turn of a card—these are every day occurrences in the hells where one class of fools worship “Fortune,” and another class delude themselves by the belief that it is possible for money dishonestly acquired to bring with it anything but a curse.

It is with the hope that those who have not already entered upon this course may be deterred from entering upon it and that those who may have already tasted the false pleasures of an unhealthy excitement may be induced to pause before it is too late, that the author has made his frank confession of his own follies and his revelation of all the secret arts of the gambler’s devil born art.

Only gamblers defend gambling. Those who play faro, roulette, hazard; those who buy mutual pools or “puts and calls;” and even those whose instinct for gaming is satisfied with a partly legitimate business, go on with their practices without an analysis of their actions. It is the object of this work, not only to trace the history of gaming, so far as is recorded, but to expose to the mind of the most casual reader the sophistries upon which the art of gambling is based. In other words, the author will show that if men seek for happiness in games of chance they find sorrow; if they hope for gain, they fall into penury; if they flee from care, they suffer unending perplexity; if they be honorably ambitious, they forfeit all public regard.

It is a sad fact that ethics—the science of human duty—had reached its summit long before the Roman Empire was founded. The philosophers of Africa and Asia taught to the students of Greece all that this work can teach to English-speaking people. Aristotle classed the gambler with the thief and robber, and so just was the mind of Alexander’s preceptor, that he hated even usury. If man studied ethics, with any other purpose than for mental relaxation, there could be no gambling; there could be none of the gross selfishness and competition which shames our civilization, and in reality gives to the barbaric spirit of conquest that relief which it finds in gambling.

We have, then, only to repeat the warnings of the sages of the world, and to reinforce them with the history of the gaming vice in all ages. Thousands of years have elapsed since man learned that gambling was morally wrong. Why, then, does he gamble? Because he does not know that all wrong is a source of unhappiness. No man wishes to be unhappy. All men are unhappy; they seek peace. In the fact that argument has failed to carry home to the human mind this conviction, that gaming cannot give peace, the author finds his reason for writing. Only by patient iteration of the principles which Aristotle accepted, and only by a persevering recital of the evils which gambling has wrought on men, can it be hoped that the young student will accept as a truth, without personal proof, that doctrine which, to prove, would cost his fortune and his happiness.

68Why, then, is gambling wrong? Why did Aristotle denounce it? Why does the young man of to-day need further proof that gambling is wrong and disappointing—why does he lose years of time, hazard his respectability, acquire dangerous habits and diseases, and regret the experiment he has made? To answer these questions requires this volume.

Blackstone cleverly calls gaming “a kind of tacit confession, that the company engaged therein do in general exceed the bounds of their respective fortunes; and therefore they cast lots to determine upon whom the ruin shall at present fall, that the rest may be saved a little longer.” This statement, which has stood the criticisms of centuries, leaves to the gamester the unhappy knowledge that some one in his company is to be destroyed. Instead of sitting at an entertainment, then, he is a pall-bearer. He carries away the dead because he himself is not dead. To begin, therefore, the gambler who thinks must have throttled pity. He knows it is a funeral; he is so selfish that he cares only for his own welfare. When two or more men gamble, the winners win and the losers lose, but there is no productive labor; therefore, nobody profits except it be the owner of the premises who has put his building to an unproductive business—a business closely allied with other vices that at once rob their agents of honor, health and fortune. Commerce, when flying almost in the face of nature, will, if successful, benefit man and alleviate his needs, but the gambler spends his time and his energies in that which (as this work will carefully show) is of enormous evil. It is more than a waste of time. It is more than a waste of money. It is more than a waste of health. It is more than a waste of thought. For gambling, as Charles Kingsley has said, is almost the only thing in the world in which the honorable man is no match for the dishonorable man. The scrupulous man is weaker, by the very fact of his scruples, than he who has none. When a man begins to play he may have a high feeling of honor, but what right has honor to sit at a gaming-table? There’s the rub. When he wins he will consider it folly not to extend the hours of play, and will begin an expense that he did not indulge before. With greater expense, he will be keener at the game—more zealous to win. But he will lose anon, and further anon his losses and gains will be equal. Then his increased expense—the luxury of late hours, with dinners, carriages, and personal service—must be paid from the income that was deemed insufficient to support a more modest mode of life. As this manifestly cannot be done, recourse in hope must be had to the gaming-table once more, where, with losses and gains so far equal, the increased disbursements must be made good. To win, the tricks of the gambler must be used; friends must be inveigled to their ruin; advantages must be seized; a sight of the opponent’s cards must be used for whatever it will win, and one 69step after another gradually reduces the player to a condition in which he secretly knows he is a rogue. Others about him have long known it. The true philosopher knows it the moment the “high-minded player” sits down to the game.

But ignorance does not depict a scene so deplorable. The gambler in his best days, is lured by a brighter vision. He does not value money, and gathers that reward which comes from a princely generosity and a reckless patronage of all who desire to serve him. But of real humanity he has none, because his business, veil it as you may, is robbery. The man who plays against the gambler is called a “producer,” and what can that mean but fool or victim—a victim whose greed is his ruin. Despising respectable men who play with him as greedy fools, the gambler must oppose honest men (who will not play) as foes. Hating all men, he must hate women; therefore marriage is rare among the “profession.” If he secures a fortune, so that he may “retire” from hazard, it will be seen that he owns and enslaves both men and women, and never aids the emancipation of society. Sensualism and materialism are his characteristics. If he loves power in his community, it is for private aggrandizement. The hand of society has been against him; he cannot forget it. Reform would be forgiveness, and the gambler never forgives. True respectability would be forgetfulness of the past, and the gambler never forgets. Such is the successful gamester—the “retired gamester.” And to secure that much of success how many thousands of victims are in his train? His charities are a sham, like the subscriptions of Monte Carlo on Riviera; like the proffered relief to flood sufferers by the Louisiana lottery. While the wail of the unhappy and the lost is heard at the wheel, the cruel game goes on without mercy. The very existence of these splendid dens of dishonesty and inhumanity, are a menace to men.

But success in this crime is as rare as success in any other. The ordinary gambler does not “retire.” He dresses extravagantly, he lives in ignorance, he pursues the existence of an ape. The mere sensualist sins and repents, but the reformer who toils with the drunkard and the fallen woman despairs of the gambler. He lives his short life, and dies alone in his garret or in prison. His fellow-gamblers are glad he is dead. They say he was unfit to live, and they know.

Of all acts, gambling induces most often to suicide. It is believed that the number of “the profession” is not relatively large considering the total population, yet the suicide of the professional gambler is a matter of the most frequent note. In England eight persons out of 100,000 kill themselves in a year. At Monaco, a solitary gambling establishment, one hundred suicides were reported in one season. The German tables of play have sent thousands out to death. The reason why a gambler should kill himself appears to him in the aspect of lost honor. If he 70joins to this a loss of money—the only thing for which he has striven—he cannot summon fortitude to live. He goes out of the world, impelled by a just nature, that thus removes his life from the earth which he has encumbered.

The strain of gambling is a sharp one. It breaks the nerves and prematurely ages the face. Losses, if they do not paralyze the mind, at least enrage it against circumstances and events, turning the man to a veritable horned beast, or to a poisonous serpent, bent on inflicting a blow though it be on its own body. The natives of India call this passion “hot heart,” or inner rage without vent. The revulsion has been severe to the extent of our conception. Fortune was near, nor is it far. The loser feels that fate is a sentient being—a hag whom he must tear with his nails. Her blow has been twice as harsh as if he had not hoped, and it falls on one ill-prepared to receive it. There lies but one escape, and that is death. Hence the excitement with which professional gamblers behold the loss of their means of livelihood. Where suicide does not follow, the most painful blows are often delivered by the gambler upon his own temples and forehead. He has no pity on himself for losing money that he ought to have kept.

Gambling is closely allied with forces which tend to the subversion of social order; it is directly conducive to various crimes of frequent occurrence. The gambling mania is at war with industry, and therefore, destructive of prosperity and thrift. Devotion to the gaming habit will in time hush the voice of conscience and is a constant menace to honor and happiness. Once possessed of the passion, an individual is lost to every sense of duty as husband, father, citizen, and man of business. His heart becomes the prey of emotions at enmity with affection and sound morality. In this condition, a man is unfitted for any responsibility requisite to the welfare of society. In spirit, if not in fact, he is an Ishmaelite—an outlaw; then, expediency is his only principle, and necessity his only law. In heart, at least, he is a criminal. As a result, the man is false to every confidence, recreant to every trust! Is this not true? Look about you and see! How many bloody tragedies are directly traceable to the gambling “hell?” How has this vice fed the mania for homicide, the tendency to suicide? The business world is rife with forgeries and defalcations, which may be directly ascribed to gambling. Widows and orphans are plundered by their trustees, corporations wrecked by their officers, one partner made the victim of another, the employer betrayed by his employee, all because of this terrible passion. But is this the end? Is it even the worst? In gambling, as in other forms of evil, are not the “sins of the father visited upon the children, even unto the third and fourth generation.” It would seem so, if Dr. Ribot is an authority. Descending from sire to son, from ancestor to posterity, the vice enters into the very 71fiber of the soul. Ribot asserts of gambling, as of avarice, theft and murder, that the propensity is subject to the law of heredity; that the “passion for play often attains such a pitch of madness as to be a form of insanity, and like it transmissible.” And Da Gama Machado says: “A lady of my acquaintance, and who possessed a large fortune, had a passion for gambling, and passed whole nights at play. She died young of pulmonary disease. Her eldest son, who was very like his mother, had the same passion for play. He, too, like his mother, died of consumption, and at about the same age. His daughter, who resembled him, inherited the same taste, and died young.” Justified twice over, then, is society, in protecting itself against a practice so terrible, so deadly, so far reaching in its effects.

In course of time, this seems to have been realized by all nations pretending to civilization, whether ancient or modern. Whatever may have been the private practice of rulers and statesmen, in this respect, their public policy and legislative enactments were against gambling.

Some of the laws of the ancients against gambling are worthy of adoption to-day, and are well calculated to check the destructive evil. Amongst the Jews, for instance, a gambler could not act as a magistrate, or occupy any high or honorable office, nor could he be a witness in any court of justice. Such disqualifications, at the present day, would largely decimate the judicial ranks and deplete the government roll. In ancient Egypt, again, a convicted gambler was condemned to the quarries of Sinai, there to expiate his offense. Would not a kindred punishment, now, be effectual with the “genteel” gambler—with ye “gentleman” gambler of the gilded “hell” and “club house.” Yea, extended, even in a general sense, to all persons, whatever their position in life, convicted of the offense of gambling, would it not go far toward a reduction of this great and growing evil?

No where is the capriciousness and inconstancy of the ancient Greeks more manifest than in their policy toward gambling. Denouncing it in the abstract, they were universally addicted to the practice. At one time the object of legislative prohibition, with them, at another it would be granted a license, or permitted to flourish without “let or hindrance.” To the Romans has been ascribed a talent for political organization; a genius for jurisprudence. Strangely inconsistent, however, was their position on the subject of gambling. By the Roman laws, ædiles were authorized to punish gambling, except during the Saturnalia—a time when every passion was allowed to run riot. In other respects, the Roman law on this subject resembled that now obtaining in England and America. Money lost at play could not be legally recovered by the winner, and the loser could recover the money paid by him to the winner. Under the Justinian Code, according to Paulus, a master or father had a 72remedy against any person inducing the servant or son to play. This must have been a wholesome measure. Why may it not be on every statute book in the United States? The most radical feature of the Roman law, perhaps, was that by virtue of which a gambling house might be forfeited to the State, and this equally so, whether it belonged to the offender, or to another person cognizant of the offense. Had this Roman law of confiscation been some years since ingrafted on the law of each State in the Union, it may be a matter of speculative opinion, of course, how many “club houses” would have passed into the hands of the government.

If wagers did not violate any rule of public decency or morality, or any rule of public policy, they were not invalid by the common law of England. And such was the principle of law inherited by the English colonies in America, and recognized by the courts of the respective States of the Union.

In England, however, dating from the middle of the eighteenth century, a series of statutes has been enacted, aimed not only at gambling in stocks, but at all wagering contracts. In 1834, the well known statute of Sir John Barnard was enacted. This act was intended to prevent what it styled the “Infamous Practice of Stock Jobbing.” This statute was repealed by 23 and 24 Victoria, Ch. 28. By the act of 8 and 9 Victoria, Ch. 109, S. 108, “all contracts or agreements, whether by parol or in writing, by way of gaming or wagering, shall be null and void, and no suit shall be brought in any court of law or equity for recovering any sum of money or valuable thing alleged to be won upon any wager.” This statute is now in force. These enactments aside, the English courts were wont to reprehend such contracts, and frequently expressed regret that they had ever been sanctioned.

The authorities in this country are far from uniform on the common law doctrine; some leaning decidedly against wagering contracts. Others, on the other hand, have countenanced them. Such contracts have been sustained by the United States courts, and the courts of New York, California, Texas, New Jersey, and Delaware. In Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Pennsylvania, a wager was never a valid contract. Now, by the revised statutes of New York all “wagers, bets, or stakes, made to depend upon any race, or upon any gaming by lot or chance, casualty, or unknown or contingent event whatever, shall be unlawful. All contracts for, or on account of, any money or property, or a thing in action, so wagered, bet or staked, shall be void.” Similar, and even more stringent, legislation of like character, exists in Ohio, Iowa, West Virginia, Virginia, Wisconsin, Missouri, New Hampshire, and Illinois.

In many states gambling is a misdemeanor only. Where this is the case, the gambler is allowed to prey upon the community at his pleasure, 73and compelled to pay only an occasional fine. In not a few of the states, however, the offense is a felony which may be punished by imprisonment in the penitentiary. May it become the law in all the states. More than this, the penalty should not be an alternative between a fine or imprisonment. The prison door should be open to every convicted gambler, without hope of escape.

From all this it will be seen not only that gambling has long been denounced, and with good cause, as a great social evil; but that it has been an important object for legislation. It will clearly appear, also, that all laws, provisions and penalties have been ineffectual to suppress it, prevent its growth, or counteract its demoralizing influence. That gaming is an evil of the most pernicious character in society, no man can have the effrontery to deny; but a doubt may be reasonably entertained whether the propensity be not too strong to be controlled by law, and too human for any legislative enactments.

More than human wisdom and effort is required to master the ruling and inherent passion of universal man. Moreover, if the law is to successfully suppress public gambling, it must be by enactments falling with equal weight, and operating with just severity on all practitioners of the principle which it is the object of the law to discountenance; and not by measures protecting one class of offenders and punishing another; not by exempting those high in social position, while those of lowly estate are made to feel the heavy hand of authority. If at all, it is to be accomplished only by striking at the whole system of gaming, as far as the law can effect the object, upon one great principle, letting law go hand in hand with justice, in the work, so that it err not in the principle of its enactments or in the equity of its administration.

The Hebrews, in resorting to the casting of lots, believed it was an appeal to the Lord. It was not thought to be gambling. It is useful that the reader should understand this. Thus by lot it was determined which of the goats should be offered by Aaron; by lot the land of Canaan was subdivided; by lot Saul was chosen to wear the crown; by lot Jonah was discovered to be the cause of the storm. It is well to note that herein gambling had its sacred origin. Man cannot easily surrender the idea that Heaven directs the casting of a die. It is possible that man founds his passion for hazard upon his love of the mystic. Yet no laws are so exact as the laws of chance, and none are so sure to seize on those laws as the professional gambler. The priests of Egypt assured Herodotus that one of their kings visited alive the infernal regions, and that he there gambled with a large party. Plutarch recites an Egyptian story to the effect that Mercury having fallen in love with the earth, and wishing to do the earth a favor, gambled with the moon, and won from the moon every seventieth part of the time she illumined the earth. Out of these seventieth parts Mercury made five days, and added them to the earth’s year, which had formerly held but 360 days.

The examples of these gods could not but move the people to gamble. We know that the vice prevailed because we discover the existence of heavy penalties against it. In Egypt, if a person were convicted of the crime of dice-playing, or of being a gamester, he was sent to work in the quarries, to recruit those vast companies which were continually engaged in public enterprises, such as the pyramids, the labyrinth, the artificial lake and the lesser monuments.

Persians.—We gather that gaming with dice was a fashionable diversion at the Persian court 400 years before Christ, from the historical anecdotes recited by Plutarch in his life of Artaxerxes. The younger Cyrus, son of Queen Parysatis, had been killed at the order of Artaxerxes by a favorite slave of the king; and the queen, who was the mother also of Artaxerxes, burned secretly for revenge on the slave, whose name was Mesabetes. But as the slave had merely obeyed the monarch, her son, the Queen laid this snare for him. She excelled at playing a certain 75game of dice. She had apparently forgiven her elder son, the King, for his cruel deed, and joined him continually at play. One day she proposed playing for a stake of $500, to which the King agreed, and she, feigning lack of skill, lost the money, and paid it on the nail. But affecting sorrow and vexation over her ill-luck, she pressed the King to play for a slave, as if her cash were short. The King suspected nothing, and accepted the stake. It was stipulated that the winner should choose the slave. Now the Queen resorted to all the arts of gaming, which easily procured a victory. She chose Mesabetes, the slayer of Cyrus, and this slave, being delivered into her hands, was put to the most cruel tortures, and to death. When the King would have interfered, she only replied with a smile of contempt: “Surely you must be a great loser, to be so much out of temper for giving up a decrepit old slave, when I, who lost $500, and paid on the spot, do not say a word, and am satisfied.”

To properly understand this story, it must be remembered that a slave had no rights whatever, being treated simply as cattle. Should a man express pity for a rat in the teeth of a terrier, he would be on a par with Artaxerxes if he pitied Mesabetes. The grief of the outwitted King was unmanly, from the ancient standpoint, but it is notable that dice ministered to the plot of revenge and murder.

The laws of the modern Persians, who are Mohammedans, prohibit all gambling. The Persians evade the sin by making alms of their winnings—a sorry device, for it is only the robbery of Peter to give larger to Paul. Like all other evasions, even this practice soon degenerates into gambling pure and simple, the excuse being that skill more than chance has to do with the game. The public spirit, however, is happily adverse to the practice, and any gambling-place is called in detestation, a morgue, a carrion-house, a “habitation of corrupted carcasses.”

The Hindoos.—At the “Festival of Lamps,” in honor of the goddess of wealth, the Rajpoots make a religion of gambling. At such a time vice may indeed prosper. Easy was the conquest of a people whose sensuality and superstition could be so well united in the service of the priesthood. The specialties of Hindoo gambling are interesting. The hot climate stimulates the passion, and the greater the Raja, or King, the longer the tale of his fortune at play.

The ancient Hindoo dice, known as coupeen, were similar to modern dice, and were thrown from a box. The practice of “loading” is plainly alluded to, and there was opportunity for skill in handling the box. In the more modern Hindoo games, called pasha, the dice are not cubic but oblong, and they are thrown like printer’s quads in “jeffing”—that is, out of the palm of the hand. The throw may be made either directly upon the ground, or against a post or board, which will break the fall and render the result more a matter of chance.chance.

76A story of a Rajah’s insane love of play forms a striking passage in the great Sanskrit poem of the Veda. The famous gambling-match was the outcome of a conspiracy between two brothers, Duryodhana and Duhsasana, and their uncle Sakuni, of the family of the Kauravas, for the purpose of robbing Yudhisthira of his Raj, or the kingdom of the Pandavas. The poem deals with the conception of a Nemesis. Envy and love of conquest led the conspirators to invite Yudhisthira to a game of coupeen at Hastinapur. The Veda is translated as follows:

“And it came to pass that Duryodhana was very jealous of the pomp of his cousin Yudhisthira, and desired in his heart to destroy the Pandavas and gain the Raj. Now Sakuni was the brother of Gandhari, who was the brother of the Kauravas, and he was very skillful in throwing dice, and in playing with dice that were loaded, insomuch that whenever he played he always won the game. So Duryodhana plotted with his uncle, and then proposed to his father, the Maharaja, or Great Raja, that Yudhisthira should be invited to the Festival, and the Great Raja was secretly glad that his sons should be friendly with their cousins, the sons of his deceased brother, Pandu, and so he sent his younger brother, Vidura, to the city of Indraprastha to invite the Pandavas to the game.

“And Vidura went his way to the city of the Pandavas, and was received by them with every sign of attention and respect. And Yudhisthira inquired whether his kinsfolk and friend at Hastinapur were all well in health, and Vidura replied, ‘They are all well.’

“Then Vidura said to the Pandavas: ‘Your uncle, the Great Raja, is about to give a great feast, and he invites you and your mother and your joint wife to come to his city, and there will be a match at dice-playing.’

“When Yudhisthira heard these words he was troubled in mind, for he knew that gaming was a frequent cause of strife, and he was in no way skillful in throwing the dice, and likewise knew that Sakuni was dwelling at Hastinapur, and that he was a famous gambler. But Yudhisthira remembered that the invitation of the Great Raja was equal to the command of a father, and that no true Kshatriga could refuse a challenge either to war or play. So Yudhisthira accepted the invitation and commanded that on the appointed day his brethren and their mother and their joint wives should accompany him to the city of Hastinapur.

“When the day arrived for the departure of the Pandavas, they took their mother Kunti, and their joint wife Draupadi, and journeyed from Indraprastha to the city of Hastinapur, where they first paid a visit of respect to the Great Raja; and they found him sitting among his chieftains, and the ancient Bhishma, and the preceptor Drona and Karua, who was the friend of Duryodhana, and many others were sitting there also.

“And when the Pandavas had done reverence to the Great Raja, and 77respectfully saluted all present, they paid a visit to their aunt Gandhari, and did her reverence likewise.

And after they had done this, their mother and joint wife entered the presence of Gandhari, and respectfully saluted her; and the wives of the Karauvas came in and were made known to Kunti and Draupadi. And the wives of the Kauravas were much surprised when they beheld the beauty and fine raiment of Draupadi; and they were very jealous of their kinswoman. And when all their visits had been paid, the Pandavas retired with their wife and mother to the quarters which had been prepared for them, and when it was evening they received the visits of all their friends who were dwelling at Hastinapur.

Now, on the morrow the gambling match was to be played; so when the morning had come, the Pandavas bathed and dressed, and left Draupadi in the lodging which had been prepared for her, and went their way to the palace. And the Pandavas again paid their respects to their uncle, the Maharaja, and were then conducted to the pavilion where the play was to be; and Duryodhana went with them, together with all his brethren, and all the chieftains of the royal house. And when the assembly had all taken their seats, Sakuni said to Yudhisthira: “The ground here has all been prepared, and the dice are all ready: Come now, I pray you, and play a game.” But Yudhisthira was disinclined, and replied: “I will not play, excepting upon fair terms; but if you will pledge yourself to throw without artifice or deceit, I will accept your challenge.” Sakuni said: “If you are so fearful of losing you had better not play at all.” At these words Yudhisthira was wroth, and replied: “I have no fear either in play or war; but let me know with whom I am to play, and who is to pay me if I win.” So Duryodhana came forward and said: “I am the man with whom you are to play, and I shall lay any stakes against your stakes; but my uncle Sakuni will throw the dice for me.” Then Yudhisthira said: “What manner of game is this, where one man throws and another lays the stakes.” Nevertheless he accepted the challenge, and he and Sakuni began to play.

At this point in the narrative it may be desirable to pause, and endeavor to obtain a picture of the scene. The so-called pavilion was probably a temporary booth, constructed of bamboos and interlaced with basket work; and very likely it was decorated with flowers and leaves after the Hindoo fashion, and hung with fruits, such as cocoa-nuts, mangoes, plantains, and maize. The chieftains present seem to have sat upon the ground, and watched the game. The stakes may have been pieces of gold and silver, or cattle, or lands; although, according to the legendary account which follows, they included articles of a far more extravagant and imaginative character. With these passing remarks, the tradition of the memorable game may be resumed as follows:

78So Yudhisthira and Sakuni sat down to play, and whatever Yudhisthira laid as stakes, Duryodhana laid something of equal value; but Yudhisthira lost every game. He first lost a very beautiful pearl; next a thousand bags, each containing a thousand pieces of gold; next a piece of gold so pure that it was as soft as wax; next a chariot set with jewels and hung all round with golden bells; next, a thousand war elephants, with golden howdahs set with diamonds; next a lakh of slaves all dressed in good garments; next a lakh of beautiful slave girls, adorned from head to foot with golden ornaments; next all the remainder of his goods; next all his cattle; and then the whole of his Raj, excepting only the lands which had been granted to the Brahmins.

Now when Yudhisthira had lost his Raj, the chieftains present in the pavilion were of the opinion that he should cease to play, but he would not listen to their words, but persisted in the game. And he staked all the jewels belonging to his brothers, and he lost them; and he staked his two younger brothers, one after the other, and he lost them; and he then staked Arjuna, and Bhima, and finally himself, and he lost every game. Then Sakuni said to him: “You have done a bad act, Yudhisthira, in gaming away yourself and becoming a slave. But now, stake your wife, Draupadi, and if you win the game you will again be free.” And Yudhisthira answered and said: “I will stake Draupadi!” And all assembled were greatly troubled and thought evil of Yudhisthira; and his uncle Vidura put his hand to his head and fainted away, whilst Bhishma and Drona turned deadly pale, and many of the company were very sorrowful; but Duryodhana and his brother Duhsasana, and some others of the Karauvas were glad in their hearts, and plainly manifested their joy. Then Sakuni threw the dice, and won Draupadi for Duryodhana.

Then all in that assembly were in great consternation, and the chieftains gazed upon one another without speaking a word. And Duryodhana said to her uncle Vidura. “Go now and bring Draupadi hither, and bid her sweep the rooms.” But Vidura cried out against them with a loud voice, and said: “What wickedness is this? Will you order a woman who is of noble birth, and the wife of your own kinsman, to become a household slave? How can you vex your brethren thus? But Draupadi has not become your slave, for Yudhisthira lost himself before he staked his wife, and having first become a slave, he could no longer have power to stake Draupadi!” Vidura then turned to the assembly and said: “Take no heed to the words of Duryodhana, for he has lost his senses this day.” Duryodhana then said: “A curse be upon this Vidura, who will do nothing that I desire him.”

After this Duryodhana called one of his servants, and desired him to go to the lodgings of the Pandavas, and bring Draupadi into the pavilion. And the man departed out, and went to the lodgings of the Pandavas, and 79entered the presence of Draupadi and said to her: “Raja Yudhisthira has played you away, and you have become the slave of Raja Duryodhana: So come now and do your duty like his other slave girls.” And Draupadi was astonished at these words, and exceedingly wroth, and she replied: “Whose slave was I that I could be gambled away? And who is such a senseless fool as to gamble away his own wife?” The servant said: “Raja Yudhisthira has lost himself, and his four brothers, and you also, to Raja Duryodhana, and you cannot make any objection. Arise, therefore, and go to the house of the Raja.”

Then Draupadi cried out: “Go you now and inquire whether Raja Yudhisthira lost me first, or himself first; for if he played away himself first, he could not stake me.” So the man returned to the assembly, and put the question to Yudhisthira; but Yudhisthira hung down his head with shame, and answered not a word.

Then Duryodhana was filled with wrath, and he cried out to his servant: “What“What waste of words is this? Go you and bring Draupadi hither, that if she has aught to say she may say it in the presence of us all.” And the man essayed to go, but he beheld the wrathful countenance of Bhima and he was sore afraid, and he refused to go, and remained where he was. Then Duryodhana sent his brother Duhsasana; and Duhsasana went his way to the lodgings of Draupadi, and said: “Raja Yudhisthira has lost you in play to Rajah Duryodhana, and he has sent for you. So arise now and wait upon him according to his commands; and if you have anything to say, you can say it in the presence of the assembly.” Draupadi replied: “The death of the Karauvas is not far distant, since they can do such deeds as these.” And she rose up in great trepidation and set out, but when she came near to the palace of the Maharaja, she turned aside from the pavilion where the chieftains were assembled, and ran away with all speed toward the apartments of the women. And Duhsasana hastened after her and seized her by her hair, which was very dark and long, and dragged her by main force into the pavilion before all the chieftains.

And she cried out: “Take your hands from off me.” But Duhsasana heeded not her words, and said: “You are now a slave girl, and slave girls cannot complain of being touched by the hands of men.”

When the chieftains thus beheld Draupadi, they hung down their heads from shame, and Draupadi called upon the elders amongst them, such as Bhishma and Drona to acquaint her whether or no Raja Yudhisthira had gamed away himself before he had staked her; but they likewise held down their heads and answered not a word.

Then she cast her eye upon the Pandavas, and her glance was like the stabbing of a thousand daggers, but they moved not hand or foot to help her; for when Bhima would have stepped forward to deliver her from the hands of Duhsasana, Yudhisthira commanded him to forbear, 80and both he and the younger Pandavas were obliged to obey the command of their elder brother.

And when Duhsasana saw that Draupadi looked towards the Pandavas, he took her by the hand, and drew her another way, saying: “Why, O slave, are you turning your eyes about you?” And when Kama and Sakuni heard Duhsasana calling her a slave, they cried out: “Well said! well said!”

Then Draupadi wept very bitterly, and appealed to all the assembly, saying: “All of you have wives and children of your own, and will you permit me to be treated thus? I ask you one question, and I pray you to answer it.” Duhsasana then broke in and spoke foul language to her, and used her rudely, so that her veil came off in his hands. And Bhima could restrain his wrath no longer, and spoke vehemently to Yudhisthira; and Arjuna reproved him for his anger against his elder brother, but Bhima answered: “I will thrust my hands into the fire before these wretches shall treat my wife in this manner before my eyes.”

Then Duryodhana said to Draupadi: “Come, now, I pray you, and sit upon my thigh;” and Bhima gnashed his teeth and cried out with a loud voice: “Hear my vow this day: If for this deed I do not break the thigh of Duryodhana, and drink the blood of Duhsasana, I am not the son of Kunti.”

Meanwhile the Chieftain Vidura had left the assembly, and told the blind Maharaja, Dhritarashtra, all that had taken place that day, and the Maharaja ordered his servants to lead him into the pavilion where all the chieftains were gathered together. And all present were silent when they saw the Maharaja, and the Maharaja said to Draupadi: “O, daughter, my sons have done evil to you this day. But go now, you and your husbands, to your own Raj, and remember not what has occurred, and let the memory of this day be blotted out forever.” So the Pandavas made haste with their wife Draupadi, and departed out of the city of Hastinapur.

Then Duryodhana was exceeding wroth, and said to his father: “O Maharaja, is it not a saying that when your enemy hath fallen down, he should be annihilated without a war? And now we that had thrown the Pandavas to the earth and had taken possession of all their wealth, you have restored them all their strength, and permitted them to depart with anger in their hearts; and now they will prepare to make war that they may revenge themselves upon us for all that has been done and they will return within a short while and slay us all. Give us leave, then, I pray you, to play another game with these Pandavas, and let the side which loses go into exile for twelve years; for thus, and thus only, can a war be prevented between ourselves and the Pandavas.” And the Maharaja granted the request of his son, and messengers were sent to bring back 81the brethren, and the Pandavas obeyed the command of their uncle, and returned to his presence; and it was agreed upon that Yudhisthira should play one game more with Sakuni, and if Yudhisthira won the Kauravas were to go into exile; and that if Sakuni won, the Pandavas were to go into exile, and the exile was to be for twelve years, and one year more; and during that thirteenth year those who were in exile were to dwell in any city they pleased, but to keep themselves so concealed that the others should never discover them; and if the others did discover them before the thirteenth year was over, then those who were in exile were to continue so for another thirteen years. So they sat down again to play, and Sakuni had a set of cheating dice, as before, and with them he won the game.

When Duhsasana saw that Sakuni had won the game, he danced about for joy; and he cried out: “Now is established the Raj of Duryodhana.” But Bhima said: “Be not elated with joy, but remember my words: The day will come when I will drink your blood, or I am not the son of Kunti.” And the Pandavas, seeing that they had lost, threw off their garments and put on deer-skins, and prepared to depart into the forest with their wife and mother, and their priest Dhaumya; but Vidura said to Yudhisthira: “Your mother is old and unfitted to travel, so leave her under my care;” and the Pandavas did so, and the brethren went out from the assembly hanging down their heads with shame, and covering their faces with their garments; but Bhima threw out his long arms, and looked at the Kuravas furiously, and Draupadi spread her long black hair over her face and wept bitterly. And Draupadi vowed a vow, saying:

“My hair shall remain disheveled from this day, until Bhima shall have slain Duhsasana and drunk his blood; and then he shall tie up my hair again, whilst his hands are dripping with the blood of Duhsasana.”

Such was the great gambling match at Hastinapur in the Heroic age of India. * * *

The avenging battle subsequently ensued. Bhima struck down Duhsasana with a terrible blow of his mace, saying: “This day I fulfil my vow against the man who insulted Draupadi!” Then setting his foot on the breast of Duhsasana, he drew his sword and cut off the head of his enemy; and holding his two hands to catch the blood, he drank it off, crying out: “Ho! ho! Never did I taste anything in this world so sweet as this blood.”

Chinese.—Many gambling games have been invented by the Chinese and gambling houses are numerous in their cities and towns. Into these dens, as is the case in other countries, the inexperienced are enticed by sharpers, there to be plundered of their money. It is the old story; the sharper pretends friendship for the unsophisticated visitor and a desire to 82show him the notable sights. Once in the den, the victim is permitted to win a small sum, several perhaps, but the result is always the same—he is fleeced of his ready money, which may not be all his own, but entrusted to him by neighbors and friends with which to purchase goods for them. With money gone and character ruined the poor Chinaman, in many cases, becomes a vagabond, in process of time, a beggar, or a thief, and finally ends his course in suicide.

A common gambling instrument in China, consists of a circular board, some 18 inches in diameter, which is divided, either into 8 or 16 equal parts, with lines drawn from the center to the division points at the circumference. In the center is a standard, or post, some 8 inches high, upon which two or three inches from the top, is placed a slender wooden stick in such a manner as to revolve easily. At one end of this piece of wood is tied a string, which hangs down nearly to the surface of the board. Being turned by a sudden movement of the hand, the horizontal stick will continue to revolve for sometime. When it stops the string indicates the division of the board which wins. The player places his bet on any division he may favor and whirls the stick himself. If the string stops over any other place than the one upon which he placed his money, he loses. If he wins, the proprietor of the concern pays him in money, or sweetmeats, as he may prefer. This gambling device operates upon the same principle as the modern “wheel of fortune.”

Another method of gambling may be called the “literary” or “poetical.” The “banker,” or gambler proprietor, having provided himself with a table, seats himself behind it, in the street. On the table, for the inspection of those who may wish to gamble, is written a line of poetry of, say, five or seven characters, one word of which is omitted. A list of several words is furnished, anyone of which, if inserted in the blank place, will make good sense. In betting which of these words is the one omitted consists the gambling. He who guesses the right word receives five times his stake. Yet another method of gambling is this: Provided with three slender slips of bamboo, or other wood, eight or ten inches long, the gambler seats himself by the wayside and, grasping the slips at one end, holds them up so that they diverge from each other. A red tassel, or string, hanging from the hand which conceals from sight the lower ends of the slips, is supposed to be attached to one of them. He who wishes to play the game bets that he can guess the slip to which the string is attached. If he fails, he loses his stake; if he succeeds he receives back his stake and twice as much more. The game is often dishonestly operated, and the operator seldom forfeits any money. Frequently, the red string is attached to all three of the slips, but in such a way that when one of them is pulled from the hand which grasps it, it will slip off and remain on the other two. If, then, one of these is pulled, 83it slips again and remains attached to the one still held in the hand. Then the gambler opens his hand to show that everything has been conducted “fairly” and the thread is seen to be attached to the slip that was not drawn, thus everything seems to have been honestly managed. Of course, the man who operates deceitfully and unfairly does not allow the condition of the string on the ends of the sticks in his hand to be seen or examined at the beginning of the game.

In China, gambling is forbidden by law. It is tolerated by the government, nevertheless, and considerable sums of money are realized by it from this source. Indeed, certain magistrates at Canton once actually converted their spare rooms in their respective “yamuns” into gaming houses. But, as a rule, the dens are in back or side streets, for, there as well as here, the more respectable trades people object to such an establishment. In 1861, all the shop-keepers in a particular street in Canton closed their shops and refused to open them, until the Governor-General of the province promised to issue an order directing the district ruler to close a gambling house which he had permitted to be opened in the street. It appeared, however, that these merchants did not object to the gambling establishments on moral grounds, but through fear that their business would be injured.

There are various kinds of gaming houses in China. Some are conducted by joint-stock companies, consisting of ten or twenty partners. In such houses there are usually two apartments. In the front room is a high table, in the center of which is a small square board, the sides of which are numbered one, two, three and four. The game in this room requires the presence of three of the partners. One is called the Tan-koon, or croupier; the second, Tai-N’gan, or shroff, and sets by the side of the former with his tables, scales and money drawers; and the third, the Ho-Koon, who keeps account of the game and pays over the stakes to the rightful winners. The gamblers and their patrons assemble around the high table, on which the Tau-Koon, or croupier, places a handful of “cash,” over which he immediately puts a cover so that the gamblers cannot calculate the amount. The players are then requested to place their stakes on such side of the square as they may choose. When this has been done, the cover is removed by the croupier, who, using a thin ivory rod a foot long, proceeds to diminish the heap of coin by drawing away four pieces at a time. Should one piece remain the gambler who placed his stake on the side of the small square marked one is the winner. If two or three remain he saves his stake; if four, he loses it. This game is called Ching-low and the player has one chance of winning, two of retaining his stake and one of losing it. Another game, called Nim is played at the same table. At this game the player has one chance of winning double the amount of his stake, two of losing it and one of retaining 84it. Should his stake be placed on that side of the board numbered two, and two pieces of money remain of the heap after successive removals of four, his winnings are double the amount of his bet. If three pieces remain he retains his stake, but if either one or four remain he loses it. Yet a third game played at this table is called Fan, in which the player has one chance of winning three times his stake and three chances of losing it. Still another and similar game at this table is known as Kok. In it the stake is placed at a corner of the board, between two of the numbers, and if either of them corresponds to the number of pieces left of the pile of money, the player wins the amount of his stake; if either of the other two numbers corresponds he loses his bet.

In the inner apartment of these establishments, the stakes are all silver coin, and here also three of the partners are required to conduct the game. The stakes are often heavy and the money is not placed on the table for fear the vagabonds or desperate characters in the place should make a rush and seize it. The players and their stakes are therefore distinguished by corresponding cards from different packs. Because of the large sums paid monthly to the mandarins by the proprietors the expenses of the latter are very heavy and they exact from the players seven per cent. of all the winnings. Sometimes gaming establishments are started by prostitutes, but they are generally closed by the authorities as soon as detected.

One peculiar mode of gambling is called Koo-Yan, or “The Ancients,” sometimes known under the name of “Flowery Characters.” This game, it is said, originated in the department of Chun-Chow, and was introduced in the 28th year of the reign of Taou-Kwang. The term “ancients” means a number of names by which thirty-six personages of former times were known. These names are divided into nine different classes as follows:

1. Four men who attained the highest literary distinction. In a former state of existence these men were respectively a fish, a white goose, a white snail, and a peacock.

2. Five distinguished military officers. These men were once respectively a worm, a rabbit, a pig, a tiger, and a cow.

3. Six successful merchants. These were once respectively a flying dragon, a white dog, a white horse, an elephant, a wild cat, and a wasp.

4. Four persons who were conspicuousconspicuous for their uninterrupted happiness on earth. Respectively, in former state, a frog, an eagle, a monkey, and a dragon.

5. Four females. Respectively a butterfly, a precious stone, a white swallow and a pigeon.

8. Two TaouistTaouist priests. Respectively a white egret, and a yellow streaked cat.

The company selects a person who has an aptitude for composing enigmas, to whom they pay a very large salary. New enigmas are constantly wanted, as the houses where this game is played are open twice daily, at 7 A. M. and 8 P. M. Each enigma is supposed to refer to one of the creatures enumerated. When an enigma is composed, it is printed and sold to the people, the sale of itself bringing in a considerable revenue. When the purchaser of an enigma thinks he has discovered the creature to which it refers, he writes his answer on a sheet of paper, and at the appointed hour hastens to the gambling house and gives it into the keeping of a secretary, together with the sum of money he is prepared to stake upon the correctness of his guess. When all the answers and stakes have been received, the names of those who have answered correctly are recorded by the secretary. Suspended from the roof of the chamber, where the players are assembled, is a folded scroll containing a picture of the creature to which the enigma refers. At the proper time this scroll is unfolded by the secretary, and as soon as the picture is seen it is greeted with a loud shout of exultation by the successful few and with murmurs of discontent from the many who have guessed wrong. “It is hardly necessary to add that the managers take care to provide enigmas of such ambiguous character that the majority are always wrong in their conjectures. The amount staked in these places is limited.”

Much money is lost at such establishments by ladies, but as they are not allowed to appear in public, they are represented by their female servants.

Large sums are daily lost by all classes in a game called ta-pak-up-pu, or “strike the white dove.” A company is formed of fifty partners, having equal shares. One acts as overseer, and, for reasons which will presently appear, is required to live in strict retirement. To him is given a sheet of paper on which are eighty Chinese characters, representing, respectively, heaven, earth, sun, moon, stars, etc. In his private apartment, he makes twenty of the characters with a vermilion pencil. The sheet is then deposited in a box, which is carefully locked. Thousands of sheets of paper, containing eighty similar characters, are then sold to the public. Marking ten of the eighty characters, the purchasers next morning, take their papers to the gambling establishment to have them compared with the one marked by the overseer. Before they give them up, 86they make and retain copies of them. When all the papers have been received, the box containing the overseer’s paper is unlocked, and when taken out, the player’s papers are compared with it. If a player has not marked more than four of the characters marked by the overseer, he receives nothing. If he has marked five, he receives seven “cash;” if six, seventy “cash;” if eight, seven dollars; and if ten, fifteen dollars. A person can buy as many as three hundred copies of the gambling sheet, but he must make them all alike. There are never more than two establishments of this kind in large cities and their winnings must be very great, judging from the number of sheets sold daily.

There are also houses in which cards are played night and day, and in them many persons are brought to ruin. To elude the vigilance of the authorities, these establishments are more or less private, but card players experience little trouble in finding such haunts. Gambling by means of oranges is also practiced at fruit stalls, the wagers being made upon the number of pips or seeds an orange may have. At fruit stalls, also, it is common to gamble for sticks of sugar cane. The cane is placed in a perpendicular position, and he who succeeds in cutting it asunder from top to bottom with a sharp edged knife, wins it from the fruitier. Should the attempt fail, the fruitier retains his cane and wins more than its value in money. Gambling by means of a joint of meat, or pork, or fish, is a very common pastime. The joint or fish is suspended from the top of a long pole and bets are taken as to its weight.

The games prevalent in Japan closely resemble those practiced in China. Cards and dice are strictly prohibited, and, although the law is said to be transgressed by the gambling houses, at home the Japanese respect it.

It is probable that the fall of Greece was due to the license that prevailed as to gaming, and consequently to all other and lesser forms of dissipation and corruption. Philip of Macedon was planning the battle of Cheronea at the very time when dicing had reached its most shameful height in Athens. Public associations existed, not for the purpose of defending Greece against her foes, but for the encouragement of the basest passions that surge in the human breast. Both Philip and Alexander knew the value to despotism of vice among the people. Alexander put a fine on those of his courtiers who did not play, for he had a jealous fear of subjects who were engaged in more serious pursuits.

But dice alone did not furnish the implements of gambling. The ancient Greeks had the equivalent of Cross and Pile, and gambled at cocking mains. The Athenian orator, Callistratus, notes the desperation of these practices when he says that the games in which the losers go on doubling their stakes “resemble ever-recurring wars, which terminate only with the extinction of the combatants.”

It was a practice of the ancients to put the invention of vicious acts or games upon foreign nations. Thus we have Plutarch’s indignant answers to Herodotus; but no Grecian ever resented the story that dice was first made by Palamedes, at the siege of Troy. Dice were called alsae by the Romans, and there were two kinds, the tali, or four-sided knucklebones, and the tesserarae or six-sided bones. The tali has four sides long-wise, the two ends were not regarded. Up one side there was an ace, or canis; on the opposite side six; on the other two sides four and three. On the tesserarae the numbers were from one to six. But on both sides of alsae or dice the numbers on the upper and lower side would make seven, as now-a-days on dice.

The game was played with three tesserarae and four tali. They were put into a box made into the form of a tower, with a straight neck—wider below than above, called fritillas turris, turricula, orca, etc. This box was shaken, and the dice was thrown upon the gaming board, forus, alvenus, tabulalus oriae. The highest or most fortunate throw was called Venus, or jactus venereus, or basilicas (the King’s throw.) It consisted of three sixes on the tesseraraetesserarae, and differing numbers, as two alike, on the 88tali. The worst throw, the dog throw, was called in Latin jactus pessimus, or jactus canes. In this throw, the three tesserarae must be aces, and the tali all the same number. The other throws were valued according to the numbers. Cocked dice nullified the throw, as now-a-days. While throwing the dice it was customary to name the desires of the player, and this practice still holds with negroes in their game of craps. Old men were specially fond of the game. Jacta alsa, esto! Let the die be cast! was Cæsar’s cry at the Rubicon when he betrayed the Roman republic. The law prohibited dice-playing, except in the month of December, during the Saturnalia, and the character of gamesters was then as infamous as now, although there was much gambling. The works of Horace, Cicero, Suetonius, Juvenal, Tacitus, Plautus, Varro, Ovid, Pliny, and Paulus, show by direct reference and by metaphor, the familiarity of dice in the public mind, and the evils they involved. Persius, in his satires, speaks of the practice of cogging the dice, and cheating the unwary.

Augustus, the first Roman emperor, was an habitual gambler, and, notwithstanding the laws prohibiting the practice, gambling was prevalent at Rome in all ranks of society. Although the emperor was a passionate gambler—as devoted to the vice, at least, as his cold and deliberate nature would permit—yet he was nothing if not a politician, and in frequenting the gaming table, he had motives other than cupidity. For example, he wrote Tiberius: “If I had exacted my winnings during the festival of Minerva; if I had not lavished my money on all sides, instead of losing twenty thousand sestercii (about $5,000) I should have gained 150,000 sestercii (about $37,000). I prefer it thus, however, for my bounty should win me immense ‘glory.’”

If Horace may be credited, they could “cog” a die in the Augustan age, if they could not “secure” it, as in this.

The emperor, Caligula, converted his palace into a gambling house, and while indulging his passion for play, this human monster conceived his most fiendish deeds, and resorted to falsehood and perjury in his efforts to escape the tide of ill-luck that set against him. When frenzied by losses, this wretch would vent his cruel spleen upon those about him, and to make good what he had lost he did not hesitate at murder most foul and confiscation most wanton. On one occasion, it is related, after having condemned to death several Gauls of great opulence and confiscated their wealth, he rejoined his gambling companions and exclaimed, “I pity you when I see you lose a few sestercii, whilst, with the stroke of a pen I have just won six hundred millions” (about $150,000,000). Although the author of a treatise on gambling, yet the emperor Claudius played like an imbecile. In gaming, as in all else, Nero was a veritable madman, and would stake hundreds of thousands on a single cast of the dice. In ghastly 89humor the imbecile, Claudius would play against the estates of his murdered victims. In his caustic description of the hypotheosis of Claudius, the great Seneca brings the emperor finally to hell, and represents him as there condemned to play at dice forever with a bottomless box, always in hope, but ever balked.

Cicero is authority for the statement that Cato, the censor, was an inveterate gambler. If so, how inappropriate the appellation which has brought to his memory an ill-deserved fame? With what consistency could a man addicted to gambling censure the conduct of his fellow man? Domitian was blamed for gaming from morning till night and without cessation even on the festival days of the Roman calendar. But this is scarcely notable in a man who was brutal in every instinct, base in every passion. In his satires Juvenal exhibits children playing dice in imitation of their fathers, and in his third satire they are represented cheating in their games. The fighting quails of the Romans are mentioned by Plutarch, and to him we are also indebted for the lament of Marc Antony, that even the very quails of Octavius Caesar were superior to his own. Was this a foreboding of the fate of Cleopatra’s lover at the battle of ActiumActium? Returning to Juvenal we find this graphic picture: “When was the madness of games of chance more furious? Nowadays, not content with carrying his purse to the gaming table, the gamester conveys his iron chest to the play room. It is there that, as soon as the gaming instruments are distributed, you witness the most terrible contests. Is it not mere madness to lose one hundred thousand sestercii, and refuse a garment to a slave perishing with cold?” This inexorable and terrible satirist was the contemporary of eleven Roman Emperors, including Domitian.

Gibbon, quoting from Ammianus Marcellinus, thus describes the situation at Rome at the end of the fourth century: “Another method of introduction into the houses and society of the ‘great’ is derived from the profession of gaming, or, as it is more politely styled, of play. The confederates are united by a strict and indissoluble bond of friendship, or rather of conspiracy. A superior degree of skill in the “tessarian” art is a sure road to wealth and reputation. A master of that sublime science who, in a supper or assembly, is placed below a magistrate, displays in his countenance the surprise and indignation which Cato might be supposed 90to feel when he was refused the prætorship by the votes of a capricious ‘people.’”

All authorities who mention the subject agree that gambling made fearful havoc in society and government under the Emperors, and the conclusion is irresistible, that the “decline and fall” was due in a large measure to the prevalence of this infatuating and demoralizing vice. It is asserted, on good authority, that at the epoch when Constantine abandoned Rome, never to return, every inhabitant of that city, down to the populace, were addicted to gambling.

The Greeks are to-day famous for the number of sharpers that ply their trade, both with dice and cards, but especially with cards. To cheat in this way the Greek relies on shifting the cut, which is done in many ways:

1. As the Greek lays down the pack to be cut, he is ready to seize that part of the deck which his opponent leaves on the table, and lay it on the other so that the upper part projects over the lower and toward him. This offers a niche for the insertion of the little finger of the hand which raises the pack. It is possible for a player having his little finger thus in a pack, to twirl the two parts and restore them to their original or uncut position. All that can be seen is a whirring movement, and even this cannot be seen if the hand falls for an instant beneath the table.

2. To pass the cut, the sharper replaces the top part of the deck himself, but so quickly that it is impossible to see that he puts the top part almost half way back off the deck. With the right hand he raises the misshapen pack to the palm of his left hand. As the back of his left hand obscures the vision, he clutches the forward or lower half of the pack and brings it to the top, the appearance being that he is straightening the pack, in order to deal. He now has the cards as he stocked them in the first place. This trick is called the straddle and other names.

3. A wider card is introduced from another pack, and placed exactly over the stocked portion of the deck. As this card is about half-way down, and as it offers a salient edge for the fingers, the victim usually makes the cut precisely where the sharper designed it.

4. The bridge is formed by bending half the deck convexly and the other concavely. Thus, if the other half be convex at the face of the card, it is difficult for the victim to lift any of the lower half, and he will make the cut in precisely the same place as if there were a wider card to aid him.

91In dealing, the sharper can at any time retain on the top of the pack a card which he does not wish to deliver, and it is impossible to detect the cheat until after a long study of the motions of the player. When gamesters play with each other, they are constantly on the lookout for this trick, which is aided by the crimping or denting of important cards. A gambler examines his aces closely to see if his opponent has crimped them. If not, he crimps them. If two gamblers confront each other in a game where “producers” are present, the two gamblers “take the office” and cheat together, dividing stakes after the play.

The palming of cards is practiced where two of the sharpers sit together in a large game. The dealer holds a “hand” in the palm of his right hand, dealing to himself a hand at his extreme left. As he lays down the deck he lowers his left arm upon his fair “hand” and pushes it along, meanwhile pretending to pick up the “hand” which has been in the palm. The confederate stays out of the play and with his right arm receives the fair “hand” and throws it in the rejected cards along with his own hand.

The roof is a large number of cards which the sharper holds from a deck of thick cards. The decks are changed by consent from very thin faro-cards to very thick cards. At the first deal of the victim the roof is placed on in the act of cutting, and the victim cannot detect the difference in thickness because of the change of decks. Thus the victim deals himself four kings and his dishonest foe four aces. Counting the cards, he finds the deck complete. Vain in the belief of his acuteness, he bets and loses.

The cold deck is a pre-arranged pack, introduced under the tray of a waiter at the call for liquor, or carried in rear pockets called finetles. Pockets called costieres are in front. To mark the cards, the Greek will buy the stock of a tradesman and exchange the goods on some excuse, often preparing and sealing the decks. Then, at some future time, he has the satisfaction of being asked to play with cards bought by his victim, every one of which carries a mark known only to the rogue.

The Greek carries a tin-box under the fore-arm, in his coat sleeve. This is called the bag in English. Projecting from the sleeve is a pair of pincers which will seize and withdraw any card that may be desired.

Basiled cards, or strippers, were one of the most effective methods of cheating in the eighteenth century, when the secret was known only to sharpers. Strippers are made by cutting the cards so that they are wider at one end than at the other. Now, if one of the cards be turned, it will present, at the narrower end of the deck, the feeling of a wide card, and can be stripped out of the deck in a twinkling. In the hands of an expert, the basil may be scarcely perceptible to the touch, and the further advantage of a variety of basils may be obtained. Thus, with a convex 92basil or ax-like edge, the gambler may feel for a court card, while with a convex basil, or razor-like edge, he may detect a low card. Thus he may cut high or low with only a few cards turned, and those by accident in the hands of his victim. Basiled cards cannot be detected without a delicate touch and close scrutiny, implying suspicion and inviting a quarrel if the rogue be vicious, as none is so jealous of his honor as a thief.

The chapelet is an arrangement or stock of cards by the order of certain words. One of the oldest chapelets is found in Latin, and each word means a certain card of the pack of fifty-two.

The poverty, squalor and filth among the Turks and the Greeks is due, in a considerable degree, to gambling. Men gamble away their money, their merchandise, their household, their clothes, and not infrequently they hazard themselves, on the chance of a die.

“One of my sudri, or carriers,” writes a gentleman to us, “when I was going from Jenidscheh up into the Rhodope mountains, had lost himself in this way and had become the property of a wealthy ‘Broussa’ merchant, but on the death of the latter he again became free and resumed his precarious gambling life. That is only one instance out of hundreds to be found in the Turkish Peninsula, of men becoming so degraded by this mad passion for gaming.

“I remember once stopping at a street corner in Zante, the capital of the Island of Currants, the Zacynthus of the ancients, and watching a party of ragged idlers, who had chosen a shady corner of a colonnade as they played ‘comboloio.’ The ‘comboloio’ is a rosary, or bead string, and the game is played with the loose beads and a ‘Kanate’ or earthen jar, with a long, narrow neck, generally used for water. I didn’t understand the rationale of the game, but it seemed to consist of betting on which of the colored beads would come out successively, after being shaken up in the ‘Kanate.’ Presently one of the party went off to fetch some wine and I strolled away down to the harbor. I had occasion to pass the same spot in the evening, about dusk, or rather the short twilight that answers to dusk in those latitudes, and the group was still there, rolling the colored beads out of the water vessel, and passing little copper coins to and fro. They were always good humored and merry. Indeed, amongst the lower classes in Greece, and particularly amongst these loafers of the street, one rarely meets with any strong display of feeling over losses or gains at play. They have become largely imbued with the spirit of the Turk, and take everything that comes with a dull resignation to fate. There are few large gambling houses in Greece, as far as I know, but every town has plenty of little ‘dens’ and ‘joints’ where gaming is openly practiced and allowed.

93“The spirit of hazard is inherent in the Greek, and everywhere one finds the dice box, the wheel, the ‘Koulai,’ or card tables. Cheating is regarded, I will not say as legitimate, but at least as justifiable. If a man is fool enough to allow himself to be cheated, he must suffer the consequences, and his acceptance of these consequences is always graceful and blended with a sort of admiration for the cheater. Speaking of this, I remember seeing in the museum at Athens (I think it was) a number of the Kanatii mentioned above, with false bottoms carefully fitted to them. They are a standing puzzle to the ceramist. If they were used simply as vessels for holding water or wine, the use of these false bottoms seems inexplicable, but I believe this was only a device used by the gamblers in the game of ‘comboloio.’

“The American gentleman, traveling in Greece, had better beware of sitting down at the card table with delicate handed Greeks. He is sure to be invited wherever he goes, and unless he knows his company well, he is sure to lose his money, no matter how skilled he may be in the tricks common to the fraternity in his native land in the west; and if he should take a hand and find that he is being plucked, the only way is to ignore it, and withdraw from the game at an opportune moment. It would never do to treat the Greek in the manner that certain parties once treated Ah Sin when playing ‘The game he did not understand.’ Everywhere, through the Grecian Islands, one will find these dens kept by Levantines and Greeks, and fitted up with all the modern paraphernalia of gambling.

“This is the most beautiful part of Europe. The waves of the glorious Mediterranean wash eternally on the ‘Shores of the old Romance.’ No spot of the land, or the sea, but has a history, a legend, or a poem. Here in old Salonica, the seven-towered citadel, once the Acropolis, still watches o’er the town, its rugged cliff facing Mount Olympus across the gulf. Down below, in the town itself, is many a temple, but little attended since the days when Olympus was the abode of the gods. What a great pity that the people should have become so degraded.

“Sings Byron. Yes, the Pyrrhic-dancer and the Pyrrhic gambler meet one at every step. Some of these old houses that I have mentioned were pointed out to me as noted gambling hells, and they have probably been so for centuries.

“One house that I went into at Corfu, just off the Italian-looking Spianata, or Esplanade, had scratched on the tiled walls of the rooms some jokes and ribaldries, which must have been hundreds of years old. Among other things there was a representative of the old tessara, or 94marble game, a sort of pocket billiards, now to be found only in the lowest dives, and usually played with biased balls.

“At Milon, a suburb of Corinth, is a magnificent gaming house, worthy of Monte Carlo, and it would seem as if a special Providence watched over it. The street in which it stands has been twice almost entirely destroyed by fire, but the house has escaped; earthquake after earthquake has left the place intact; and while I was in the city there was a very severe shock of earthquake, which desolated the entire suburb, but did not even disarrange the mirrors in the ‘Glass Room,’ a chamber where only high play is permitted, and whose very floors and ceilings are of plate glass. By the way, there is an ugly hole through one of these very mirrors, a little round hole, which has not starred the glass, telling that a certain Russian Prince once shot himself with a revolver in that room, and in his death agony pressed the trigger again, firing another shot which pierced the mirror behind him.”him.”

“The Huns,” says St. Ambrose, “a fierce and warlike race, are always subject to a set of usurers, who lend them what they want for the purpose of gaming. They live without laws and yet obey the laws of dice.” The Father adds that when a player has lost he sets his liberty and often his life upon a single cast, and is accounted infamous if he does not pay his “debt of honor,” as a debt of dishonor has always been named.

We are told by Tacitus, in his history of the Germans, that the warriors gambled without the excuse of being drunk, which was probably an ironical indictment of the Romans, who did the same thing. The practices noted in a later age, by St. Ambrose, are described by the great Roman scholar, who says that a German who loses his liberty, submits to be chained and exposed to sale. The winner is always anxious to barter away such slaves.

Let us now look into the Germany of to-day. In 1838, the government at Paris abolished the public salons of play, and then arose Baden, Weisbaden, Sissingern, Wilhelmbad, Koethen, Hamburg, Ems, Spa, Geneva and Monaco. The gaming season began in the spring, when the leaves were green and closed in the late autumn. The opening and closing days of the tables were like the saturnalia of the Romans. Rouge-et-noir and roulette were the games.

In 1842, Homburg was an obscure village, the capital of the smallest of European countries. Its inhabitants were poor and unassuming. There was one inn, the “Aigle.” To this, a few German families came to drink the waters of a mineral spring. In the year 1842, the famous Blanc brothers arrived from Paris, from whence they had been driven. Frankfort had refused to receive them, and hearing of Homburg, they traveled thither in a diligence, and put up at the “Aigle.” The prime minister, who governed the Landgrafate of Homburg, at a salary of $300 a year, was open to the offers of a visitor so rich as the elder Blanc. Permission was given to set up a roulette-wheel at the inn and an old and skillful croupier of Frascati turned the wheel. No one could beat this wheel. So successful was the summer’s business that Blanc, at its close, obtained from the prime minister an exclusive concession to build a cure-hall, 97lay out a public garden, and pay into the national exchequer 40,000 florins (over $17,000) a year. With this concession Blanc went to Frankfort, and the Jews aided him in forming a company with a capital stock of about $175,000. Of this sum the Jews took half, and the Blancs half. During the winter a small cure-hall was built, and advertisements of the sanitivesanitive properties of the waters filled Europe. Next year visitors poured into Homburg in large numbers, and they were offered fully as much gambling as mineral water. From this beginning arose the great “company.” In 1867, the place was the most noted gaming resort in Europe. Nature and art had conspired to make it attractive. On one side are the mountains; on the other the river plains; the stream being the Main. On the mountain-side is a forest, with walks for the visitors. Gardens, lawns, groves, lakes, fountains, swans, music, and perfume, all united to dull the sense of right, and make a heaven of hell, for hell was what Homburg had come to be in 1867.

Fronting on the main street of the town, built of brown freestone in the fashion of a palace of Florence, was the “Temple of Fortune.” A spacious vestibule, paved with Roman mosaic, led to the great salon, whose walls and ceilings were laden with gilt and sculpture, mirrors and curtains of velvet and satin. Sofas and chairs of damask appeared to invite to rest, but there was no rest in that dread chamber. The rattle of the balls went on. Money sounded and checks clicked. There came regularly the cries of the croupiers, the cappers and the recommenders: “Make your play, gentlemen and ladies;” “The play is made; nothing more goes.”

As he entered, the visitor must remove his hat, as if he were in St. Peter’s. The goddess of fortune was a jealous and very exacting deity.

From a gentleman once connected with the “Levant Herald,” we are indebted for the following glimpses of gambling as it obtains in the Balkan Peninsular to-day:

“In Bulgaria and Servia I have seen the peasants throwing dice, or coins, or even a notched stick, to decide the point as to who should pay for the morning meal of ‘yekmek e’ soot’ (bread and milk.)

“The gamins of the street gamble for ‘LoukouniLoukouni,’ little sticks of what looks like ‘Turkish Delight.’ In all the towns one may see at the street corners, the ‘hakimal,’ or ‘fakirs,’ with their packs of greasy cards, wheels of fortune, and little cunning traps of dingy brass work into which you drop small pieces of money and see whether it will ever reach the bottom. Unfortunately that happy event rarely occurs. The coin almost invariably becomes intercepted in its tortuous path and is claimed by the swarthy proprietor of the “faki.” Very often these men carry jewelry, and will match their wares against some property of your own; then play you ‘double or quits’ at ‘djini,’ which is practically the same as three card monte, only both parties have the privilege of a throw. While in 98Belgrade I came across an Arab, a most intelligent man, who had been a courier in Europe for years. I remarked to him upon this passion for gambling, and denounced its results in very strong terms. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but what would you have? These people are happy; they enjoy themselves. Why should they work when they can earn money so easily?’easily?’ ‘Ed djunya djifetun ve talibeha khilab’ (The world is an abomination, and those that work thereon are dogs.) This man had a supreme contempt for manual labor, and would spend days and nights in gaming houses. He was a master of the art of cheating, and told me he never employed any but fair means. ‘I know enough to guard myself from others,’ he said, ‘but why should one waste one’s talents on cattle like these?’ pointing to a long-bearded, venerable ‘hakimal’ near by. I think, however, that he did use his ‘talents’ pretty freely, for I noticed that he never came away from the table empty-handed.

“Now here was an instance of a man with remarkable natural intelligence, a fine linguist, well read, cultivated, a most agreeable traveling companion; but he was a gambler, and all his thoughts and energies were directed to one object—the winning of money by unfair means. He won immense sums, and if he had kept them, would have been a very wealthy man. But ‘light come, light go,’ and every cent was squandered in pleasure, often of the vilest, most revolting kind. I told him how it would probably end in a horrible death from starvation. ‘No,’ he replied quietly, ‘not like that. There is always a way out of life,’ and he pointed significantly to a small Malay creese which he carried in his belt. I went with him one night to the ‘Tag Alek’ in Belgrade, a hell of the worst reputation, and where I would not have ventured alone for a kingdom, but I knew I was safe in the company of ‘Le Brulant,’ as the courier was called. We passed through a dimly lighted court yard and entered by a little arched door-way, which opened into a small stone hall with a little fountain in the middle. My companion spoke a few words to the man in charge (cawass), who supplied us with felt sandals, and also gave me a loose gown to put over my European dress. Then we passed into a long, low room filled with little tables, each occupied by its group of card players, who were waited on by nearly nude negroes.

“There was almost perfect silence, broken now and then by a muttered oath or exclamation. The players were well, and even richly dressed, and seemed to embrace many nationalities. We went through noiselessly, and into another small room fitted up with divans and lounges. This was a conversation room, and there were two or three men talking in a Slav dialect in one corner. From here one could pass by separate doors, to the rooms where roulette, rouge et noir, and other games were played, but my companion refused to enter these, saying we 100should only disturb the players. We sat down, and an attendant brought us some coffee, black and bitter as gall, then handed us each a ‘tcihbouque’ (pipe), to light while a little boy dressed as an Albanian, brought us a piece of red hot charcoal on a platter. After a few minutes ‘Le Brulant’ proposed that we should see the rest of the house. I agreed, and we arose. ‘Let’s go to the Shades first,’ he said. I asked him what he meant. ‘Well,’ was the reply, ‘the rooms over these,’ pointing to the way by which we had entered, ‘are nothing. The men who play there are quiet, steady people. They are not initiated. Look here,’ and he drew back a heavy gold-embroidered curtain which concealed the end of the passage we had traversed. It was a magnificent room which lay beyond, gorgeous with gold and silver, and all the vivid colors of oriental furnishing. At the different tables were men and women seated, and apparently absorbed in their game. The attendants in this room were young girls dressed in a single fold of a fabric so fine and transparent that the white flesh gleamed through like pearl. My companion dropped the curtain and said: ‘Ah, there’s no one there to-night but the Lurley (mentioning the soubriquet of a woman infamously known all over Europe) and she seems to have a new victim.’ The Arab ground his teeth together savagely, as he hissed: ‘They may well call her the Lurley.’ We looked into a number of other rooms, where the same scene was being enacted, with variations. These were the public rooms, but there were also private dens, some of which were set apart for opium devotees. ‘But,’ I said to ‘Le Brulant,’ ‘I don’t see any danger in coming here. Everything seems quiet and orderly. How is it that the house has such a fiendish reputation?’ ‘Yes, you see the fair side to-night,’ he answered, ‘but if I was to leave you now, you might never get out of this place alive, if you had any money or jewelry about you. One of those sirens yonder would soon lure you to a nice, cool resting place at the bottom of the Danube.’ He said this so fiercely that I shuddered, and the thought struck me that the gambling fever might flash out in his veins at any moment and leave me without a protector in this hell upon earth. He saw my disquietude, and said gently: ‘Come, let’s go; its best not to stay too long.’ We passed out by another door opening on the same dark court yard, and I breathed more freely when we reached the open air, and I could see the stars above my head and feel the fresh breeze blowing down from the mountains, sweeping away the sense of languor and enervation imbued by the heavy scented atmosphere of the Tag’ Alek.”

At the German watering places the gambling houses were required to pay a heavy tax by the several principalities, which licensed them, notwithstanding games of hazard were forbidden by the laws. Moreover, the respective governments were so perfectly conscious of the ruin caused by 101gaming that they prohibited their subjects from patronizing the licensed establishments. In Homburg the law even forbade citizens from living intimately with gamblers and visitors, under a penalty of from 30 to 150 florins.

“The bankers” of Baden-Baden paid an annual license of 300,000 francs ($60,000), which was expended in constructing and beautifying the baths. The “bankers” were at an annual expense, in addition to this license, of 700,000 francs ($140,000), yet, notwithstanding this, the net profit of one season amounted to 2,000,000 francs ($400,000).

At Wiesbaden and Ems, the tables belonged to a joint stock company, which paid 115,000 florins for the double license. So profitable was the business that the company offered 100,000 florins more for the privilege of keeping the establishment open during the winter. The expenses of the company, for the season of 1860, were estimated at 750,000 francs, yet, from the net profit of the year, a dividend of 49·30 francs was paid on each one of the 25,000 shares of stock, showing an aggregate net profit of 1,232,500 francs ($246,500). At Wiesbaden there were two tables for roulette and two for rouge-et-noir, and at Ems one for each.

Homburg paid a license of 50,000 francs ($10,000), for which it had the privilege of keeping the tables in operation throughout the year. The society, or company, defrayed the expense of all buildings and embellishments. Its capital was divided into 10,000 shares, each of which earned a dividend of fifty-three francs.

Spa, for a time one of the most flourishing gaming resorts, paid a net annual profit of more than 1,000,000 francs from the operation of one roulette and one rouge-et-noir table. Geneva, like Spa, paid no license. The gaming “sessions” were held in a mansion of the President of the Council, for which, in 1860, a rental of 25,000 francs was paid. The general expenses that year were about 125,000 francs, and the net profits 300,000 francs ($60,000). Towards the end of the last century, Aix-la-Chapelle was a great rendez-vous of gamblers, and play there was generally desperate and ruinous. The chief banker paid a license of 4,000 Louis. The gaming profits in 1870 were 120,000 florins ($70,000).

Wiesbaden is in the Duchy of Nassau, being three or four miles farther from the historic city of Frankfort, to the westward, than Homburg is to the northward. Situated on the spurs of the Taunaus, about 100 feet above the Rhine, it is environed by beautiful villas, remarkable for the picturesqueness of their gardens—the residences, for the most part, of the wealthy bankers of Frankfort, the financial center of continental Europe. Wiesbaden is one of the oldest watering places in Germany. The locality is referred to by Pliny, in his natural history, and the remains of a Roman fortress were discovered some twenty years ago in the Heidenburg, north of the city.

102Among the noteworthy buildings of the place are the Ducal Palace, built in imitation of the Alhambra, the ministerial building, once occupied by the Florentine Consulate, and the Catholic Church. Until 1872, the architectural and social center was the Cure Hall. In this structure the principal hall once contained copies of the Apollo, Venus, Laocoon and other celebrated productions of ancient art, and was embellished with pillars of red and gray marble quarried in the region. Outwardly, the Cure Hall is a reproduction of the immortal Pantheon, with its imposing portico fronting upon a charming square, wherein fountains play in the sunlight or beneath the soft rays of the moon, glinting through the leaves and branches, all of which makes beautiful shades and contrasts of color. On each side of the square are broad colonnades lined with fancy shops. The interior of the Cure Hall was furnished and adorned in a sumptuous and florid manner, as at other German Spas, and the pleasure grounds in the rear presented a charming prospect of walks, grottoes, and miniature lakes.

When gambling was in the ascendant at Wiesbaden, society there was in a very mixed and deplorable state. The fast were in full possession, almost, and as late as 1872 respectable women dared not take a stroll in the grounds outside the Cure Hall. When gambling, with “hideous mien,” stalked through this fair scene, the aged, broken down courtesans of Paris, Vienna and Berlin made Wiesbaden their autumn rendez-vous. A correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph described them as “arrayed“arrayed in all the colors of the rainbow, painted to the roots of their dyed hair, shamelessly decollette, prodigal of “free” talk and unseemly gestures, these ghastly creatures, hideous caricatures of youth and beauty, flaunted about the play rooms and gardens, levying blackmail upon those who were imprudent enough to engage them in “chaff” or badinage, and desperately endeavoring to hook themselves onto the wealthier and younger members of the male community. They poison the air around them with sickly perfume; they assume titles and refer to one another as “cette chere comtesse,” their walk was something between a prance and a wiggle; they prowled about the terrace whilst the music was playing, seeking whom they might devour, or rather whom they might inveigle for their devouring. How they did gorge themselves with food and drink when some silly lad or aged roue allowed himself to be bullied or wheedled into paying their scope, their name was legion and they constituted the very worst feature of a palace which, naturally a paradise, was turned into a seventh hell by the uncontrolled rioting of human passions. They had no friends, no “protectors.” They were dependent upon accident for a meal or a piece of gold to throw away at the tables; they were plague spots upon the face of society; they were, as a rule, grossly ignorant, and horribly cynical, and yet there were many men who were proud of their acquaintance, always ready to entertain them in the most expensive 104manner, and who spoke of them as if they were the only desirable companions in the world.

In all the world cannot be found an inland watering place so charming as Baden. The climate is invigorating, the situation unequalled and the locality, from every point of view, exceedingly beautiful. Situated on the confines of the “Black Forest,” in the beautiful valley of the Oelbach, and surrounded by green and graceful hills, Baden resembles both Heidelberg and Freiburg, but is more lovely than either. Overlooking the town are the fine old ruins of a castle, dating from the 11th century. This castle was for centuries the residence of the Margraves of Baden, and was destroyed as late as 1869 by the French. From the ruins a beautiful panorama is unfolded to the view. In the distance can be seen the broad valley of the Rhine, from Strasburg to the ancient town of Worms. Nearer lies the delightful valley of Baden, with its green pastures, and groves of fir trees and charming villas. Near the castle are huge and irregular masses of porphyry, which seen at a distance, reminds one of ruined towers and crumbling battlements.

The pleasant walks and drives, which are numerous about the town, lead one to pretty villages and fine views of old Roman ruins. Baden has only about 8,000 inhabitants, but the annual influx of visitors has been known to reach 50,000 or 60,000.

Prior to 1873, the central attraction of Baden was, of course, the conversationhaus (Conversation House); so called, it is presumed, because no one was permitted to speak there above a whisper. Applying the name “conversationhaus” to a gambling hall must have been due to some Teutonic vagary in which irony was uppermost. The conversationhaus contained drawing, reading, dining, concert and gaming rooms, all elaborately gilded and frescoed and richly furnished. Great mirrors, on every side, reflected all that transpired and made the place appear larger and the players more numerous than they really were.

The promenades of Baden, during the afternoon and evening, when an excellent band played before the gambling hall, presented a very animated and attractive scene. There representatives could be seen from all quarters of the world and of every nationality claiming to be civilized. The great majority were faultlessly attired in the latest fashion, and many very elegant toilets were to be seen. No better opportunity could be imagined to show a pretty face, a fine figure, or costly jewels and gowns, and the women were therefore happy. The men struggled to express that grand insouciance which indicates the final fathoming of all social profundities. The pleasantest feature of Baden were the walks and promenades where one could stroll leisurely with the bright sunshine overhead, soft and perfect music in the ear, and a gay panorama of pretty women and well dressed men before him.

105The gambling rooms at Baden usually had six roulette and rouge-et-noir (trente-et-quarante) tables running. The games opened daily at 11 o’clock in the morning, and ran continuously until 11 o’clock at night. The place was almost as public as the street. Everybody went in or went out, played or refrained from playing, as he pleased. There was no one to question or interrupt, to invite or discourage, any respectably dressed or decently behaved stranger, who, from curiosity, inclination or other motive might desire to enter and look about. It was contrary to the rules for one to wear his hat or to take a cane or umbrella into the gambling rooms, and in the vestibule, lackeys were stationed to relieve visitors of these articles. These lackeys wore livery not unlike a court costume and were most obedient, obsequious and ready to do any one’s bidding, with the expectation of course, of receiving a “tip” for their trouble. The Directors paid a license of $75,000 a year and paid out as much more for the running expenses of the establishment, yet reaped immense profit. The season extended from May until October and was at its height from the middle of July until the first of September.

The Baden salons during the height of the season, were attractive to the mind and interesting to the eye. The contemplative spectator, the student of human nature, saw much relating to cosmopolitan society which he could scarcely find elsewhere. The roulette and trente-et-quarante tables were always crowded, while the games were in progress. Well dressed men and women, young and old, notables and nobodies, many of distinguished bearing, sat around the tables, or leaned over from their standing posture behind, and placed their bets, raked in their winnings, or scowled and muttered curses when they lost. All the players were absorbed in the game. Around each table, also, were to be seen, scores of persons, whose despondent countenances told, as plainly as words could express it, that their last louis had been swept away. The “banker” or dealer, and the croupiers, his assistants, occupied seats raised above those of the players, that they might the better see what was transpiring on the table, and not to be interfered with by the movements of the bettors.

No attache of the establishment was ever known to ask any one, even in the most indirect manner, to take part in the game. All seemed indifferent on that point, and visitors were free to play or not as they pleased. Dealers, croupiers, and lackeys—all maintained an air of good breeding and never allowed themselves to exhibit emotion or even any particular interest. Thousands were raked in, or paid, with each deal or roll of the ball, and all proceeded in a marvelously mechanical way. The players did but little talking and rarely spoke above an undertone. The chink of the coin could be distinctly heard, as the dealer tossed it adroitly to the winning stakes, or as the croupiers raked in the losses. Over all, like a sad refrain, was heard periodically, the dealers direction to the players, “faites 106votre jeu, messieurs,” “le jeu est fait,” and “rien ne va plus.” (“Make your play, gentlemen!” “Nothing more goes!”)goes!”)

Baden was the most dangerous of all gambling resorts, though the most respectable. On arriving from Homburg or Wiesburg, say in 1860, and entering the Maison de Conversation, at Baden, one could hardly believe, for the moment, that he was in a gambling house, for the interior was in striking contrast with that of most places devoted to this purpose. The attendants were neatly attired and quite courteous. The company was elegantly dressed and no one over-stepped the bounds of strict decorum. The professional gambler was a rarity. The titled aristocrat was there and potentates arrived in their elegant carriages, from the city, or the country. Representatives of the demi-monde were there, but they differed little, in outward aspect, from the most respectable.

Writing of the interior of the Conversationhaus in 1870, Mr. Whitelock said: “How shall I describe to my readers, in language sufficiently graphic, one of the resorts the most celebrated in Europe—a place if not competing with Crockford’s in gorgeous magnificence, use, and display, at least surpassing it in renown, and known over a wider sphere? The metropolitan pump-room of Europe, conducted on the principle of gratuitous admittance to all bearing the semblance of gentility and conducting themselves with propriety, opens its Janus doors to all the world with the most laudable hospitality and with a perfect indifference to exclusiveness, requiring only the hat to be taken off upon entering, and rejecting only short jackets, cigar, pipe, and meerschaum. A room of this description, a temple dedicated to fashion, fortune, and flirtation, requires a pen more graphic to vivify and depict. Taking everything, therefore, for granted, let us suppose a vast salon of regular proportions, rather longer than broad, at either end garnished by a balcony; beneath, doors to the right and left and opposite to the main entrance, conduct to other apartments, dedicated to different purposes. On entering, the eye is at once dazzled by the blaze of lights from chandeliers of magnificent dimensions, composed of lamps, lustres, and sconces. The ceiling and borders set off into compartments showered over with arabesques, the gilded pillars, the moving mass of promenaders, the endless labyrinth of human beings, assembled from every region in Europe, the costly dresses, repeated by a host of mirrors, all this combined, which the eye conveys to the brain at a single glance, utterly fails of description. As with the eye, so it is with the ear; at every step a new language falls upon it and every tongue with different intonation, for the high and the low, the prince, peer, vassal and tradesman, the proud beauty, the decrepit crone, some freshly budding into the world, some standing near the grave, the gentle and the stern, the sombre and the gay; in short, every possible antithesis that the eye, ear, or heart can perceive, hear, or respond to, or that the mind itself can imagine, is here 107to be met with in two minutes. And yet all this is no Babel; for all, though concentrated, is admirably void of confusion; and evil or strong passions if they do exist, are religiously suppressed—a necessary consequence, indeed, where there can be no sympathy, and where contempt and ridicule would be the sole reciprocity. In case, however, any such display should take place, a gendarme keeps constant watch at the door, appointed by the government, it is true, but resembling our Bow street officer in more respects than one.”

We here append what a traveler witnessed within the Cure-hall at Baden in the summer of 1854:

“Almost immediately on our entrance our attention was attracted to a young Englishman, fashionably dressed, but yet of such rakish and sinister aspect that I set him down at once as a black-leg who had figured at Epsom or Newmarket; a London roue, who, having lost character and means at home, now formed one of that base band of English sharpers who are to be found on the continent, and who initiate our young bloods into the mysteries of the gambling tables, or fleece them at private gaming parties. In eager excitement this person pressed through the crowd, and, bending over the table, repeatedly deposited a handful of silver florins, until nearly every yellow line or space had a stake placed upon it. It seemed as if he had set his life upon the cast and was resolved to take the bank by storm. Within a few minutes, however, his entire cash was lost, and as the croupiers remorselessly gathered it in with their little rakes, he turned abruptly away.

“But whose are the small gloved hands and rounded arms which, just at my left, are suddenly thrust forward to obtain silver for the Napoleon d’or which she gives to the markers? I look around and see a tall and elegantly dressed French lady standing at my side. She cautiously deposits one or two florins on the board, and with subdued excitement watches the progress of the game. At length the silver pieces are all staked and lost. Now, with gloved hands, she unfastens the string of her purse and other gold is produced and changed, until all is gone, and she, too, suddenly disappears.

“The game has progressed but a few moments when our countryman returns and proceeds as before, with the same result, and then disappears again. Now, here is also the French lady again, with her silk purse containing gold pieces, and playing with greater excitement than ever; but after some winnings, she, too, loses all.

“Yonder stands a tall, thin lady, who seeks the table on which small sums can be played. See how anxiously she glances over the table, and how cautiously she deposits her little sum. Once or twice she wins, and her pale cheeks become flushed, and her eyes kindle; but in a short time it is all gone, and then, leaving the place, she retires to one of those garden 108chairs sitting apart from the rest of the people, her cheeks more wasted, her eyes duller, apparently broken-hearted, as if the thought of her confiding husband and little ones far away oppressed her spirit. But look again and you will see another lady with a younger lady by her side. It is her daughter, and she is initiating her into the mysteries of gambling. Who would like to marry such a woman, thus trained into the mysteries of such a game as this?

“A man now enters the room. His dress and person are neglected, his face is unwashed, his long and curly hair falls wildly over his forehead, seamed and furrowed with deep wrinkles, A little girl is by his side. She, too, is miserably dressed, and his rank seems to be that of a peasant. He is an inveterate gambler and cannot do without his excitement. He takes a seat at the foot of the table, deposits a florin from time to time, and carefully examines a small marked card on which is marked the result of each revolution of the deal. For a time familiarity with the game seems to give him an advantage, and with a calm satisfaction he rakes in his winnings in a heap, on which the little girl bends her glistening eyes. And there he sits until the evening closes, when he departs, having passed an evening of feverish excitement and lost all. The face of that gambler and the little girl, who was always with him and who seemed as if she were the only one left of a ship-wrecked and ruined family, haunt me to this hour.

“At rouge et noir is a more select class than is generally found playing at roulette. English, French, Germans, Russians, and Poles, and the fire of Mammon always burning on his altars and the doomed flies buzzing about them, some with already scorched-off wings; it is a scene of external gaiety with all that is internally hollow and deceiving.

“The lights are burning brightly overhead, the players nearly all seated, and a large number of people forming an outer circle.

“Here are two gentlemen who are bold players. They never stake silver. A pile of Napoleons lies at the side of each. One player is about sixty years of age, tall and robust; the other a little, dark haired, black eyed man, and both appear to be habitues of the place. Three gold pieces formed the first stake, and the player winning, the same was doubled. Five more Napoleons are won.

“At this moment one of the proprietors can be seen talking with some friends nonchalantly, and apparently uninterested in the game, in the background; but if you will watch him carefully, you can see that he ever and anon casts a searching glance toward the table, for this evening the game is going against the bank. But soon caution on the part of the player is gone, and golden visions beckon onward. One of the gentlemen leaves ten gold pieces on the cloth, another turn and all is gone.

110“It was here that an Englishman played one night until he lost £180,000, and announced his determination to win it back or to lose everything; but he was doomed to drink, and justly too, the cup of bitterness: he lost everything.”

Mrs. Trollope has thus described two specimens of the gamestresses, who were wont to frequent the German watering places:

“There was one of this set,” she says, “whom I watched day after day, during the whole period of our stay, with more interest than, I believe was reasonable; for had I studied any other as attentively, I might have found less to lament.

“She was young, certainly not more than twenty-five, and though not regularly nor brilliantly handsome, most singularly winning, both in person and demeanor. Her dress was elegant, but peculiarly plain and simple—a close white silk bonnet and gauze veil; a quiet colored silk gown, with less of flourish and frill, by half, than any other person; a delicate little hand, which, when ungloved, displayed some handsome rings; a jeweled watch of peculiar splendor; and a countenance expressive of anxious thoughtfulness—must be remembered by many who were at Baden in August, 1833. They must remember, too, that, enter the room when they would, morning, noon or night, still they found her nearly at the same place at the rouge et noir table.

“Her“Her husband, who had as unquestionably the air of a gentleman, as she had of a lady, though not always close to her, was never very distant. He did not play himself, and I fancied, as he hovered near her, that his countenance expressed anxiety. But he returned her sweet smile, with which she always met his eye, with an answering smile; and I saw not the slightest indication that he wished her to withdraw from the table.

“There“There was an expression in the upper part of her face that my blundering science would have construed into something very foreign to the propensity she showed; but there she sat—hour after hour, day after day, not allowing even the blessed Sabbath, that gives rest to all, to bring it to her;—there she sat, constantly throwing down handfuls of five-franc pieces, and sometimes drawing them back again, till her young face grew rigid from weariness, and all the lustre of her eye faded into a glare of vexed inanity. Alas! alas! is that fair woman a mother? God forbid!

“Another“Another figure at the gaming table, which daily drew our attention, was a pale, anxious old woman, who seemed no longer to have strength to conceal her agitation under the air of callous indifference which all practiced players endeavor to assume. She trembled, till her shaking hand could hardly grasp the instrument with which she pushed, or withdrew her pieces; the dew of agony stood upon her wrinkled brow; yet, hour after hour, day after day, she, too, sat in the enchanted chair. I never saw age and station in a position so utterly beyond the pale of respect. I 111was assured she was a person of rank; and my informant added, but I trust she was mistaken, that she was an Englishwoman.”Englishwoman.”

Ems is a quiet village in the Duchy of Nassau, fifteen miles north of Wiesbaden, situated picturesquely on the river Lahn; it is surrounded by green hills, beautiful landscapes and delightful drives. The discovery of ancient vases and coins in the vicinity indicates that, like Wiesbaden, it was known to the Romans. Ems has a population of less than 5,000, but entertains about 8,000 visitors each summer. When gambling flourished at Ems, years ago, there was a croupier whose life had been a most adventurous and checkered one. The illegitimate son of a German Margrave, he was educated a soldier and served with distinction. Leaving the army, he traveled through the East—was in succession a Mohammedan, a member of the Greek church, an Israelite, a Roman Catholic, a Buddhist and an Atheist. By his father’s death he inherited a large fortune. Married three times, he had quarreled with and separated from each wife. Becoming an epicurean and dilettante, he was soon a sensualist and a sot. Broken down with dissipation, and reduced to poverty, he found himself at Ems. Thoroughly familiar with gambling, he was given a situation as croupier, provided he would give up drinking. This he agreed to do, and kept his pledge. A man of exceptional ability, and unusual opportunities, he had, in twenty short years, ruined his prospects and his health, and settled down to the monotonous and hopeless career of a croupier in a gambling house.

The Russians, late to learn civilization, but keenest of its students, have begun—so say the English, their enemies—by learning all the vices. Like Alexander the Great, the Russian autocrat permits a dissolute life among the nobility, in order that the empire may not have to confront the resolutions of more honorable men. Ennui wears upon the gentry. At Moscow and St. Petersburg, the man of the fashionable world dwells in a state of social license that contrasts sharply with his political restrictions. Moscow is filled with men in disgrace, who are here allowed to live in splendid exile. Gaming, racing, intemperance, and libertinism are the most striking features of the Russian realistic novel. If we read “Anne Karenina,” by Tolstoi, we shall be outraged with the gross treatment of an honest husband, at the hands of an author who pretends to follow the practical teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. The minister of state, who suffers from the incursions of a libertine, is dwelt upon, and held up to ridicule, while the inner life of a villain who steals away the love of a bad wife, is glazed over and made entertaining to low minds. It may be said that this was necessary, in a land where a betrayed husband was the butt of ridicule; but why should the life of a woman offer a field for the apologetics of Tolstoi? Why should the noble author who toils like a peasant in the field, have no word of praise for a husband whose every 112act was visibly an attempt to do justice and serve the state? Why should not gambling and racing receive a stinging rebuke at the hands of an author who is not afraid to rebuke all other iniquities? Possibly “Anne Karenina” would have had a very limited sale, if gamblers, libertines, and a wicked woman had not figured as the principal characters.

In Roumania, lansquenet, makaw, baccaret, and other games are the pastimes of old and young, and consequently the Shylock flourishes. All Roumanians play, and it is difficult for the visitor to resist the epidemic. The Roumanians lay the blame on the Russians and declare that gambling sprung up during the two military occupations. Exiles like the emigrants from France, weary of absence from their own vodki, introduced games of chance; and card playing is now the only social entertainmententertainment of the salons. “Every drawing-room in Bucharest is an unlicensed cure-halle,” say a recent writer.

Histories, accessible to the author present but few glimpses here and there of the gambling vice as it has prevailed in modern Italy. He found but few allusions to the subject by historians, and only an occasional word in books of travel. However, from what is generally known of Italy, and Italians, it is beyond question that in gaming this people are not behind the rest of their fellow men. In Naples, while under the Spanish dominion, there was scarcely one viceroy who did not issue a decree against games of chance; but all their efforts were in vain, for the governor of the Vicarial Court farmed out the gaming tables to the nobles, the people and the soldiers. The nobility at that time, especially, were passionately devoted to every sort of gaming. When in 1620, A. D., Cardinal Zapata assumed the government, he forbade the further farming of the gaming table by the governor, who complained loudly. This prohibition remained in force, only until a son of the Cardinal was appointed to the gubernatorial office. Thousands of ducats were staked upon cards and dice during this period. In the year 1631, the Duke of St. Agata lost ten thousand ducats at tarocchi. Vencinzio Capece, the natural son of a Knight of Malta, acquired sixty thousand ducats by lending money to be used in gaming. His income, from interest on such loans, amounted to fifteen and even twenty ducats daily. When the Neopolitan people revolted, in 1647, they complained that gaming had been encouraged by the nobility. On the 29th day of July, of that year, the people assembled in groups to visit the gambling resorts—even the Royal Palace was not spared. A mob entered the house of one Belogna, where the nobles of highest rank were accustomed to meet for gaming purposes. “Ye lord cavaliers,” called out one of the leaders, “do you think that you will be allowed to go on with such doings? For what else but to indulge in your evil passions for dice and cards, have you sold the poor citizen to his arch-enemy? For what else have you sold your votes to the Viceroy that he may burden us to his heart’s desire?” The mob then set fire to the house, which was destroyed, together with its contents—household furniture, tables, cards and dice. It has been estimated that more than one hundred gaming houses were at this time consumed 114by fire. Not only the nobility, but numerous adventurers gained a livelihood at these licensed redoubts, (as the gaming resorts were named). For instance, under the Second Duke of Alcala, a Calabrian cavalier, Muzio Passalacqua, kept a house of this character, where the play was so high that Bartholo Meo Imperiali lost sixty thousand ducats in one evening. We are told that during the time under consideration a similar state of affairs prevailed throughout the Italian Peninsula.

The picture given reflects the vices of Italian society, which had then prevailed for more than four hundred years. Sismondi and John Addington Symonds, clearly indicate that during the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the gaming vice spread amongst all classes of Italians. In the princely castle, the ducal palace, the lowly cot, and even the monastery, dice and other gaming devices held sway. From such views as we obtain from the later Latin historians, of their barbarian neighbors in the north, we know that with their invasion of Italy, was introduced the gaming vice in its most persistent and pernicious features. How prone the modern Italian is to the fascination of gaming, is evident from the papal lottery system as it flourished in all parts of the country.

Passing to the northwest, we reach the little principality of Monaco, and the notorious Monte Carlo. Monaco is now reduced to a square mile or two, but has a malodorous reputation greatly exceeding its political importance or geographical dimensions. Leaving the city of Nice, by train, and passing through a tunnel, you come full upon the beautiful little bay of Villa Franca. Go under ground, again, and you presently emerge upon a rocky headland jutting out into the sapphire, sea. This cape bears aloft the little town of, Monaco. On the extreme southern side of the headland is a deep bay, beyond which, at a distance of less than half a mile, stands Monte Carlo on another and lesser promontory. The bay is lined with hotels, cafes, shops and lodging houses. The famous Casino crowns the slope of Monte Carlo, and contains the gambling rooms, concert hall, and theatre. Near this massive structure are more hotels and the enclosures for pigeon shooting. The walks are shaded by orange trees and cacti, while a velvet turf spreads like a verdant carpet under the trees. All this was the work of the late M. Blanc, who established the Casino and its environs, after his enforced departure from Baden-Baden. But in reality this stately palace was erected, and the surrounding grounds laid out, at the expense of the dupes, the blacklegs, and the courtesans of Europe. M. Garnier, who planned the Grand Opera House, at Paris, designed the architecture of the Casino in its sensuous detail. But this devil’s university of Monte Carlo, with its classic rooms, and chairs for Professors Belial and Mammon, is, in sober truth, the erection of those named. The fortune is always with roulette and rouge et noir.

There are six tables in the Casino for roulette, where the lowest stake is twenty-five francs. Two rouge et noir, where the lowest stake is twenty francs. These tables are always crowded, Sundays and week days alike. Some persons, it is true, make lucky coups, but the majority lose, of course. Some years ago a British dowager won four hundred pounds, and a German two thousand pounds the same day.

By some Europeans, it has been insisted that while Monte Carlo may not have moral or elevating influence, yet men will play, and it is not worse there than at the club. This plea is specious and superficial. The club is private; it is not open to women and children. The mischief that might occur there is not an example for the public, and therefore not contagious. The club does not exist for the sole purpose, and is not supported by the profits of the play. It is not an instrument of wholesale demoralization, as is Monte Carlo. The latter is a curse, a public scandal, and an unmitigated evil. In these times of spirited foreign policy, a more wholesome exercise of diplomacy cannot be imagined for some influential European power, than bringing pressure to bear on France for the extinction of Monte Carlo. It is a disgrace to the French Republic that under its protecting wing this pandering to European vice should be allowed, or that Monte Carlo should be a shelter for the sharpers expelled from other haunts on the continent, there to fatten on the wages and spoils of iniquity. If Monaco and Monte Carlo were cleansed of this blot, they would be among the most alluring resorts of the world. The demoralizing tables, and the vicious crew should not be allied with such delightful scenery and salubrious climate. Let us hope that the report is not true that an American syndicate has offered eight million francs for the right of keeping a gambling house at Taft-chi-dar, Hungary, like that at Monte Carlo.

M. Blanc, now dead, obtained the lease of the place from the Prince of Monaco, agreeing to pay him an enormous rental, one-tenth of the profits of the game, and to defray the expense of maintaining the standing army, the police, and the menials of the principality. M. Blanc’s widow 117now enjoys the profits accruing from the bargain made by her husband. The games at Monte Carlo are kept running from noon until 11 o’clock at night, every day in the year, Sundays not excepted, and are patronized by the titled and most aristocratic personages in Europe. In the height of the season, from December to April, Monte Carlo is one of the most cosmopolitan places on earth. English, French, Germans, Russians, Americans, Spaniards—all nationalities, almost, are to be seen about its gaming tables. Elegantly dressed women, young and old, some of them the wives, or members of the families, of the most reputable men in Europe; some representatives of the demi-monde mingle with the throng and engage in the play. The interior of the Casino presents the appearance of a grand drawing room feté. Monte Carlo is the last and sole representativerepresentative of the class of gambling resorts of which Baden Baden, Wiesbaden, Homburg; and Ems, were formerly notable examples.

It is said that the game at Monte Carlo is undoubtedly fair. This may be true. The eyes of the greatest scoundrels in Europe, it is argued, are bent upon the dealers, and that ought to be a sufficientsufficient guarantee against any fraud being practiced. But this does not certainly follow. The powers of a Professor of Legerdemain are admitted, and knowing this, it would be childish to guarantee the integrity of any professional gambler.

At the Casino eight roulette and two trente et quarante, or rouge et noir tables, are kept running. Roulette is not played precisely as in America, the player has less odds against him, from the fact that the tables have only one zero instead of two. The heaviest play occurs at the trente et quarante tables. This game is played with six packs of cards of 52 each. Having shuffled the cards, the dealer passes them to the nearest player, sometimes the nearest female player, to be cut. It is a gamblers superstition that bad luck attends the one who cuts the cards, and accordingly the professional often shirks that duty. The pack is not cut as in the United States. The operation consists of inserting a blue 118card in the sextuple pack. Two rows of cards are dealt on the table, the first representing black and the second red. The ace counts as one, and court cards as ten each, and the tailleur, or dealer, continues to turn cards for the black row until the aggregate number of their spots exceeds thirty. Suppose he deals three “court” cards, or tens, he must deal another. If it is a deuce he calls “deux,” and then proceeds to deal the red row, which, perhaps, aggregates thirty-five. “Cinq,” exclaims the dealer. The black row being nearest to thirty wins, and accordingly, all who have bet on the black win the amount of their stakes, and the bank rakes in all that has been bet on the red.

Should the two rows tie, on thirty-one, the bank takes half of the stakes, but ties on any other number are considered as a stand-off and the player is free to withdraw or shift his bet, as he pleases. Bets may also be made on “couleur,” or “envers,” the former winning, when the winning color is the same as that of the first card dealt; and the latter, when it is not. In the time when Baden-Baden and Homburg preserved the air of Paris; when Meyerbeer played at Spa, and while Tamberlik was losing his Louis, trente et quarante was played with a quart de refait, which only gave the bank a quarter, instead of a half, of the money on the table, in case of a tie at thirty-one. This was the practice, also, at Monte Carlo, until these other public gambling establishments were closed. These ties, like all other manifestations of chance, occur with great irregularity. On some days there will be scarcely one; on others they will occur with terrible frequency. M. Blanc invented a system of insurance against these ties at thirty-one, and heavy players generally avail themselves of it. It consists, simply, in the player paying to the bank one per cent. of his bet, which being done, the bank does not take any of his stake when such tie occurs. In such case the player pays one per cent. for the privilege of playing a game in which the chances are precisely even.

At Monte Carlo no bet of less than a Louis (four dollars) is taken at the trente et quarante tables, and no bet larger than 12,000 francs ($2,400). The smallest bet allowed at roulette is five francs, and the largest 5,000 francs. On a single number, nine Louis, or 180 francs, is the largest bet permitted. Roulette, compared with trente et quarante, is a very unfavorable game for the player.

Formerly, at European gaming resorts, the game was played with two zeros and thirty-six numbers; that is, two chances out of thirty-eight were reserved for the bank. With the advent of M. Blanc at Homburg a more liberal policy was inaugurated, and only one zero was employed. When M. Blanc went to Monte Carlo he made the game still more favorable to the players by taking, when the ball struck zero, only half, instead of the whole of the bets on the colors, odd or even, etc. Including the 119zero, the Monte Carlo roulette table has thirty-seven numbers, and the player on a single number is paid thirty-five for one. The advantage which the bank has, is easily seen. In backing two numbers with a single bet, one is banking one eighteenth of the table, and is paid seventeen times his stake. In backing four numbers, “en carré,” as it is called, he bets on one-ninth and is paid eight for one. Accordingly, as he places his bet, the punter, even though he stakes but a single coin, can play one, two, three, four, or six numbers at once. He can also bet on the first, second or third twelve in the thirty-six numbers, or one of the three columns in which the numbers are arranged on the board, or on the colors, or odd or even, or on what is called “manque et passe,” the former signifying the numbers from one to eighteen, and the latter those from nineteen to thirty-six. Betting on the columns, or the dozens, against which the bank pays two to one, is a favorite game for punters, who potter about the room with a handful of five-franc pieces, and struggle all day long to win or lose a Louis or two. Twenty francs is a Louis, in the language of the gamester. However he may bet, the advantage is ever preserved by the table.

Though the games at Monte Carlo are kept running throughout the year, the great rush of visitors occurs between December and April, during which period hundreds of thousands from all parts of the civilized world visit the Casino. Very many stay at the hotels or villas in Monte Carlo, but the majority come and go on the trains from Nice, Menton, San Remo and other Riviera resorts. Particularly is this true of the sports of both sexes, who, for the most part, make Nice their headquarters. The gardens and drives about Monte Carlo are as famous as those of any other Riviera towns, and share, with the Casino, the attention of visitors.

Connected with the Casino is a spacious and richly adorned theater, in which an orchestra of about seventy-five instruments furnish, each afternoon and evening, as fine music as can be heard in Europe. These entertainments are free, and are always crowded. The most stylish hotel and café, the Hotel de Paris and the Café de Paris, which flanks the Casino on either side, respectively, are both under the same management as the Casino. The café, particularly at night, is a gay place, and couples are continually emerging from the “lair of the tiger” to while away a few minutes in the enjoyment of ices and liquid refreshments under the cool awning of the café. This is a favorite resort of the courtesans, who are ever on the watch for men who have made a winning, and who, in consequence, are often in a mood to be lavish in spending their easily procured gains.

In French story and song we read much of the chivalry—the valor and honor—of their Kings and nobles in the days of old.

120Here, again, “distance lends enchantment to the view.” If we are to credit the impartial annalist, bad is the pictures of the noblesse in early France, addicted as they were to violence, drunkennessdrunkenness and gaming. In spite of the admonitions of the virtuous St. Louis, his brother was a determined gamester and, while in prison, gambled away his estates. We have it, on authority of Froissart, that the Duc de Touraine, a brother of Charles VI, set to work eagerly to win the King’s money, and was transported with joy, one day, at having won five thousand livres; his first cry was: “Monseigneur, faites-moi payer!” “Please pay me, Sire.” Gambling went on, not only in the camp, but even in the face of the enemy. In their devotion to the practice generals squandered their property and imperiled the safety of their country. While in command of the French army before Florence, under Charles V., Philibert Chalon, Prince d’Orange, lost at play the money with which he had been entrusted to pay the soldiers. As a result, he was obliged to capitulate to those he might have conquered. During the reign of Charles VI, the Hotel de Nesle was made infamous by a series of gaming catastrophes, in which, among the nobility and opulent men of the day, who alone were allowed to frequent it, not a few lost their fortunes and their honor and some even their lives. In the following reign, that of Charles VII, a wonderful reformation in the matter of gambling was effected among the lower and middle classes, and by the preaching of an Augustinian friar, at whose instigation the people lit fires in several quarters of Paris and, with the greatest enthusiasm, threw into them their cards and other gambling instruments. This reformation did not reach the royal Palace and mansions of the nobility, where gaming continued as before, but it seems to have quite effectively checked the gambling mania among the common people for a number of years.

Louis XI, according to Brantome, being desirous, one day, of having something written, called to him an ecclesiastic who had an inkstand hanging at his side, and bade him open it. As the later obeyed a set of dice fell out.

“Sire,” replied the priest, “they are a remedy for the plague.” “Well said,” exclaimed the king, “you are a fine paillard,” (a word he was wont to use) “you are the man for me.”

Thereupon the king took the priest into his service, for he was fond of bon mots, and sharp wits, and was not adverse to tempting dame Fortuna himself with the dice.

Henry III established card and dice rooms in the Louvre, and information to this effect having been sent to a coterie of Italian gamesters by their representatives in Paris, they gained admission at court and won thirty thousand crowns from the king. Henry III, according to Brantome, 121was very fond of play, but not through cupidity or avarice. He was wont to play tennis and, if he won, distribute his winnings among his companions, and, if he lost, would pay, not only his wager, but the losses of all engaged in the game. At that time, the stakes were not usually above three or four hundred crowns. Later, play ran much higher, and bets of ten or twelve thousand crowns were not uncommon.

It is related that a French Captain, named La Roue, once offered a bet of twenty thousand crowns against one of Andrew Doria’s war galleys. Doria took the wager, but immediately declared it off, fearing the ridiculous position in which he would be left should he lose. “I don’t wish this young adventurer,” he said, “who has nothing worth naming to lose, should he win my galley, to go and triumph in France over my fortune and my honor.”

Henry IV, when very young and stinted in ready money, used to raise money with which to gratify his growing passion for gaming by sending his own promissory note to his friends with the request that they should cash it, an experiment that almost invariably succeeded, as his friends were only too glad to have the prince beholden to them. The influence of Henry IV was exceedingly pernicious in the matter of gaming, as in other vices. Gambling became the ruling vice, and many noted families were brought to ruin by it.

In a single year the Duc de Biron lost over 500,000 crowns (£125,000). The celebrated D’Audigne wrote: “My son lost twenty times more than he was worth, so that, finding himself without resources, he abjured his religion.” Henry IV was, indeed, the gambling exemplar of France. He was very avaricious, and those who played with him had either to lose or to offend their sovereign.

The Duke of Savoy, it is said, once sacrificed 40,000 pistoles (about £28,000) rather than incur the king’s enmity. The king always wanted “revanche,” or revenge, when he lost, and often used his royal authority in exacting it. The extent of gambling in France at this period was astonishing, and Paris swarmed with gamesters.

Bassompierre says in his memoirs that he won 500,000 livres in a single year, and that his friend, Pementello, won more than 200,000 crowns (£50,000—$250,000). It was at this period that, for the first time, were established “Academies de jeu,” or gaming academies, as they were called. They were public gambling houses, to which all classes of society, even to the lowest, were admitted. Scarcely a day passed without its suicide or scandal arising from the ruin of somebody through gambling.

Upon the accession of Louis XIII the laws against gambling were revived, and a vigorous attempt was made to enforce them. Nearly fifty licensed gaming houses in Paris, which had been paying half a sovereign a 122day to each of a number of magistrates, were closed. As a consequence of this movement, gaming among the lower classes was checked to a considerable extent, but little, if any, effect was produced upon the progress of the vice among the nobility and the rich, beyond causing the practice to be carried on with much greater secrecy.

It is said that the favorite stake of the Marechal D’Ancre was 20,000 pistoles (£10,000—$50,000). Louis XIII was opposed to gambling, and indeed to all games, with the single exception of chess, of which he was exceedingly fond.

Gambling became furious and universal again under the reign of Louis XIV. The revolutions effected in morals by Cardinal Richelieu were entirely nullified, at least so far as gambling was concerned, by Cardinal Mazarin. He introduced gaming at the court of Louis XIV in 1648, and, according to St. Pierre, induced the king and queen regent to not only countenance, but engage with much interest in various games of chance. Everybody who had expectations at court learned to play cards as a prerequisite to success. Games were often continued all through the night, and the gaming mania quickly spread from the court to the city, and thence to the country. One of the evil effects of this was shown in the marked decrease in the respect shown to women. Under the infatuation of the play they would remain up all night in company with their male fellow gamesters and would give up their honor to pay their losings, or to secure a loan with which to continue the indulgence of their passion for play.

From the time of Louis XIV., gambling again spread among the French people, even the magistrates becoming inveterate gamesters. Cardinal de Retz stated that in 1650, the oldest magistrate in the parlimentparliment of Bordeaux, also reputed the wisest, staked his entire property at play one night, and that so general was the gambling mania, the act was in no wise thought to his discredit.

Madame de Sevigne, familiar as she was with all that transpired at the “iniquitous court,” as she calls it, has left more than one picture of the disgraceful state of the gambling habit there present. In the private houses of the crown officials, even the nobility gambled for money, lands, houses, jewels and wearing apparel. Gourville, in his memoirs, writes that within a few years he won more than a million francs, while a few won considerable amounts, many more brought ruin upon themselves and their families.

In addition to the licensed gaming houses, others were maintained in the mansions of the ambassadors and representatives of Foreign Courts. Indeed several gamesters of quality, in fullness of their temeritytemerity offered 123to hire a hotel for a certain plenipotentiary and to defray all expenses incident to the establishment, if he would but permit one apartment to be used for play, and allow their valets to wear his livery. In 1775, Sartines, lieutenant of police, licensed gambling houses in Paris, and directed that the fees thus obtained should be applied to the foundation and support of hospitals.

Women were then allowed to visit these houses two days in the week. So numerous became the crimes, misfortunes and scandals directly attributable to gambling, that it was prohibited in 1778. At court, and in the houses of the ambassadors, however, it continued to flourish, soon the public houses re-opened their doors, and the vice was even more rampant than before, because of the temporary check. Suicides and bankruptcies became so frequent, that the attention of parliament was called to the subject, and it placed the gambling houses under rigid regulations, which the proprietors were forbidden to violate, under penalty of the pillory and whipping post.

Gambling was a conspicuous vice during the reign of Louis XVI. Fouche, the minister of police, received an income of £128,000 ($640,000) a year for licensing, or “privileging” the gaming establishments. These furnished employment for not less than 120,000 persons, and, it is said, they were all spies of Fouche. In 1836, so long, so scandalous and so disastrous had been the rule of licensed vice, that public opinion revolted at a further continuance of the policy, and all gambling houses were ordered closed from January 1st, 1838. Since that time none have been licensed, and gambling in France is on the same footing as in England,—prohibited by law, but protected in secret.

In the French world M. Vernon was both influential and conspicuous in his day. He has given to the world an interesting sketch of gambling in Paris, from the Consulate to 1840. When a young man he sought the allurements of the gaming table, and for several years was addicted to the practice of this vice. His experience as a gamester would be a lesson, in itself, for every thinking man, could it be here given in all its masterly analysis. So elaborate is it, however, that it cannot be given the necessary space.

Under the regime of 1840, M. Thiers, then president of the cabinet, offered M. Vernon several places in the employ of the government. The latter, however, requested the Maître des Requêtes. “The thing is impossible,” replied Thiers; “the traditions of the country would not allow an ex-manager of play to such a noble position,”position,” and M. Thiers instanced, among others, a State Counselor, whose name and virtue then commanded the highest respect. M. Vernon smiled and left M. Thiers 124to his allusion. This very virtuous statesman, like M. Vernon, had been one of the most assiduous frequenters of the gambling houses. One day, thereafter, M. Vernon placed twenty francs on the rouge; he won, and was paid by the banker; wishing, soon after, to take up his twenty francs, he found they had disappeared. When the “deal” had ended, a player stepped up to M. Vernon, and said: “See here, Monsieur, here are the twenty franc pieces you are looking for. I took them up by mistake.” This absent-minded player was none other than M. Thiers’ virtuous State Counselor.

Two popular gambling resorts in the Paris of that day were Frascadi’s and the Circle des Etrangers. In both places visitors were required to leave their hats with the servants, in the vestibule, for which they were given a check. Servants also brought sugar and water gratuitously; while at Frascadi’s refreshments, in large variety, could be ordered. At the Circle des Etrangers, the visitor was permitted to sup with the person or persons he had invited to the resort. In some gambling houses of the lower order, money upon personal credit was loaned to the patrons by the inmates. At Frascadi’s and the Circle des Etrangers as well, large sums were loaned to known players without a receipt. Such loans were always recompensed at the will of the borrower. One could bet as low as ten cents in some houses of the second and third class, but at roulette, as a rule, the first stakes could not be under two francs, and at trente et un, the first stake could not be less than five francs. In all games, the first or the highest doubling stakes, could not exceed 12,000 francs. All gambling houses opened at noon and closed at midnight. At the Circle des Etrangers gambling commenced at eight o’clock only on the days that dinners were given, and on all other days at ten o’clock. At Frascadi’s and the Circle des Etrangers suppers, were occasionally given, with balls.

“I often met at one resort,” said M. Vernon, “a literary man with powdered hair, who in his lucky bets, would rejoice over his winnings in Latin. He was a poor wretch, and the least loss would make him penniless. One day he touched me on the shoulder and led me out into the hall: ‘See here,’ said he, ‘take this Persius and this Juvenal, and give me forty cents.’ I refused to pay less than a dollar for these two Latin poets. His joy was excessive, but in half an hour he returned to me, and putting his hand in his pocket said, ‘take that pair of black silk stockings, and give me what you please.’ I had consented to diminish his library, but I would not consent to wear his old clothing.”

“At one time a young man, who was about to be married, came up from the provinces with 1,500 francs to purchase his wedding gifts. He returned home, at the end of the week, empty-handed, having lost everything at play. His fiancee, on learning the facts, broke the engagement.

“The bank is not completely protected from swindlers. Two young men entered Frascadi’s one evening. One staked on the rouge fifty Louis 125d’or in double Louis. The other staked on the noir, the same sum in similar coins. The rouge won and the fifty Louis were paid. The stakes and money won were immediately taken away. The banker took up the stakes lost on the noir, and saw that these double Louis were merely forty cent pieces well gilded. The player who had won had instantly departed. The other was arrested, whereupon, he was not at a loss for argument. ‘I did not say,’ he said, ‘that I staked fifty Louis. I have not given you counterfeit money; nay I lost a hundred francs. It was your business to be more careful about paying the party beside me.’ The affair ended here, and the bank lost its 900 francs.

“A celebrated general invented a trick which still bears his name. One day, during the empire, he staked at the Circle des Etrangers, at rouge et noir, a small rouleau sealed at both ends, which looked exactly like a rouleau d’or of 1,000 francs. After he lost, he took up the rouleau and gave the bank a thousand franc notes. He won, and said to the banker who in turn offered him a thousand franc notes, ‘I beg your pardon, I staked more than that.’ He opened the roll, and drew out of the midst of some gold pieces it contained, fifteen or twenty thousand franc notes. The general was paid, but the lesson was never forgotten, and no one was allowed to play except with his money open and with limited stakes.”

Before 1779, public gaming was authorized in France, but was afterwards abolished. Under the Consulate, Fouche farmed out the gambling privileges to a certain Perrin, and enjoined him especially to open a Circle des Etrangers. However, this offer was not gratuitous. Benazet, who was a farmer of the gambling houses during the Restoration, said that Perrin gave to Fouche fifty Louis d’or every morning without taking a receipt. Not satisfied with this, Fouche frequently made police drafts on him of ten or twenty thousand francs.

The Circle des Etrangers frequently gave balls, known as the Bals Livre. During the Directory and under the Consulate, Bals were all the rage. Baron Hamelin, Madam Tollien, and indeed all the distinguished ladies of society were invited to these Bals. During the Consulate and the first days of the Empire, Napoleon, in company with Duroc, one of his most intimate generals, visited them for a few hours, on several occasions, both being masked. The president of the Circle des Etrangers barely allowed Perrin to show himself. If the unanimous testimony of all contemporaries of the Directory and the Consulate can be trusted, nothing can give an idea of the pleasures, the brilliancy and the intoxication of this period of revival.

Perrin, who was made colonel, in order that he might deal Pharaon before the queen without offense, was succeeded by Chalabre. Marie Antoinette played Pharaon nearly every evening at the Tuilleries, at Versailles and Trianon. Subsequently, the farming of the gambling houses was 126public, and the four successive farmers were M. Bernard, Chalabre, Boursault and Benezet. In every respect Chalabre was a man of the old regime. He powdered, and was a man of fine manners. Boursault, on the contrary, was a man of the times, with a marked face, heavy voice, violent and passionate. He made himself heard, perhaps applauded, in more than one club during the Restoration. It was his aim to participate only in that which gave large profit. He therefore contracted for the mud, for the night-soil and for the gambling houses of Paris. His house was splendidly arranged, and he had also a rare collection of plants and flowers, which in those days were a luxury. Benazet, the last farmer of the gambling houses, was an ex-attorney, a man of talent and enterprise, and both obliging and generous. At the revolution of July, he was elected the commandant of one of the legions of the National Guard of the environs of Paris. He was subsequently appointed chevalier in the Legion of Honor. When alone with his intimate acquaintances, they called him the “Emperor.” At the Cheque office of the Theatre Francais, they invariably said to him “Mon Prince.”

While M. Benazet was farmer, all the gambling houses in Paris were open. Said M. Vernon, “the leases each contained the following provisions. The farmer paid the treasurer by equal monthly instalments, the annual sum of 5,500,000 francs. Upon this sum appropriated to the city, the Minister of the Interior, and under the Restoration, the Minister of the King’s Household, received annually, and by equal monthly instalments the sum of 1,660,000 francs, as an appropriation to the theatres and other places of amusement. The Minister of the Interior took from it also a good deal more money for the political refugees, or the disasters in the department, and for charity and all sorts of misfortunes.

“The expenses of the gambling houses were fixed in the lease in the sum of 2,400,000 francs. The farmer also received out of the net receipts 100,000 francs as his interest, and was obliged to have always either upon the gaming tables or in his safe, 1,219,000 francs. The result of gambling per day, and per gaming table was stated in a formulated journal. The total capital at the beginning and at the end of the gambling, was written in the presence of the cities’ controllers, and showed the net proceeds. The ninth article of the lease stated that all expenses of the administration to the annual sum of 5,550,000 francs appropriated to the city being there paid, should further be appropriated to the city, all the net profits when there were profits, one-half when the total annual net profits did not exceed 9,000,000 francs belonging to the farmer. On the 31st day of December, 1837, the gambling houses of Paris were closed by vote of the Chamber of Deputies. From 1819 to 1837 the gambling houses cleared from 6,841,838 francs to 9,008,628 francs per year, making a grand total from 1819 to 1837 of 137,313,403 francs, and the money of foreigners formed a greater part of this sum.”

127Gambling was universally prevalent in Paris during 1829-30, and the houses were very numerous and varied in character. Of the higher order, were the Salon and Frascadi’s; specimens of the lower class were to be found in the Palais Royal. The Salon and Frascadi’s were on the Rue Richelieu, near the boulevard. They were of pretentious appearance, externally, and magnificently furnished. They pretended to be exclusive and to admit only such as were vouched for by some person of recognized standing. Access was not difficult, however, and at Frascadi’s particularly, admittance was rarely refused to those who were decently dressed. This most popular resort opened for business at one o’clock. Rouge et noir, roulette and dice, were played in different rooms, the first named being most popular. In addition to the elegant furnishings of the establishment, which included everything conducive to the comfort and convenience of the patrons, the directors provided another feature “for the good of the house.” They admitted a number of the demi-monde, and, in fact, encouraged their presence. The beauty, rich toilets and engaging manners of these females were an attraction to young men, who would not otherwise have visited the establishment.

These women played more or less, and naturally their example was followed by the rich scions who sought their favor. Five francs was the smallest, and 12,000 francs the largest wager permitted at Frascadi’s. These rooms were frequented by the nobleman, the mechanic, and the loafer, provided their apparel was tolerably presentable. A large proportionproportion of the patrons were foreigners, the English predominating.

The lower class of gambling houses, in the Paris of that time, were supported mainly by mechanics, clerks, draftsmen, and the like, men whose character would have been ruined had it been known that they were addicted to play, and who would not have gambled, probably, had not the law thrown its protecting arm around the gaming dens.

In an English work on ecarte, the author says of gambling in Paris: “In no capital of the world, are the exigencies of the needy and dissipated made more an object of speculation than in Paris. As for our Jews, or usurers, they are not only honest, in comparison, but far inferior, both in their number and in their practices, to the wretches who are everywhere to be met with in the French capital, ready to advance their money at an extortionate interest, provided the security afforded by the parties is such as to preclude all possible risk. With the natives of the country themselves, these people are not only limited in their advances, but scrupulous to a nicety in regard to public credit, since, as by the loss of friends, a debtor for a term of confinement not exceeding five years, is entitled to his liberty, and becomes exonerated from any pre-existing claim, it not infrequently occurs that those who are heavily laden with debt, prefer to be incarcerated for a few years, to giving up property which 128constitutes their whole fortune and the means of their future subsistence. The money lenders keep a regular list of names noted down in their books, to which, in cases of necessity, they usually refer and advance or withhold in proportion as their employers have been more or less forward in their liquidation of former engagements. This caution has only reference to the gay and dissipated of their own country. But with foreigners, and Englishmen in particular, the case is widely different, for upon these they have a hold which is equal to all the mortgages and freehold securities in the world, being in the event of defalcation almost certain of the debtor and for life.

“But the principal auxiliaries of these people are the dashing, splendid females, who frequent the salons d’ecarte. Although the greater number of these women have independent incomes, and form attachments for young men, they usually meet in these haunts, without any view of personal interest. Still there are many who are often without any other gifts than those afforded by their natural attractions, and on whom the irresistible impulse of play operates a desire to produce, in any possible manner, the means of gratifying their favorite propensity. Most of these also have some sort of liaisonliaison, either with their own countrymen or with strangers. When, therefore, as the natural result of the play and lavish expenditure of his chere amie of the moment, the immediate finances of the young man are exhausted, and he has no longer the means of gratifying his favorite passion, or of conducing to the amusement of the mistress, she kindly suggests the possibility of his procuring a sum of bills on such and such terms. These are ever in favor of the money lender, and furnished with the necessary powers, she instantly repairs to one of them and bargains for a present for herself in proportion to the amount required. Then when the money is all expended, either wholly ruined, or what is nearly the same thing, thrown into St. Pelagie, at all events, unable to command further resources, the young man can no longer please his fair enchantress; she forsakes him without the least ceremony, and looks out for some other lover whose prospects are yet in a flourishing condition. Very frequently these women have for their lovers young men moving in the first sphere of Parisian society, yet rendered nearly as indigent as themselves from play, whose credit with the money lending race has long been ended.”ended.”

Gambling in Paris is carried on mainly in resorts of three distinct kinds,—regularly established clubs, places called “clubs,” but which are open to the public solely for gambling purposes, and the illegal gambling houses. At all the clubs properly so-called, play runs high. Strange as it may seem, at first thought, the danger of being cheated is greater at these “clubs” than elsewhere, for the reason that occasional visitors do not suspect dishonest methods in such a place. Knowing this, sharpers 129manage to introduce themselves and then fleece the members as rapidly as is possible, without exciting suspicion. This cannot be so readily accomplished in the so-called “clubs,” which are maintained solely for gambling, owing to the constant watch maintained by the crooks, sharpers and professionals who frequent these resorts. The same state of things prevails at the illegal gaming houses. The French are quite as fond of gambling as they ever were, though there has been a change in the manifestation of the propensity. They now seem to gamble more for pleasure than gain, and to prefer games of the simpler sort. In betting they are excitable like the Italians, but show better judgment. The English surpass them in coolness, and the Americans in shrewdness and audacity.

The most approved methods of cheating are practiced in the Paris gambling dens. One is by arranging a “chaplet,” that is, putting the cards into the deck in some particular order, the succession of which is retained by the memory of the dealer; “stocking” the cards, as it is called in the United States. The collusion of a card room attendant is necessary to affect this. With a “chaplet” the dealer knows, of course, what each card is before it is turned. Dealers have been known to obtain an unfair advantage by having on a table in front of them a highly polished snuff box, or cigarette case; which, serving as a mirror, enables their quick and practiced eye to catch the reflection of the cards, as they are dealt.

In American parlance, the same device is called a “shiner.” The time honored fraud of “ringing in a cold deck” is still occasionally practiced, and the utmost watchfulness does not always prevent it. The dealers are sometimes the losers at this game, for, through bribery, or otherwise, sharpers now and then succeed in having attendants supply decks of marked cards. An instance is told of a sharper who obtained a supply of marked cards of fine quality and then succeeded in selling them in large quantities to persons who supplied such goods to gaming establishments. Waiting until the cards were in use, the sharper won many thousands of dollars before the fraud was discovered. From time to time the same trick has been successfully played in many parts of the United States.

M. Des Perriers, it is stated, once saw a friend of his playing ecarte with a stranger and after watching the game for awhile perceived that his friend was being cheated. Watching his opportunity Des Perriers warned his friend of the fact, and the latter coolly replied “Oh that’s all right, I know perfectly well that he is cheating me, but it is agreed that every time I catch him at it, I shall score an extra point.” This recalls the story of the game on a MississippiMississippi river boat, wherein one friend warned another that the latter was being cheated by a certain gambler in the game. “Well, what of it, Isn’t it his deal?” the friend replied.

130The number of celebrated Frenchmen who have been ruined by gambling is great. Of the number were Coquillart, a poet of the 15th century, Guido the great painter, Rotrote, Voiture, M. Sallo, counselor to the parliament of Paris, and Paschasiur Justus, a celebrated physician. Montaigne and Descartes, the philosophers and Carden the scientist, were all gamblers at one stage of their life, but each succeeded in conquering the passion.

Previous to the reign of Louis XIV., women could not gamble openly, and retain their reputation. If it was known that they were addicted to play, they lost caste. Before the end of the reign of Louis XV., the wives of aristocrats, generally, played heavily in their own houses without exciting much, if any, adverse criticism; and, by the close of the last century, gambling among women of the higher classes was almost universal and viewed as a matter of course. It has been often remarked that with the so-called respectable there has been less honor among women gamesters than among men; many of them, indeed, not hesitating to claim unfair advantages, and even to engage in downright lying and cheating. Many women of wealth and title have by heavy losses at the gaming table, been brought to a state of desperation and degradation most surprising. Instances have been numerous where they have sacrificed their virtue in order to obtain money with which to continue the indulgence of their passion for play. Cases are not unknown where they even sacrificed the virtues of their own daughters to the same end. The beautiful Countess of Schwiechelt, it is said, after losing 50,000 livres at Paris became so desperate that she resorted to the robbery, of a friend, Madame Demidoff, in order to repair her losses. The latter possessed a magnificent coronet of emeralds which, at a ball given by her, was stolen by the Countess, who next day proceeded to raise money with the coronet as collateral. She was detected and convicted of the crime. She had many influential friends who tried to induce Napoleon I. to pardon her, which he steadfastly refused to do.

Towards the close of the Reign of Napoleon III., the circles or clubs, became greatly demoralized by card gambling. Heavy play, which had been confined chiefly to the mansions of the rich, places of considerable privacy, began to be common at the clubs and be talked about in public. Disregard for the gambling laws gradually increased, until after the Franco-Prussian war, and numerous “clubs” were organized solely as gambling resorts. The authorization of the Prefect of Police was necessary, whenever a circle or club was started, and one of the stipulated conditions was, that no play for ready money stakes should occur at such club. It is unnecessary to say that this regulation is now scandalously ignored and that the authorities wink at the infraction. Baccarat is the favorite game at these resorts, as it is in the more aristocratic and legitimate 131clubs of the city. In this connection, by way of illustration, the following experience of a once prosperous founder of one of these circles, or clubs, told by himself, is interesting:

“I had never been in a gambling club in my life,” he said,said, “until one evening in 1872, a friend took me to the circle de —— in the Place de l’Opera. I had a capital dinner and a cigar of the first choice, and after this everybody went into the card room. “Cincq cents louis en banque,” (five hundred louis in the bank) were the first words I heard, and then I watched the people play. I understood nothing of Baccarat at that time, and my friend had to explain to me how it was played, how much the different counters were worth, and how the man sitting in the centre of the table opposite the dealer, and passing the cards to the players with a sort of lath, and paying out counters or raking them up after each coup, was an attendant, called a croupier, specially engaged for the purpose of conducting the play. I was struck by seeing this croupier at each bank, about every ten minutes on an average, drop several counters, representing a louis each, into a small slit in the table within easy reach of his hand. “Why is he doing that?” I asked my friend. “That is the percentage which the house takes on the banks,” he replied, “ostensibly for the use of the cards. That slit you perceive into which the money is dropped is called the “cagnotte.” Not wishing to play myself, and having nothing else to do, I thought I would see exactly how much the croupiers would put in this “cagnotte” within a given time, and I found that in an hour twenty-nine louis had been levied on the various banks. “But at this rate,” I said to my friend, “the house must take in an immense lot of money in the course of a few months.” “Rather,” he replied. “It is one of the greatest money-making concerns in the world.” “And how do they manage to start these clubs?” I asked. “Well, you see, it all depends upon the Prefecture; if you can only get an authorization you will find any number of capitalists to give you what money you want to carry on your club with.” I said nothing, but I determined to get an authorization for a club myself, if I could. I spoke about it to some of my friends—you must know that I was then a fabricant de brouges, and got my decoration just after the war for having allowed them to convert a lot of my bronzes into a cannon for the defence of Paris—I spoke to my friends, and we formed a committee, and then I waited on the Prefect’s secretary with a document setting forth that a few commercial gentlemen of the —— arrondissement wished to open a club where they could meet after the business of the day, etc. “Yes, but you are sure you will have no cards?” said the secretary, “Monsieur le Prefect won’t hear of gambling.” I said: “Only a little Piquet, perhaps, or ecarte; nothing more.” Well, after waiting a few months I got my authorization, and then that scoundrel, Theodore, who cheated me out 132of seventy thousand francs later on, come in with capital as cashier. Ole Z., the usurer, came in too, and we took that apartment on the boulevard—only 16,000 francs rent. We sent out our invitations to the press, and to the leading players, and gave a grand dinner for the opening night. Well sir, you may believe me if you like, but we made 12,000 francs cagnotte in that one evening, and the first year I made 300,000 francs for my share, and ought to have had more, only Theodore and Z. swindled me. But then, of course, I had to play; I had to keep the game going, and the luck was always against me. I had to sell out my share in the club. I lost that, and now you see where I am.”

“It was unnecessary for the narrator to finish for the one to whom he was speaking knew “where he was.” He had gambled away nearly a million francs in four years and exhausted his credit, and finally had been forced to take a position as “commissaire des jeux,” or steward in another den similar to the one at the head of which he had formerly prospered. He had dealt “banks” at a thousand or two thousand louis, and won and lost time and again a hundred thousand francs in a night. Now he was receiving in his menial position only a few guineas a week and his one consuming desire was to wager these at the table as soon as he got possession of them. This was not easy to do, for the commissaires are expected to refrain from playing. But he managed it in some way or another and invariably lost them before the evening passed. During the rest of the week, until his next wages were due, his only pleasure consisted in rehearsing to whoever would listen to the experiences of his halcyon days.”

Many men of like experience are to be found in the baccarat clubs of Paris. Some are in the height of their short-lived prosperity; the greater number, however, are wrecks. The class includes unsuccessful speculators on the Bourse, ex-government officials, and men who have failed in the legitimate callings in life. Gambling dens, the world over, are peopled by a horde of broken down, disreputable, and degraded beings, and those of Paris are not an exception.

So profitable to their managers are these baccarat clubs, that it is not surprising their number increased rapidly, until, at one time, there were nearly a hundred of them, the majority of which occupied pretentious and well-appointed quarters, until, a few years ago, in obedience to public indignation, an attempt was made to close them up. Many were compelled to shut their doors, but, as the movement was not thorough, a score or more remained, defiling and corrupting the best quarter of the city, prospering the more because of the diminished competition. As a rule, these clubs bear high-sounding names, not calculated to arouse suspicion in the mind of a stranger of the iniquitous business going on within their walls. The Cercle des Arts Liberaux, Cercle des Arts Industriels, 133Cercle des Artistes Dramatiques; such were and are specimens of these names. Standing side by side with clubs of genuine respectability, are some of these dens, in which it is unsafe to leave anything of the slightest value in an over-coat pocket. As a rule the baccarat clubs are managed with great shrewdness. Rules regarding entrance fees and dues exist, but merely that they may be cited when necessary in support of a claim that these institutions partake of the character of genuine clubs. “Members” are rarely asked for either fees or dues. Invitations by the hundred are sent to frequenters of the boulevards, and each one is given to understand that he may take his friends. Practically, these cercles are open to all who have money. Emissaries, known variously as rabatteurs, racoleurs, or rameneurs, or, as the English would call them, “bennets,” frequent public places, in order to specially invite rich foreigners and greenhorns with whom they may become acquainted. Journalists are always welcomed and treated handsomely, in order that they may puff the musical or other attractions offered, and that they may refrain from exposing the real character of the places. Elaborate dinners and luncheons are served at nominal prices; the rooms are richly furnished and adorned; there are reading rooms, containing a wide range of current literature, and writing rooms replete with all that convenience could suggest; liveried attendants, deferential and polite to a nicety, attend to all possible wants, and, in short, almost every conceivable attraction is provided. Those who enter and, amid all these seductions, resist the temptation to play, are exceedingly few, and to play is to lose. Visitors naturally infer that they are in the private club house of a company of gentlemen. The elegance is substantial enough, but the company in reality is largely composed of genteel scoundrels and thieves, who scruple at no dishonesty, provided the chances are fairly against detection.

These Paris clubs are exceedingly demoralizing, not only to the members and visitors, but to their attaches. Hundreds of persons, employed at first when mere boys, as pages, and rising (rather descending) to be croupiers, dealers, cashiers, etc., and gradually acquiring the desire to own houses and carriages, and keep mistresses, can attribute their ultimate ruin to these dens.

Dishonest playing is probably more rife in the Paris clubs now than ever before, and is carried on with skill never before equaled. Once in a while, as in the case of the very “respectable” Cercle de la Rue Royale, an expose is made of a system of cheating that has been pursued for months, perhaps, and for a week or two all Paris talks of the scandal. If the truth were known it would be found that similar practices obtain in nearly every gambling club. Only collusion between a menial, a croupier, the dealer, and perhaps one or two others, is necessary for marked cards to be introduced. Those in the secret, divide the ill-gotten 134profits and detection is not probable, unless a quarrel arises over the division of plunder. Cheating at baccarat is general, and organized bands of sharpers scour the cities of Europe, reaping a rich harvest from each one. The mechanism and methods of cheating at gambling have been perfected wonderfully within the last twenty or thirty years, as the reader of M. Hector Malots’s novel, “Baccara,” can well understand, and nowhere has this perfection manifested itself to a greater extent than in Paris. That Gambling is having a most demoralizing effect in Paris is indisputable.

The time is ripe for a reformation in Paris, and many are praying that it may come soon and be sweeping and thorough in character.

The Spaniards are as much addicted to gambling, at least, as any nationality. There is a tradition that they were once very liberal in their gaming, and Voltaire says: “The grandees of Spain had a generous ostentation; this was to divide the money won at play among all the bystanders of whatever condition.” Montefiero tells of the liberality of the Duke of Lima, Spanish minister to the Netherlands, who, when he entertained Gaston (brother of Louis XIII), with his retinue, was accustomed, 135after dinner, to put two thousand louis d’or on a large gaming table, to be gambled for by the Prince and his attendants. Such open-handedness certainly does not characterize the Spanish gamester of this day. He is as greedy as any gamester, judging from appearances. Gambling in Spain is general, and has always been practiced more openly than in other European countries.countries. “I have wandered through all parts of Spain,” writes a traveler, “and though in many places I have scarcely been able to procure a glass of wine, or a bit of bread, or any of the first conveniences of life, yet I never went through a village, however mean and out of the way, in which I could not have purchased a pack of cards.”

The nobility of Spain, for centuries, have been especially addicted to gambling. Not a few of this class, indeed, are said to live from the proceeds of the gaming table, and that, too, without any apparent loss in reputation. The condition of things in Spain thirty years ago, is thus described by another traveler: “After the bull-feast, I was invited to pass the evening at the hotel of a lady who had a public card assembly. This vile method of subsisting on the folly of mankind is confined, in Spain, to the nobility. None but women of quality are permitted to hold banks, and there are many whose faro banks bring them in a clear income of a thousand guineas a year. The lady to whom I was introduced is an old countess, who has lived nearly thirty years on the profits of the card tables in her house. They are frequented every day, and though both natives and foreigners are duped out of large sums by her, and her cabinet junto, yet it is the greatest house of resort in all Madrid. She goes to Court, visits people of the first fashion, and is received with as much respect and veneration as if she had exercised the most sacred functions of a divine profession. Many widows of great men have kept gaming houses, and lived splendidly on the vices of mankind. If you be not disposed to play, be neither a sharper nor a dupe you can not be admitted a second time to their assemblies. I was no sooner presented to the lady, than, she offered me cards, and on my excusing myself, because I really could not play, she made a very wry face, turned from me and said to another lady in my hearing, that she wondered how any foreigner could have the impertinence to come to her house for no other purpose than to make an apology for not playing. My Spanish conductor, unfortunately for himself, had not the same apology. He played and lost his money—two circumstances which constantly follow in these houses. While my friend was thus playing the fool, I attentively watched the countenance and motions of the lady of the house. Her anxiety, address and assiduity were equal to that of some skillful shop-keeper, who has a certain attraction to engage all to buy, and diligence to take care that none shall escape the net. I found out all her privy counsellors, by her arrangement of her parties at the different tables, and whenever she showed 136an extraordinary eagerness to fix one particular person with a stranger, the game was always decided the same way, and her good friend was sure to win the money. In Madrid one is scarcely welcome in polite society, unless he engages in play, and, it may be added, unless he loses much more than he wins. In the capital there are resorts where all classes meet and play together. In these places the tables are managed by suspicious looking men, who insist that you will be almost certain to win, if only you engage in play: They even go so far, in inviting you to play, as to assert that they themselves do not play for gain but for pleasure.”pleasure.”

Gambling is perhaps more distinctively a characteristic of the Latin races than of any other. Not only is it almost universal in Spain, but it seems to cling to Latin blood wherever it is found, however much it intermingles with that of other peoples. In Mexico, Central America, and the countries of South America, gambling thrives as in the mother country. “Chusa,” dice, cards, and lotteries are the principal means of indulging the vice, but there are many other devices and games in use. The lottery is an especial favorite, and no Mexican, Nicaraguan or Brazilian neglects taking one or more chances of getting a fortune in each drawing, as it occurs. Gambling in these countries is carried on with more publicity than in England, France or Germany. In none of the Spanish Republics on our South, is it acknowledged as one of the most debasing and ruinous vices to which humanity is addicted; indeed, by many, it is scarcely thought to occupy a place among the vices at all. It is regarded scarcely to the injury of a person’s reputation that he gambles, and it will doubtless be many years before serious attempts are made in these countries to suppress the evil.

In this connection may appropriately be appended a picture drawn by a tourist in Mexico, a Mr. Mason, illustrative of the gambling propensities of the Spanish Americans in that country. He writes: “This, being Easter Eve, was the first of those days especially set apart for gaming and idleness, and at about nine o’clock I went to the Plaza—an open space near the church—where I found many hundred people already assembled to amuse themselves. A large circle, surrounded by spectators and dancers, was especially set apart for fandangoes, which, whatever they may be in Spain, are in the New World much inferior in grace and activity to the common American dances, though the latter, it must be confessed, are usually to the sound of tin pans and pots and empty gourds. Here the music was somewhat better, though not less monotonous, and consisted of a guitar, a rude kind of harp, and a screaming woman with a falsetto voice. Beyond the fandango stood a range of booths beneath which men and women of all descriptions, old and young, rich and poor, officers in full uniform and beggars in rags, were gambling with the most intense interest, and individuals who, from their 137appearances, might be considered objects of charity, were fearlessly staking dollars—some even venturing a handful at one time. The favorite game was called “Chusa,” which is played on a deep saucer-shaped table, and resembled the “E. O.” of England.

“When the oppressive glare of the sun had ceased, and the cool evening breezes set in, Donna Francisca announced to me her intention of visiting the “Chusa,” and invited me to accompany her. She walked there in good state between Don Antonio and myself, preceded by her three servant maids, one of whom was in her Indian dress and had charge of the cigars for her mistress. We found our way to the largest gambling table, at which Francisca, having elbowed some ragged women off the only bench in the place, established herself in full play. Even ladies with mock jewels, and women of all shades and colors, with every variety of mien, crowded around their favorite game, and my landlady having succeed in getting the balls in her hands, became entirely occupied in throwing them, with such gestures, or turns of the arm, as, in her opinion, would insure success. Before leaving the Plaza, where Francisca remained playing until nearly daylight, I made my way through the crowd to take a last peek at her, and saw a fellow to whom I had paid a real (the eighth of a dollar) in the morning for sweeping before my door, and who was almost in rags, standing beside my fair friend, acting as banker to the table, at which I suppose he had been successful. He ventured his dollar at every turn with the most perfect sang froid. The apparent indifference to losses, and apathy when successful, is very remarkable with all classes of Mexicans, but they gamble so incessantly that I should conceive all excitement in this dangerous fashion must be deadened and that love of play at last becomes a disorder, rather than an amusement. I have frequently seen a couple of poor porters, who had not a farthing of money, sit gravely down in the dust with a greasy pack of cards, and anxiously stake their respective stock of paper cigars until one or the other became bankrupt.”

Under the second Henry, when the courtiers grew weary of the minstrels and jugleurs, or when they were not occupied in making love, they beguiled the lagging moments by gaming in every form then known. Before the third crusade, there was no check upon the gaming vice, and no limit to the stakes. The gamester, when he had been defrauded of his patrimony, in turn preyed upon the unsuspecting youth. He lived upon the weaknesses of human nature then as now, and watched with pleasure the trembling fingers and flushed cheeks of his victim, led on, as they were, by apparent carelessness, to risk a larger sum after losing a smaller. The victim was left by the gamester, only when the former could not even call his clothes his own. The dupes often discovered, when it was too late, that they had been ruined, not by the superior skill of their adversary, but by his dishonesty. For their own advantage, then, they who had been victims began to practice the arts of deception, chief among which was the loading of the dice.

During the reign of Richard I., (he of the Lion’s Heart) and that of King John, dice constituted the chief amusement of the nobility, and the length to which they carried the game, may be inferred from the fact that not even the “pomp and circumstance” of the martial field could allure them from the fascinating pursuit. The Barons who collected to resist the tyranny of John, were reproached by Matthew Paris with spending their time in gambling with dice when their presence was required in the field. Even the flames and the dissensions of civil war could not excite in them an ardor equal to that induced by the dice-box. But the evil did not stop here, and honor itself was sacrificed at the shrine of the unworthy and demoralizing passion by some of that brilliant band of cavaliers to whom England is indebted for her fundamental privileges and constitutional liberty. Should still stronger proof be required of the prevalence of the gaming vice among the Anglo-Normans of to-day, it would be found in the instrument which was prepared by the “allied” kings of England and France in 1190, for the government of the forces they had fitted out against the Saracens, and which related particularly to this vice. It was thereby enacted that “knights and clerks should be restrained to the loss of twenty shillings in one day, but that sailors and soldiers detected in playing for money at all should be fined at will, or 139‘ducked.’” During subsequent reigns gaming, although generally condemned, was vigorously pursued. How the practice operated upon the morals of the English people, during the reign of Elizabeth and her immediate successors, may be inferred from that phrase in Shakespeare which avers “dicers’ oaths are accounted proverbially false.” Gambling prevailed in England under Henry VIII, and it seems the King himself, was an unscrupulous gamester. The evidence is ample that gambling flourished during the reigns of Elizabeth, James I, and in the time of Charles II. Evelyn, writing on the day when James II was proclaimed King of England, says: “I can never forget the inexpressible luxury and profaneness, gaming and dissoluteness, and, as it were, total forgetfulness of God (it being Sunday evening), which this day I was witness of. The King sitting and toying with his concubines, Portsmouth, Cleveland and Mazarine, a French boy singing love songs in that glorious galaxy, whilst about twenty of the great courtiers and other dissolute persons were at Basset round a large table, a bank with twice two thousand pounds in gold before them, upon which two gentlemen who were with me made reflection with astonishment. Six days after, all was in the dust.”

From the Harleian Miscellany, we copy the following observations on gaming in England during the year 1668:

“One propounded this question: Whether men in ships at sea were to be accounted amongst the living or the dead—because there were but a few inches betwixt them and drowning. The same query may be made of gamesters, though their estates being never so considerable—whether they are to be esteemed rich or poor, since there are but a few casts at dice betwixt a person of fortune and a pauper.

“Betwixt twelve and one of the clock a good dinner is prepared by way of ordinary, and some of civility and condition oftentimes eat there and play a while for recreation after dinner, and both moderately and most commonly without deserving reproof. Towards night, when ravenous beasts shall seek their prey, there come in shoals of hectors, trepanners, gilts, pads, biters, prigs, divers, lifters, kidnappers, vouchers, millikens, pie-men, decoys, shop-lifters, foilers, bulkers, droppers, gamblers, donnapers, cross-biters, etc., under the general appellation of “rooks,” and in this particular it serves as a nursery for Tyburn, for every year some of its gang march thither.

“Would you imagine it to be true that a grave gentleman well stricken in years, in so much that he cannot see the pips of the dice, is so infatuated with this witchery as to play here with other’s eyes, of whom this quibble was raised; ‘That Mr. Such-a-one plays at dice by the ear.’ Another gentleman, stark blind, I have seen play at hazard, and surely that must be by the ear, too.

140“Late at night, when the company grows thin, and your eyes dim with watching, false dice are often put upon the ignorant, or they are otherwise cozened with topping, or slurring, and if you are not vigilant the book shall square you up double or treble books, and though you have lost your money, dun you as severely for it as if it was the justest debt in the world.

“There are yet some more genteel and subtle ‘crooks’ whom you shall not distinguish, by their outward demeanor, from persons of condition, and who will sit by a whole evening and observe who wins, and then if the winner be ‘bubbleable’ they will insinuate themselves into his acquaintance, and civilly invite him to drink a glass of wine, wheedle him into play, and win all his money either by false dice, as high fulhams, low fulhams, or by palming, topping, etc. Note by the way, that when they have you at a tavern, and think you are a sure ‘bubble,’ they will many times purposely lose some small sums to you the first time, to encourage you more freely to ‘bleed’ at the second meeting to which they will be sure to invite you. A gentleman whom ill fortune had hurried into a passion, took a box to a side table and then fell to throwing by himself. At length he swore with an emphasis—‘Now, I throw for nothing, I can win a thousand pounds, but when I play for money I lose my all.’”

In the time of Henry VIII., as stated heretofore, gambling pervaded every rank of society. Sir Miles Partridge threw dice with this king and won from him the celebrated “Jesus bells,” then the largest in England, which were in the tower of St. Paul’s. Partridge was hung for some criminal offense in the time of Edward VI. During the Protectorate of Cromwell, vigorous attempts were made to suppress gaming; but under Charles II., a dissolute monarch, the vice more than recovered the ground it had lost. The aristocracy of the period plunged into gaming as it did into other dissipation. After the death of this King the gambling mania again declined only to revive during the classic reign of Queen Anne. Parliament thereupon turned its attention to the subject, and passed stringent measures against the evil.

Under the first and second Georges, faro and hazard were subjected to heavy penalties and yet, these and other games continued to be played by all classes. In his correspondence with Horace Walpole, Lord Oxford makes pregnant and forcible reference to the absorbing passion for play that distinguished, or rather, disgraced, the times. December 13, 1754, Walpole wrote: “I met Dyke Edgecombe and asked him with great importance, if he knew whether Mr. Pitt was out?” “Yes,” replied Edgecombe, who was too much of a gamester not to have a sportsman’s conception of the meaning of “out,” “How do you know?” I asked, “Why, I called at his door, just now, and his footman told me so,” he 141replied.replied. Another incident, related in Lord Oxford’s correspondence, shows to what ruin the desperate play of that time sometimes led. After expressing his surprise at the extraordinary death of ——, a most accomplished man of the day, he says: “He himself, with all his judgment in debts, would have bet any man in England against himself for self murder. Yet, after having been supposed the sharpest genius in his time, he, by all that appears, shot himself in the distress of his circumstances. He lost £1,200 a year by Lord Albemarle’s death and more by Lord Gage’s, late Duke of Bedford. The same day he asked immediately for the government of Virginia, or the fox hounds, and pressed for an answer with the eagerness that surprised the Duke of N., who never had a notion of pinning down the relation of his own, or any man’s wants, to a day. Yet that seems to have been the case with ——, who determined to throw the die of life or death upon that answer from the court. Tuesday was the night for the answer, which did not prove to be favorable. He consulted, indirectly, and at last directly, several people of the easiest method of finishing life, and seems to have thought that he had been too explicit, and invited company to dinner on the day of his death, and ordered a supper at White’s, where he had supper but the day before. He played until it was one o’clock in the morning; it was New Year’s morning. Lord Bertie drank to him a happy New Year. He clapped his hands strangely to his eyes. In the morning he had a lawyer and three witnesses to execute his will, which he made them read twice very carefully, paragraph by paragraph, and then asking the lawyer if that would stand good though a man were to shoot himself, and being assured that it would, he said, “Pray be seated while I step into the next room,”—and shot himself. I feel for the distress this man must have felt before he decided on so desperate an action. He had the the most compendious understanding of any man I ever saw. He had effected a finesse in many matters beyond what he deserved, and aimed at reducing affections to a calculation like Demoirves.

Again Lord Oxford writes: “The great event is the catastrophe of Sir ——,Sir ——, who has frittered away his whole fortune at hazard, but that does not exceed what was lost by the Duke of Bedford, he having lost at one period of the night (though he recovered the greater part of it) 230,000 pounds. The citizens put on their double chameleoned pumps and trudged to St. James Street expecting to see judgment on White, angels with flaming swords and devils playing away with the dice box, etc., but there was nothing done.”done.”

In gambling, the reign of George III. was no improvement on those of his predecessors, but quite the contrary. The vice became more general among the nobility and, if possible more desperate. The most talented men of the day were heavy players at faro and hazard. Lord 142Lauderdale states that £5,000 ($25,000) were often staked on a single card at faro; and, on authority equally good, we learn that Mr. Fox played at hazard for twenty two consecutive hours and lost on an average £500 ($2,500) in cash each hour. Fox was an infatuated gamester, and he once declared that the greatest pleasure in life was to play and win, and the next greatest pleasure to play and lose.

Under this monarch, gambling invaded private mansions to an extent greater than ever before, or since. Many noblemen, enjoying public esteem and political confidence, permitted their homes to become virtual gambling dens. Lords, statesmen, and orators received from ten to twenty guineas per hour for dealing faro in the houses of eminent personages. At this time, women of the highest rank plunged into gaming and in their houses promoted the terrible evil.

Since the time of George IV. gambling among the aristocracy has decreased greatly. Gambling parties in the houses of the higher classes are now exceedingly rare. The English Lord or Baronet now gambles at his club, at Monte Carlo, or some other Continental resort. One sees many English women playing at Monte Carlo, but it is said with them to be a pastime mainly. Gambling is still largely indulged in by the lower classes of London, but is attended with much inconvenience and risk owing to the vigilance of the police. Turf betting, however, in which all classes join, goes on unchecked.

In gambling, as in all other occupations, the Englishman manifests his race characteristics. Cool and collected, he bets in a cold-blooded sort of way, impossible to an Italian or Frenchman. The Englishman knows generally what he is doing and rarely “loses his head,” whatever else he may lose. Although conservative, he will, at times, bet heavily and desperately. The gambling propensity in England now exhibits itself on the turf more than elsewhere. Gambling houses have flourished for 200 years at least. Formerly, gambling among the nobility was carried on at clubs or “coffee houses,” and was one of the understood features of club-life. It was also largely practiced in private mansions. In time, establishments, devoted solely to gambling, were started, and called “clubs,” that an air of importance and respectability might be thrown about them. The practice has continued to this day and the vilest gaming “hells” in London are known by the euphonious name of “clubs.” Some of the gaming resorts once noted in London were: “White’s”, “Brooks’”, “Crockford’s”, “Fishmongers’ Hall”, the “Berkely Club”, “St. James”, “Melton-Mowbray”, “Strangers”, “Cavendish”, “Leicester”, and “Hertford.”

In its day, “Fishmonger’s Hall” was the most celebrated den of the metropolis. A description of this place was given in a communication to the London Times, of July 22nd, 1824 as follows:

143At the head of these infamous establishments is one yclept, “Fishmongers’ Hall,” which seeks more plunder than all the others put together, though they consist of about a dozen. This place has been fitted up at an expense of about £40,000, and is the most splendid house interiorly and exteriorly in all the neighborhood. It is established as a bait for the fortunes of the great, many of whom have already been very severe sufferers. Invitations to dinners are sent to noblemen and gentlemen, at which they are treated with every delicacy, and the most intoxicating wines. After such enjoyment a visit to the French hazard table in an adjoining room is a matter of course, where the consequences are easily divined. A man thus allured to the den may determine not to lose more than a few pounds, which he has about him, but in the intoxication of the moment and the delirium of play, it frequently happens that notwithstanding the best resolves he borrows money upon his checks, which being known to be good, are readily cashed for very considerable amounts. In this manner £10,000, £20,000, £30,000, or more, have often been swept away. The profits for the last season over and above expenses, which cannot be less than £100 a day, are said to be fully £150,000 ($750,000).). It is wholly impossible, however, to come at the exact sum unless we could get a peep at the ledger of accounts of each day’s gains at this pandemonium, which, though, of course, contains no name, as it might prove awkward, if at any time that book fell into other hands. Some idea can be formed of what has been made, when it is understood that £1,000 alone was given to be divided among the waiters at the end of the last season, besides the “Guy Fawkes” of the place, the head servant having that amount given him last year as a New Year’s gift.

“It would be well for the frequenters of this resort to understand that it is their money that pays the rent and superb embellishments of the house, the good feed and fashionable clothes which disguise the knaves of the establishment, the refreshments and wine with which they are regaled, and which are served with no sparing hand in order to bewilder the senses, to prevent from being seen what is going forward, and which will not be at their service longer than they have money to be fleeced of; they may also understand that it is their money which has gone to make the vast fortunes of which two or three of the keepers are possessed. The ‘hellites’ at all the ‘hells,’ not content with the gains by the points of the game in favor of the bank, and from the equal chances, do not fail to resort to every species of cheating. The dealers and croupiers are especially selected for their adeptness in all the mysteries of the black art. Sleight-of-hand tricks at rouge et noir, by which they make any color when they wish, false dice and cramped boxes at French hazard, are all put in practice with perfect impunity, when every one save the banker and croupiers 144are in state of delirium of intoxication. About two years ago false dice were detected at the French hazard bank in Piccadilly, in which the proprietors of the ‘Fishmongers’ Hall’ had a share. A few noblemen and gentlemen had been losing largely, (it is said about £50,000) when the dice became suspected, one gentleman seized them, conveyed them away, and found the next morning that they were false.

“The“The ‘hells’ generally are fitted up in a very splendid style, and their expenses are very great. Those of the ‘Fishmongers’ Hall’ are not less than £1,000 per week. The next in importance are about £150 per week, and the minor ones from £40 to £80.

“The inspectors, or over-lookers, are paid from £6 to £8 a week each, the croupiers or tailleurs £3 to £6, the waiters and porters £2, and a looker-out for the police officers, to give warning of their approach £2. What may be given to the watchman upon the beat of the different houses, besides liquor, etc., is not known, but they receive no doubt according to the services they are called upon to render. Then comes rent, and incidental expenses, such as wines, etc. There is another disbursement, not easily ascertained, but it must be very large, viz.: the money annually given in a certain quarter to obtain timely intelligence of any information laid against a ‘hell’ at a public office, to prevent sudden surprises. This has become the more necessary since by recent act the parties keeping the houses, and those playing and betting at them are, when sufficiently identified, subject to a discipline at the tread mill. The houses are well fortified with strong iron-plated doors, to make the ingress into them a tardy and difficult matter. There is one at the bottom of the stairs, one near the top, a third into the room of play. These are opened or closed one after another as the person ascends or descends, for the doorkeeper to take a bird’s eye view of the person. The appearance of the houses, attention of the waiters, civility of the dealers, condescension of the bankers, refreshments and wine, all combined, have an intoxicating influence upon the inexperienced and unreflecting mind. The proprietors, or more particularly speaking, the bankers of these houses of robbery are composed for the most part of a heterogenous mass of worn out gamblers, blacklegs, pimps, horse dealers, jockeys, valets, pettifogging low tradesmen that have been dealers at their own, and at other tables. They dress in the first style of fashion, keep good houses, women, carriages, and fare sumptuously, bedizen themselves out with valuable gold watches, chains, diamonds, and rings, costly snuff boxes, etc.—property with but little exception originally belonging to unfortunates who had been fleeced out of everything, and who, in the moment of disaster, parted with them for a mere trifle. Some have got into large private mansions, and keep very respectable establishments, but persons with a superficial knowledge of the world can very easily see through the disguise of the gentlemen 145they assume. They are awkward and vulgar in their gait, nearly all without education and manners, and when they discourse, low slang bespeaks their calling—escapes them in spite of their teeth. There is not a single constant player who can say that he is a winner by them.”

In 1830 “Crockford’s” was one of the most prosperous gambling establishments in London. It was situated on the west side of St. James street, Piccadilly, and was built by the man whose name it bore. Although devoted to gambling purposes, “Crockford’s” was a private club, and numbered among its members several gentlemen of eminent respectability. It was from this fact, doubtless, that the place succeeded in maintaining a fair reputation and was not interfered with by the authorities. Mr. Crockford, early in life, had been a fishmonger, which occupation he abandoned to become a gaming-house keeper. With a man named Taylor, he for a time, managed the “Waiters’ Club,” which had for its patrons employes and well-to-do trades-people. In little more than a year Crockford amassed a large sum of money. Being ambitious, he next constructed a net for higher game, in his St. James street palace. In its meshes he would entangle the aristocratic and wealthy. In this he succeeded to a remarkable degree, and, within a few years, accumulated a colossalcolossal fortune. His “club house” was most magnificent within and imposing without. The interior comprised a grand drawing-room, library, billiard room, supper room, and several “parlors” devoted to play. All the apartments were embellished and furnished at enormous expense and with a magnificence quite beyond description. From the start every precaution was taken to make the membership as select as possible; the founder sagaciously perceiving that no surer course to success could be adopted. The most distinguished personages of the day, including the Duke of Wellington, were members, and “Crockford’s” became the “fad” in fashionable London. Play was heavy in this palatial “hell,” and repeatedly £10,000, £15,000, £20,000, and even more, were lost at a single sitting by members of the nobility. It is said that not less than a dozen lost £100,000 each at this fashionable “den.” Crockford’s policy extended a liberal credit to his noble dupes. A score or more of the heads and scions of great families were indebted to him constantly to the extent of hundreds of thousands of pounds. He retired in 1840 but long before that was a millionaire. Building for himself an expensive town residence and buying an estate at Newmarket, once the property of a proud nobleman, Crockford lived like a prince, and that, too, without losing favor with the titled dupes whom he bled. It would seem as if the aristocrats deemed it a privilege to impoverish themselves in his “gilded hell.” It was said, perhaps in the bitterness of irony, that Crockford retired only because there were not remaining enough unplucked noblemen to make it an object to continue his business.

146“White’s Club,” established as a “chocolate house” in 1698, near the bottom of St. James street, was the most famous gaming resort of its time. Dean Swift, in his essay on Modern Education, says of the place: “I have heard that the late Earl of Oxford, in the time of his ministry, never passed by White’s Chocolate House, a common rendezvous of famous sharpers and noble cullies, without bestowing a curse on that famous ‘academy’ as the bane of half the English nobility.” White’s was the place where the nobility indulged their passion for play, and of the number who frequented its baneful precinct, were the Duke of Devonshire, the Earls of Chesterfield, Chalmanely, Colley Cibber, Major John Churchill, and Budd Doddington. It was there that Chesterfield uttered many of his celebrated witticisms, and afforded delightful entertainment to a distinguished company. He gambled, although fully aware of the inevitable results of the practice. Indeed, according to Walpole, he once told his son that “a member of a gambling club should be a cheat or he would soon be a beggar.” Pelham, the Prime Minister, was a life-long gambler, and, even when holding his exalted office, divided his time between attending to its duties and playing at White’s. In a letter to Dr. Doddridge, in 1750, Lord Littleton said: “I tremble to think that the rattling of the dice box at White’s may, one day or other, if my son should become a member of that ‘noble academy,’ shake down all our fine oaks. It is dreadful to see, not only there, but almost in every house in town, what devastations are made by that destructive power, the sport of play.” Faro was the principal game at White’s, and professional gamblers, provided they were thought honest, were admitted. “Heavy” betting was the practice, and Lord Carlisle lost £10,000 at one sitting. During the game he stood to win £50,000 of Sir John Bland, of Kippax Park, who, himself, after losing £32,000 one night, succeededsucceeded in winning back the greater part of it. In 1755, however, he gambled away his whole fortune at hazard. At this period almost every difference of opinion regarding expected occurrences was made the subject of a bet. A book for the recording of such bets was kept at White’s and some of the entries were of the strangest character. One member bet that the first baronet to be hung would be Sir William Burdette, who seems to have been the black sheep of a very respectable family. Bets were recorded on the duration of the ministry, the receiving of titles, on earthquakes, scandals, births, deaths, marriages, and countless other events. One day a man fell to the pavement in front of White’s and instantly a member bet that he was dead and the wager was accepted. When it was proposed to bleed the man the gamesters protested vigorously on the ground that the use of the lancet would interfere with a fair settlement of the bet. Walpole writes: “A person coming into the club on the morning of the earthquake of 1750, and hearing bets laid whether the shock was caused by an earthquake or the blowing up of a powder 147mill, went away in a hurry, protesting that they were such an impious set that he believed ‘if the last trumpet were sounded they would bet puppet show against judgment.’” And in another place he says, “One of the youths at White’s has committed murder and intends to repeat it. He bet £12,000 that a man could live twelve hours under water, hired a desperate fellow, sunk him in a ship by way of experiment, and both ship and man have not been heard of since. Another man and ship are to be tried for their lives instead of the real murderers.” “Lord Digby,” wrote Guy Williams, “is very soon to be married to Miss Fielding. Thousands might have been won at White’s on his lordship not knowing that such a being existed.” One of the entries in the book read, “Lord Mountford bets Sir John Bland 20 guineas that Nash outlives Colley Cibber.” Neither won the bet, for both committed suicide before either Nash or Cibber died. Bets were also made that Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, would out-live the Duchess of Cleveland.

Play at White’s was believed to be “on the square,” but there is much information to the effect that it was not. The fact that professional gamblers were admitted ought to be conclusive on the point. Hogarth, in his representation of gambling at White’s, places a highwayman at the fireside, waiting until the heaviest winner shall depart and thus furnish his opportunity.

“Brooks’ Club” was founded in 1764, immediately south of White’s, on St. James street. Of the celebrities who frequented it, one time or another, were Sir Joshua Reynolds, Garrick, Hume, Gibbon, Sheridan, Fox, Pitt, Lords Euston and Chatham, Wilberforce, Horace Walpole, the Dukes of Roxburgh and of Portland, the Earl of Strathmore, and Mr. Crew, afterwards Lord Crew. It did not flourish at first and Brooks, its proprietor, died in poverty in 1772. The club then became known as “Almack’s” and for a time enjoyed prosperity as the favorite rendezvous of the rich and great men of London. That the betting was heavy there may be inferred from the fact that a certain Mr. Thynne, because he won only 12,000 guineas ($63,000.) in two months, retired in disgust on March 21st., 1772. Fast scions of noble families were accustomed to lose or win from £10,000 to £25,000 in an evening at “Almack’s”. It was asserted that when play was in progress there was rarely less than £10,000 in bets on the table. Lord Starbordale, one night while he was still in his minority, lost £10,000, but won it back by one fortunate turn at hazard, whereupon he exclaimed, with a great oath: “Now if I had been playing deep I might have won millions.”

The fashionable young men of the day were veritable dudes and affected foreign notions and tastes and wore curls and eyeglasses. When about to sit down to play, they replaced their embroidered coats with others of frieze, or turned them wrong side out for luck. They slipped 148on leather wristlets to save their lace ruffles. To avoid disarranging their hair and to protect their eyes from the light, high-crowned broad-brimmed hats were worn by them. Pitt put his whole soul in play while at it, as into all else that he did. When Wilberforce returned in triumph to Parliament and to London, in 1790, he was at once elected to membership in all the “clubs.” “Almack’s,” however, was his favorite resort, where he became very intimate with Pitt, whom he had known at Cambridge. Wilberforce was not a heavy gambler and did not continue the practice long. It has been handed down that he once lost £100 and that on another occasionoccasion he kept the bank and won £600.

Gibbon, the historian, spent much of his time at “Almack’s”, and was far from averse to play. He was accustomed to indite his correspondence from there and in one letter, dated June 24th, 1776, wrote: “Town grows empty, and this house, where I have passed many agreeable hours, is the only place which still invites the flower of English youth. The style of living, though somewhat expensive, is exceedingly pleasant, and notwithstanding the range for play, I have found more entertainment and rational society than in any other club to which I belong.”

Six years before, Horace Walpole, in a letter to Mann, draws a less favorable picture. “Gaming at “Almack’s”, which has taken the place of “Whites”, is worthy the decline of our Empire, or the decline of the wealthy, as you choose.”

The “Berkley Club” enjoyed its greatest prosperity about the middle of the present century. It had spacious and finely furnished rooms and afforded every convenience to its members. French hazard was the principal game at this resort. No stake less than a sovereign was accepted and players were allowed to bet as high as they desired. The terms of play, as well as the management, were such as to exclude all except the wealthy elite. These frequented the place in considerable numbers, but it never had the patronage once enjoyed by “White’s”, “Almack’s”, and “Crockfords.”

The “Waiter’s Club,” in Piccadilly, flourished in the early part of the present century. For ten years, or more, the company wont to gather there was rather select, but the ruinous effects of play (dishonest play, it was quite generally believed) soon demoralized and actually forced them to disband. By an easy transition the place passed to the management of a set of blacklegs, who conducted it as a common gambling “hell.”

Gambling in the 18th century, in England, is thus described in the Eclectic Magazine for May, 1885: “In the more contracted sense in which we understand the word ‘gambling,’ our grandsires appear to have been more attached to it than the generations which went before them. The actor and the politician, the divine and the tradesman, were alike infected 149with the rage for gaming. The Duke of Devonshire lost his valuable estate of Leicester Abbey, to Manners at a game of basset. Peers were impoverished, and estates mortgaged, in a single night, and the men who had entered the room in a state of affluence, rushed madly into the streets at night, penniless, and probably in debt to a large amount. The chocolate rooms in the neighborhood of Charing-cross, Leicester-fields, and Golden Square, were the principal ‘hells’ of the West end, and it was not far for ruin, disgrace and despair to find oblivion in the bosom of the Serpentine, or the Thames. The coffee houses, we are told, most notorious for gambling, were ‘White’s Chocolate-house,’ for ficket or basset clubs, in 1724, ‘Littleman’s,’ for faro, which was played in every room; ‘Oldman’s,’ ‘Tom’s,’ ‘Will’s,’ and ‘Jonathan’s’ Coffee-houses, for ‘ombre,’ ‘picquet,’ and ‘loo.’ About 1730 the ‘Crown’ Coffee-house, in Bedford-row, became the rendezvous of a party of whist players. Early in the century, although Swift mentions it as a clergyman’s game, whist appears to have been less in vogue, excepting with footmen and servants, among whom it kept company with foot and all fours.

“From the frequent mention of it in Swift’s ‘Journal to Stella,’ we should surmise that ‘ombre’ was in great fashion about 1710 to 1730, as was crimp among the ladies, according to Steele, and, in 1726, we find in ‘Gay’s Correspondence’ a letter to Swift, in which he alludes to the favor in which the game of quadrille was then held: ‘I can find amusement enough without quadrille, which here is the universal employment of life.’ ‘Nay,’ cries honest parson Adams, in the ‘True Briton,’ on January the 28th, 1746, ‘the holy Sabbath is, it seems, prostituted to these wicked revellings, and card playing goes on as publicly as on any other day. Nor is this only among the young lads and the damsels, who might be supposed to know no better, but men advanced in years, and grave matrons are not ashamed of being caught at the same pastime.’

“The Daily Journal of January 9th, 1751, gives a list of the officers retained ‘in the most notorious gaming houses,’ showing how these matters were then managed. The first twelve were:

“1. A commissioner, always a proprietor, who looks in of a night, and the week’s account is audited by him and two other proprietors.

“4. Two crowpiers (croupiers) who watch the cards and gather in the money for the bank.

“6. A clerk, who is a check upon the puffs, to see that they sink none of the money given them to play with.

150“7. A squib is a puff of lower rank who serves at half-pay salary while he is learning to deal.

“10. A waiter, to fill out wine, snuff candles, and attend to the gaming rooms.

“12. A captain, who is to fight any gentleman who is peevish at losing his money.

“The green-rooms of the theatres even, were the scenes of great doings in the gaming way, and Miss Bellamy tells us that thousands were frequently lost there in a night—rings, brooches, watches, professional wardrobes, and even salaries in advance, being staked and lost as well as money.

“It was in vain that essays, satires and sermons were written with a view to checking this universal vice. Hogarth has depicted it in all its horrors, whether in the scene where it first leads the idle apprentice into sin, or in others, where it shows the young rake on the way to jail. But its dreadful consequences were most forcibly placed before the eyes of the infatuated town by Edward Moore, in a tragedy, first performed at Drury Lane in 1753, and entitled the “Gamester.” How did “the town” receive this lesson? The “New Theatrical Dictionary” says: “With all its merits, it met with but little success, the general cry against it being that the distress was too deep to be borne. Yet we are rather apt to imagine its want of perfect approbation arose in one part, (and that no inconsiderable one) of the audience from a tenderness of another kind than that of compassion, and that they were less hurt by the distress of “Beverly” than by finding their darling vice—their favorite folly—thus vehemently attacked by the strong lance of reason, and dramatic execution.”

But gambling in England has never been confined to the aristocracy. If anything, it has been even more prevalent in the “Lower orders of society.” The play in the “dens” frequented by them has been less “heavy,” but none the less ruinous and far more productive of misery and crime. Such resorts have thrived for centuries in every part of London, and indeed, in every large English city. Many of them have been known as “clubs,” as are those of to-day, which the police raid from time to time.time.

In these places, as in those more aristocratic, hazard became the favorite game immediately upon its introduction from Paris, early in the century, and for a time almost superceded other gambling devices. St. James street early became the center for aristocratic gambling, and in no quarter of London were the third and fourth class “hells” so numerous as 151in the section surrounding this district. After “Crockford’s” was established and it became apparent that it was not only prospering under the protection and patronage of the ennobled and wealthy, but was also safe from police interference, the gamblers who designed to prey upon the lower classes were not slow to conclude that nowhere in London would they be so secure as in the same vicinity. Accordingly, in a short time, scores of “clubs” sprung up in Leicester Square, the Quadrant, in Regent street, and between Bennett and Jermyn Streets. The Quadrant was known as “Devil’s walk,” getting the name because of the half dozen or more “hells” which flourished on its North side, between the County Fire offices and Glasshouse street, and because of the hundreds of abandoned women who promenaded the pavement then, as now, during the closing hours of the day and far into the night. It was a locality especially favorable to these “dens.” The throngs of people were greater in its vicinity at night than in any other part of London. Competition between the different houses was so sharp that each had its messengers on the street, mixing with the people, and thrusting into their hands cards of invitation to their respective resorts. Even the courtesans solicited for the dens at the time they solicited for themselves.

The Quadrant “clubs” have been the ruin of thousands of young men. Finally, the scandal became so great and openly offensive that the public revolted. Some young men turned over the cards of invitation to their parents, the latter in turn passing the invitations to the police. With the cards as a clue the authorities began a determined fight upon the evil, and finally exterminated the infamous resorts. Their doors had opened readily, day and night, Sundays included. Anyone, no matter how high or low in degree and circumstances, was welcome, and all were systematically plucked.

As late as 1844 there were no less than fifteen gambling houses, well known to the police, in the parishes of St. James’, St. George’s, St. Ann’s, and St. Martin’s-in-the-fields, besides the rooms of public houses, billiard rooms and coffee shops, in which gambling was conducted. These latter, known as “copper halls,” usually accepted the lowest stakes, down to a penny or a ha’penny, and were patronized mainly by clerks and servants.

Gambling establishments, pure and simple, and of the lowest order, have generally “followed the races;” that is, have been opened during race week in the town where the courses are located—such as Warwick, Doncaster, etc. Allusion has been made already to the fact that betting on horse races is a favorite species of gambling in England. That subject receives due attention in another part of this work. Reference is proper here, however, to the gambling by those who attend the races. It was said of Doncaster in 1846: “The Eldorado, or grand source of income 152and wealth to the proprietors, arises from the prolific revenue of the play of gaming tables, of which there are usually six in constant nightly operation during the racing week. The proprietors of the Subscription Betting Rooms are not ostensibly connected in the co-partnership of the banks, or in the business of the tables, but they are, nevertheless, largely interested in the successful issue of the week, as will be shown. In the first instance it should be stated that the sum of £350 or £400 is paid down to them by the party contracting for the tables, and for the privilege of putting down the banks. This is all clear profit, paid for in advance, and without any contingency, and in addition to this large sum so paid, for the mere privilege of finding capital, there is a stipulation also on the part of the proprietors of the room, that they shall receive a considerable part or share of the clear profits or gains of the week, accruing from the tables, and this without the risk of a single shilling by them under any unlooked-for reverse of fortune.”

Doncaster, at an earlier period, often harbored fully thirty or forty gambling establishments during race week, which were conducted in the most open manner. Men were stationed in front to hand to passers by cards bearing such inscriptions as, “Roulette, £1,000 in the bank.”bank.” A former magistrate of Warwick certified that once during the races nearly every house in a certain street was utilized for gambling purposes, and that the windows were wide open so that those who were passing could see what was transpiring within. Though the sporting gentry had usually to pay large fees for the privilege of running race week “hells,” they could well afford to do so in view of their enormous profits. The games usual at such places were roulette and hazard. Both French and English hazard were in favor, the latter to accommodate the older generation of “sports,” with whom it was a favorite. French hazard is a quiet game; English hazard a noisy one. In the former, the players have simply to place their stakes in particular positions on the table; as they wish to bet, and await the result of the cast. They need not utter a word. At the English game, on the contrary, every player is usually shouting at the top of his voice, and the scene is not unlike that in the wheat pit of a Board of Trade or in the Stock Exchange in New York. “The caster’s in for five pounds!” “done;” “I’ll bet fifteen to ten!” “What’s the main and chance?” “Seven to five;” “I’ll take on doublets!” “The caster throws before the five for ten pounds.” These are samples of the exclamations made by those who are offering and taking bets. The players in the English game bet against each other and not against the banks as in the French game. Wranglings, disputes and hot words are frequent, owing to misunderstandings and the efforts of sharpers to impose upon those whom they take to be inexperienced and susceptible to bravado.

153An English hazard game is superintended by a “groom-porter,” as he is called, who presides at the table to regulate the bets made between the “caster,” or thrower of the dice, and the “setter,” or person opposed to him. The proprietor does not get a percentage of the money staked as in the French game, but derives his profit from a stipulated amount from all the players who are fortunate enough to throw on three mains, or win three times successively. Such winnings, it has been estimated, occur eight times an hour. Accordingly the proprietor gets about $40 an hour for each table, or $400 a night on the basis of ten hours. Of course, the amount varies with the number engaged in playing. But the amount, whatever it is, is clear profit, for the use of the table only is involved. The “groom porter” has very arduous duties to perform, and must, of necessity, be quick and determined, in order to keep track of all the bets made and to defeat the frequent attempts at fraud by knaves and scoundrels who sometimes stake less than their proportion, or endeavor to escape their “obligations.”(?) In return for this protective vigilance he receives a gratuity of a guinea or more from every one who throws six mains, or wins six times successively. When betting is large his “doucers” are generally increased, and sometimes he receives as much as five or ten pounds.

In these “dens” the roulette tables are usually more numerous than those devoted to hazard, and they prove more remunerative to the proprietors, as the percentage against the players is about five and a half, or more than three times what it is in hazard. The profits during race week averaged, some times, £2,500 each.

Of the low gambling resorts in London, early in this century, Fraser’s Magazine, of August 1833, gives this interesting account: “On an average, during the last twenty years, about thirty ‘hells’ have been regularly open in London for the accommodation of the lowest and most vile set of hazard players. The game of hazard is the principal one played at the low houses, and is, like the characters who play it, the most desperate and ruinous of all games. The wretched men who follow this play are partial to it, because it gives a chance, from a run of good luck, to become possessed speedily of all the money on the table. No man who plays hazard ever despairs making his fortune at some time. Such is the nature of this destructive game, that I can now point out several men, whom you see daily, who were in rags and wretchedness on Monday, and, before the termination of the week, they rode in a newly purchased stanhope of their own, having several thousand pounds in their possession. The few instances of such success, which unfortunately occur, are generally well-known, and consequently encourage the hopes of others who nightly attend these places, sacrificing all considerations of life to the carrying their all (if it be only a few shillings) every twenty-four hours to stake in this 154great lottery, under the delusive hope of catching Dame Fortune at some time in a merry mood. Thousands annually fall, in health, fame and fortune, by this mad infatuation, while not one in a thousand finds an oasis in the desert. The inferior houses of play are always situated in obscure courts, or other places of retirement, and most frequently are kept shut up during the day, as well as at night, as if unoccupied; or some appearance of trade is carried on as a blind. A back room is selected for all operations, if one can be secured sufficiently capacious for the accommodation of forty or fifty persons at one time. In the centre of the room is fixed a substantial circular table, immovable to any power of pressure against it by the company who go to play, a circle of inlaid white hollywood is formed in the middle of the table, of about four feet diameter, and a lamp is suspended immediately over this ring. A man, designated the “groom porter,” is mounted on a stool, with a stick in his hand, having a transverse piece of wood affixed at its end, which is used by him to rake in the dice, after having been thrown out of the box by the caster, (the person who throws the dice). The avowed profits of keeping a table of this kind is the receipt of a piece for each box-hand—that is, when a player wins three times successively, he pays a certain sum to the table, and there is an aperture in the table made to receive these contributions. At the minor establishments, the price of a box-hand varies from one shilling to half-a-crown, according to the terms on which the house is known to be originally opened. If there is much play, these payments produce ample profits to the keeper of the house, but their remuneration for running the risk of keeping an unlawful table of play, is plunder. At all these houses, as at the better ones, there is always a set of men who hang about the table like sharks for prey, waiting for those who stay late, or are inebriated, and come in towards morning to play when there are but few lookers-on. Unfair means are then resorted to with impunity, and all share the plunder. About eleven o’clock, when all honest and regular persons are preparing for rest, the play commences, the adventurers being seated around the table, one takes the box of dice, putting what he is disposed to play for into the ring marked on the table, as soon as it is covered with a like sum, or ‘set,’ as it is termed, by another person, the player calls ‘a main,’ and at the same moment throws the dice, if the call comes up, the caster wins, but if any other ‘main’ comes uppermost on the dice, the thrower takes that chance for his own, and his adversary has the one he calls, the throwing then continues, during which bets are made by others, on the event, until it is decided. If the caster throws deucesdeuces or aces, when he first calls ‘a main,’ it is said to be ‘crabbed,’ and he loses, but if he throws the number named, he is said to have ‘nicked it,’ and thereby wins. Also, if he should call six or eight, and throws double sizes, he wins, or if seven be the number 155called, and eleven is thrown, it is a ‘nick,’ because those chances are ‘nicks’ to these ‘mains,’ which regulation is necessary to the equalization of all the chances at this game when calling a ‘main.’

“The odds against any number being thrown against another number varies from two to one, to six to five, and consequently keeps all the table engaged in betting. All bets are staked, and the noise occasioned by proposing and accepting wagers is most uproarious and deafening among the low players, each having one eye on the black spots marked on the dice, as they land from the box, and the other on the stake, ready to snatch it if successful. To prevent the noise being heard in the street, shutters closely fitted to the window frames are affixed, which are padded and covered with green baize. There is also invariably an inner door placed in the passage, having an aperture in it, through which all who enter the door from the street may be viewed. This precaution answers two purposes, it deadens the sound of the noisy voices at the table, and prevents surprise by the officer of justice. The generality of the minor houses are kept by prize fighters, and other desperate characters, who bully and hector the more timid out of their money, by deciding that bets have been lost when in fact they have been won. Bread, cheese, and beer are supplied to the players, and a glass of gin is handed when called for, gratis. To these places thieves resort, and such other loose characters as are lost to every feeling of honesty and shame. A table of this nature in full operation is a terrific sight, all the bad passions appertaining to the vicious propensities of mankind are portrayed on the countenancescountenances of the players. An assembly of the most horrible demons could not exhibit a more appalling effect, recklessness and desperation overshadow every noble trait, which should enlighten the countenance of a human being. Many, in their desperation, stripped themselves on the spot of their clothes, either to stake against money, or to pledge to the table-keeper for a trifle to renew the play, and many instances occur of men going home half naked, after having lost their all. They assemble in parties of from forty to fifty persons, who probably bring on an average each night of from one to twenty shillings to play with. As the money is lost the players depart, if they can not borrow or beg more, and this goes on some times in the winter season for fourteen or sixteen hours in succession, so that from 100 to 150 persons may be calculated to visit one gambling table in the course of a night; and it not unfrequently happens that, ultimately, all the money brought to the table gets into the hands of one or two of the most fortunate adventurers, save that which is paid to the table for box-hands, whilst the losers separate, only to devise plans by which a few more shilling may be secured for the next night’s play.

“Every man so engaged is destined either to become by success a more finished and mischievous gambler, or to appear at the bar of the 156‘Old Bailey’ where, indeed, most of them may be said to have figured already.

“The successful players, by degrees, improve their external appearance, and obtain admittance to the houses of higher play, where 2s. 6d., or 3s. 4d. is demanded for box-hands. At these places silver counters are used, representing the aliquot parts of a pound; these are called ‘pieces,’ one of which is a box-hand.

“If success attends them, in the first step of advancement, they next become initiated into pound-houses, and associate with gamblers of respectable exterior, where, if they show talent, they either become confederates in forming schemes of plunder, and in aiding establishments to carry on their concerns in defiance of the law, or fall back to their old station of playing chicken-hazard, as the small play is designated.

“The half-crown, or third rate houses, are not less mischievious than the lower ones. These houses are chiefly opened at the west end of the town, but there are some few at the east. In the parish of St. James, I have counted seven, eight and nine, in one street, which were open both day and night.

“One house in Oxenden street, Coventry, had an uninterrupted run of sixteen or seventeen years. Thousands have been ruined there, while every proprietor amassed a large fortune. The man who first opened the house (G. S.) has resided at Kentish Town for years past, in ease and affluence, keeping his servants and horses, although he rose from the lowest of the low.

“Several others who have followed him have had equal success. The watchmen and Bow street officers were kept in regular pay, and the law openly and expressly set at defiance, cards being handed about, on which were written these words: ‘Note, the house is insured against all legal interruptions, and the players are guaranteed to be as free from officious interruptions as they are at their own homes.’homes.’

“At another of these medium houses, known by the numerals ‘77,’ the proprietor, (a broken down Irish publican, formerly residing in the parish of St. Anne’s) accumulated in two years so much money that he became a large builder of houses and assembly rooms at Cheltenham, where he was at one time considered the most important man of the place, although he continued his calling to the day of his death. ‘Alas! J. D. K., hadst thou remained on earth thou wouldst ere this have been honored with the title of Grand Master of all the Blarney Clubs throughout the United Kingdom. Many a coroner hast thou found employ, and many a guinea hast thou brought into their purses, and many a family hast thou cast into the depths of sorrow.’ So runs the world. Fools are the natural prey of knaves, nature designed them so, when she made lambs for wolves. The laws that fear and policy framed, nature disclaims; she knows but 157two, and those are force and cunning. The nobler law is force, but then there’s danger in’t; while cunning, like a skillful miner, works safely and unseen.

“The subject of these remarks was not only subtle, wily, and in some measure fascinating, but most athletic and active in person. He was part proprietor of No. —, Pall Mall, for many years, where he would himself play for heavy stakes. And it was a favorite hobby of his to go into St. James’ Square, after having been up all night, to jump over the iron railings and back again, from the enclosure to the paved way.

“The average number of these third-rate houses in London, open for play, may be calculated at about twenty-five. If there were not a constant influx of tyro-gamblers this number would not be supported. Their agents stroll about the town, visiting public house parlors, and houses where cribbage-players resort, whist clubs, also billiard and bagatelle tables, experience having taught them that the man who plays at one game, if the opportunity be afforded him, is ever ready to plunge deeper into the vice of gambling on a large scale. Junior clerks, and the upper class of gentlemen’s servants are the men whom they chiefly attack.

“It is an extraordinary and uncomfortable fact that no set of men are more open to seduction than the servants of the nobility, and the menials of club-houses, an instance of which occurred a few months since, in the case of a servant of the Athenæum Club, who was inveigled into a house in the Quadrant, where he lost, in two or three days, a considerable sum of money belonging to his employers.

“The sum annually lost by the servants of the present day may reasonably be laid at one million and a half sterling. At most of the middle class gambling houses, play is going on from three o’clock, p. m. to five or six o’clock a. m. In the afternoon, from three to seven, it is called morning play, being generally rouge-et-noir or roulette.

“As soon as the proprietor of a ‘crown-house’ amasses money enough to appear on the turf, and becomes known at Tattersall’s as a speculator on horse-racing, he is dubbed a gentleman. Associating now with another class of men, a high ambitious spirit prompts him to open a superior house of play, where the upper class of gamblers and young nobility may not be ashamed of meeting together. All petty players are excluded. When he has accomplished his object he deems himself in the high road for the acquirement of a splendid fortune, being now master of a concern where money and estate are as regularly bought and sold as any commodity in a public market; one man of fashion betraying another—the most intimate and bosom friends colleaguing with these monsters for the purpose of sacrificing each other to the god Plutus, instances of which occur in this viciated town as often as the sun rises and sets.

158“It might be thought invidious to mention names by innuendo, but every man of the world, or rather of the London world (which comprehends some thousand swindlers intermingled with the same number of nobility and gentry), must have a knowledge of those characters who have elevated themselves from the lowest state in society by gambling, to associate on terms of equality with nobles. One married his daughters to peers of the realm, and was treated with respect daily at the table of those who enact laws for the punishment of swindlers, and also of bishops who expatiate daily against all kinds of vice, including that of gambling, and the sin of countenancing those who promote it. Another, whose confederate was executed for poisoning horses, to secure for himself and his honorable employer a large sum of money, now stalks through the halls of our proud Norman, but too susceptible aristocracy, with as much freedom and nonchalance as one who could trace his ancestry back to William the Conqueror, and was possessed of a pure and unblemished reputation. When the history of this individual and that of six others, who, to use their own phraseology, have rowed through life together in the same boat, are before the world, scenes will be developed which will stand as beacons to warn future generations against coming in contact with such characters.

“In accordance with the reigning spirit of the day, such persons having acquired money, no matter how, rank as gentlemen, and are qualified to sit at the tables of the nobility. The company of fashionable or club society is that of black-legs, and it would not be difficult for me to name from twenty to thirty individuals at this moment who associate with, and move among, persons of high life, who were, but a few years back, in low vice and penury, and who have possessed themselves of a sum of money certainly not less than from eight to nine millions sterling.

“Again, there are hundreds of others who have amassed from ten to twenty thousand pounds each. Add to these the two or three thousand who annually make smaller sums of money, or manage to keep themselves and families in comfortable style by ‘hokey-pokey’ gambling ways, as Brother Jonathan would say, some estimate may be made of the evil occasioned to society by the movements of these men in it.”

One of the most deplorable phases of gambling in England is that women have figured prominently. Incredible as it may seem, numerous instances are recorded where the honor of wives and daughters has been staked in the desperation of cowardly men. It may be believed that this occurred only when all else had been swept away, and by persons from whom every vestige of manhood had departed. Ethiopians, it is said, have been known to gamble away their wives and children, and Schouten tells of a Chinaman who lost his family in this manner. A similar story is told of a Venetian, by Paschasius Justus, and in the wicked Paris of Louis XV, debauched nobles played at dice for the favor of a notorious courtesan.

159English literature contains many allusions to women gamblers. So far did ladies of fashion carry the vice that certain nights for meeting were set apart in their private mansions, at which young and old, married and single, played with a desperation that must have made their husbands and fathers tremble. Professionals, whose morals were not above reproach, were engaged to conduct the games, and thus the women were thrown into association with bad characters, and their names and reputations bandied about in the mouths of the sporting gentry of London.

In 1820, James Lloyd, a harpy who practiced on the credulity of the lower orders by keeping an illegal lottery, was arrested for the twentieth time to answer for the offense. Lloyd was a Methodist preacher, and on Sundays expounded the gospel to his neighbors; the remainder of the week he instructed them in the gambling vice.

“In the same years,” says a writer of the time, “parties of young persons robbed their masters to play at a certain establishment called ‘Morley’s Gambling House,’ in the city of London, and were there ruined. Some were brought to justice at the Old Bailey, others in the madness caused by their losses, destroyed themselves while some escaped to other countries.”

To the games of faro, hazard, macao, doodle-doo and rouge-et-noir, at this time, more than to horse-racing, may be ascribed the ruin of many London merchants who once possessed fortunes and prosperous business. Thousands upon thousands were thus ruined in the vicinity of St. James; but this was not confined to youths of fortune only, but to decent and respectable merchants, who were engulfed in its vortex.

Of the “South Sea Bubble,” a writer in the Eclectic Magazine for May, 1885, says: “If not the earliest, at least the most remarkable instance of this national spirit of gambling displayed itself in the last century, and was the infatuation which led all classes to commit themselves to the alluring prospects held out to them by the South Sea Company. The public creditor was offered six per cent. interest, and a participation in the profits of a new trading company, incorporated under the style of ‘The Governor and Company of Merchants of Great Britain trading to the South Seas and other parts of America.’ But, whatever chances of success this company might have had, were soon dispersed by the breaking out of the war with Spain, in 1718, which rendered it necessary for the concoctors of the scheme to circulate the most exaggerated reports, falsify their books, bribe members of the government, and resort to every fraudulent means, for the purpose of propping up their tottering creation. Wonderful discoveries of valuable resources were trumped up, and, by the mystery which they contrived to throw around the whole concern, people’s curiosity was excited, and a general, but vague impression got abroad that one of the South Sea Company’s bonds was talismanic, and there was 160no reckoning the amount of profit it would bring to the fortunate possessor. The smallest result expected from the enterprise was that in twenty-six years it would pay off the entire amount of the National debt.

“How it was to be done no one knew, or cared to inquire, it was sufficient to know that it was to be done. Trade and business of all kinds was suspended, every pursuit and calling neglected, and the interest of the whole nation absorbed by this enchanting dream. Money was realized in every way, and at every sacrifice and risk, to be made available in the purchase of South Sea stock, which rose in price with the demand from £150 to £325. Fresh speculators came pouring in, and the price went up to £1,000. This was at the latter end of July, but alas, a whisper went forth that there was something wrong with the South Sea Company. The chairman, Sir John Blunt, and some of the directors had sold their shares. There was a screw loose somewhere, and on the 2nd of September it was quoted at £700. An attempt to allay the panic was made by the directors, who called a meeting on the 8th, at Merchant Tailors’ Hall, but in the evening it fell to £640, and next day stood at £540. The fever had been succeeded by a shivering fit, and it was rapidly running down to zero. In this emergency, the king, who was at Hanover, was sent for, and Sir Robert Walpole called in, when the case was desperate. He endeavored to persuade the Bank of England to circulate the company’s bonds, but in vain. The stock fell to £135, and the bubble burst. The duration of this public delirium, as SmallettSmallett has truly called it, may be estimated when we state that the bill enabling the company to raise the subscription received the royal assent on the 7th of April, 1720, with the stock at £150; that the price subsequently ran up to £1,000; and that, on the 27th day of September it had again sunk to £150, and the delusion was over, and the nation in a state of panic, with public credit shaken to its center. Investigations were now made into the conduct of the managers of this marvelous fraud. A bill was first passed through parliament to prevent the escape of the directors from the kingdom, and then a Committee of Secrecy appointed to examine into their accounts. It then came out that the books had been destroyed, or concealed, entries erased and altered, and accounts falsified; that the king’s mistress, even, the Duchess of Kendal, had received stock to the amount of £10,000; another favorite, the Countess of Platen, £10,000; Mr. Aislabie, Chancellor of the Exchequer, £70,000; Mr. Graggs, father of the Secretary of State, £659,000; the Duke of Sutherland, £160,000; Mr. Graggs, Jr., £30,000; and Mr. Charles Stanhope, Secretary of the Treasury, two amounts, one of £10,000, and another of £47,000. The manner in which these worthies, who were in the secret, could anticipate and influence the markets, is obvious. Poor Gay had received an allotment of stock from Mr. Secretary Graggs which was at one time worth £20,000, 161but he clung fast to the bubble, refused to sell at that price, and waited till it was worthless, when he found himself hugging the shadow of a fortune. The amount of the company’s stock, at the time of the inquiry, was found to be £37,800,000, of which £24,500,000 belonged to individual proprietors. As some compensation to these rash and ruined speculators, the estates of the directors were confiscated. Sir George Caswell was expelled from the House of Commons, and made to disgorge £250,000; Aislabie, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was expelled, and committed to the Tower; Sir John Blunt, the chairman, was stripped of all but £5,000, and the excitement and popular resentment was so intense that it is marvelous that they escaped with their lives.

“The South Sea frenzy was not sufficient to engross the gambling spirit that it had generated, simultaneously there oozed up a crowd of smaller bubbles, of which Malcom counted 156. The titles to some of them were sufficient to illustrate the madness which had seized upon the nation. There were companies for carrying on the undertaking business and furnishing funerals, capital £1,200,000 at the ‘Fleece Tavern’ (ominous sign,) Cornhill; for discounting pensions, 2,000 shares at the Globe Tavern; for preventing and suppressing thieves, and insuring all persons’ goods from the same (?), capital £2,000,000, at Cooper’s; for making Joppa and Castile soap, at the Castile Tavern; for sweeping the streets, for maintaining bastard children; for improving gardens and raising fruit trees, at Carraway’s, for insuring horses against natural death, accident or theft, at the Brown Tavern, Smithfield, another at Robin’s, of the same nature, capital £2,000,000; for introducing the breed of asses; an insurance company against the thefts of servants, 3,000 shares of £1,000 each, at the Devil Tavern; for perpetual motion, by means of a wheel moving by force of its own weight, capital £1,000,000 at the Ship Tavern,” etc., etc. The Prince of Wales became governor of a Welsh Copper Company. The Duke of Chandos was Chairman of the York Building Company, and of another Company for building houses in London and Westminster.

“Many of these speculators were jealously prosecuted by the South Sea Company, but they all succeeded, in a greater or less degree, in spreading the general panic. The amount of capital proposed to be raised by these countless schemes was three hundred million sterling—exceeding the value of all the lands in England. The most amusing instance of the blind credulity of the public was in the success which attended one wary projector, who, well knowing the value of mystery, published the following proposal:

“‘This day, the 28th inst., at Sam’s Coffee-house, behind the Royal Exchange, at three in the afternoon, a book will be opened for entering into a joint co-partnership for carrying on a thing that will turn to the advantage of all concerned.’

162“The particulars of this notable scheme were not to be revealed for a month, and, ‘in the meantime’ says SmalletSmallet, he declared that every person paying two guineas should be entitled to a subscription of one hundred pounds, which would produce that sum yearly.’ In the forenoon, the adventurer received a thousand of these subscriptions, and, in the evening, set out for another kingdom.

“Some curious satires on these several schemes are preserved in the British Museum, in the shape of a book of playing-cards. Thus, one is a caricature of York-buildings, with the following lines beneath it:

“The Company for the insurance of horses’ lives against death, or accident, is thus dealt with:

“SmallettSmallett gives us a more dismal picture. ‘The whole nation,’ he says, ‘was infested with a spirit of stock-jobbing, to an astonishing degree. All distinctions of party, religion, sex, character, and circumstances were swallowed up. Exchange-alley was filled with a strange concourse of statesmen and clergymen, churchmen and dissenters, Whigs, and Tories, physicians, lawyers, tradesmen, and even with females. All other professions and employments were utterly neglected.’

“It is not to be wondered at that various lottery schemes were started and prospered immensely at a time when the public mind was in the state indicated above. They were launched by the State, by private companies and by individuals. These institutions played no small part in the general debasement of the public mind and the ruin of fortunes and families.” This will appear more fully in the treatment accorded to lotteries elsewhere in this book.

163The history of anti gambling legislation in England, and the various efforts which have been made to suppress or regulate the vice forms an interesting phase of the subject, and also suggests how the evil was regarded from time to time in the public mind. The earliest legislation on the subject appears to have been based on the idea, not that gambling was immoral and degrading, but that it interfered with the usefulnessusefulness of servants and employes, induced idleness, and diverted attention from archery. “The first statute (12 R. 2, c. 6) in England (1388) prohibiting gambling, applied only to servants of husbandry, artificers, and victuallers—not to servants of gentlemen—and commanded such to refrain from ‘hand and foot ball, quoits, dice, throwing of stone kayles, and such other importune games.’ The next statute (1409) enforced the above, with a penalty of six days imprisonment for such offence. The next act (17 Ed. 4, c. 3, 1477,) after naming in a preamble the foregoing games, says, ‘Contrary to such laws, games called kayles, half-bowles, hand-in-hand-out, and queckeborde, from day to day are used in divers parts of the land,’ then provides that no occupier or master of a house shall voluntarily permit any prohibited person to play at any such game in said house, under pain of three years’ imprisonment and forfeiture of £20 for each offense. No prohibited person could play under pain of two years’ imprisonment and £10 default. Another act (11 H. 7, c. 2, 1494,) provided that no artificer, laborer or servant should play any unlawful game except at Christmas, while the law (19 H. 7, c, 12) of 1503, absolutely prohibited certain persons named therein from playing at any game. In 1511, (3 H. 8, c. 3) unlawful games were again prohibited, and a still more stringent law enacted in 1535 (22 H. 8, c. 35).

“In 1541, (33 H. 8, c. 25) the manufacturers and dealers in archery petitioned Parliament to prohibit all games and enforce the practice of archery. Accordingly, in 1542, a most stringent act was passed, obliging all able-bodied men, between the ages of 17 and 60 years, except ministers and judges, to own bows and arrows, and to practice with the same. Masters were required to see that their servants were provided with bows and arrows and instructed in their use; if not provided, the master must furnish the same, and was empowered to deduct the price from the servant’s wages. This act repeals all other laws concerning gaming, and then prohibits the keeping of any ‘common house, or place of bowling, coytinge, cloyshe, cayles, half-bowle, tannys, dysing table, or cardianage, or any other unlawful new game hereafter to be invented,’ under a penaltypenalty of 40s. for each offense. Magistrates, sheriffs, bailiffs, constables, and head officers of cities, boroughs and towns, were required and authorized to enter all such places, at any time, and arrest offenders; they must also search at least once a month to discover such places, and suppress the same under a monthly penalty of 40s. for every default.”default.”

164Section 16, of this act then provided that “No manner of artificer, craftsman, husbandman, apprentice, laborer, servant at husbandry, journeyman, or servant of artificer, mariner, fisherman, waterman, or servingman shall play at the tables, tennis, dice, cards, bowles, clash, coyting, logating, or any other unlawful game, out of Christmas, under pain of 20s. for each offense.” At Christmas, this class could play only in their master’s house or presence. This act made no game in itself unlawful. It only became unlawful by being used by certain persons at certain times, or certain places. The keeping of a common gambling house for any unlawful game, for lucre or gain was prohibited, but no game was made unlawful unless played in such common house. Faro and rouge et noir were not then considered unlawful games.

In 1745, faro, bassett, ace of hearts, hazard, passage, roly-poly, roulette, and all games of dice, except backgammon, were prohibited under a penalty to the “setter-up,” of £200, and £50 fine for players. A subsequent act repealed so much of the act of 1542 as prohibited bowling, tennis and other games of mere skill.

Justices of the Peace, at their annual licensing meetings, were empowered to grant license to persons to keep a room for billiards, bagatelle-boards, and the like, but these were prohibited between the hours of 1 and 8 A. M., and on Sundays, Christmas, Good Friday, or any public feast, or Thanksgiving day. Gambling was not then indictable at common law. In England, at common law, it was held, “a common gambling house kept for lucre or gain, was per se a common nuisance, as it tends to draw together idle and evil-disposed persons, to corrupt their morals and ruin their fortunes, being the same reasons given in the case of houses of common prostitution.” (King vs. Rogers and Humphrey.)

The following curious piece of evidence is probably an extract from the Journal of the House of Lords, although there is no reference to the subject in the published debates.

“A bill for preventing the excessive and deceitful use of it having been brought from the Commons and proceeded on, so far as to be agreed to in the committee of the whole house with amendments, information was given to the house that Mr. Burdus, Chairman of the Quarter Session for the sitting and liberty of Westminster; Sir Thomas Deveil, and Mr. Lane, Chairman of the Quarter Session for the County of Middlesex, were at the door. They were called in and at the bar severally gave an account that claims of the privilege of peerage were made and insisted on by Ladies Mordington and Cassilis, in order to intimidate the peace officers from doing their duty in suppressing the public gaming houses kept by said ladies. And the said Burdus thereupon delivered the instrument in the 165written hand of said Lady Mordington, containing the claim she made of privilege for her officers and servants employed by her in her said gambling house; and then they were directed to withdraw, and the said instrument was read as follows: ‘I, Dame Mary, Baroness of Mordington, do hold a house in the great plaza Covent Garden for, and as an assembly, where all persons of credit are at liberty to frequent and play at such diversions as are used at other assemblies, and I have hired Joseph Dewbery, William Horsely, Ham Croper, and George Sanders as my servants or managers under me. I have given them orders to direct the management of other inferior servants, namely, John Bright, Richard Davids, John Hill, John Vandevoren as book-keepers, Gilbert Richardson as house-keeper; John Chaplin, William Stanley, and Henry Huggins, servants that wait on the company of the said assembly, and all the above named persons I claim as my domestic servants, and demand all those privileges that belong to me as a peeress of Great Britain pertaining to my said assembly. M. Mordington. Dated, 8th of January, 1744.’ Resolved and declared that no person is entitled to the privilege of peeress against any prosecution or proceeding for keeping any public gaming house, or any house, room, or place, for play at any game or games prohibited by any law now in force.”

In the time of Queen Anne gambling ran riot to such an extent that it commanded the attention of Parliament, and resulted in the following act: “Whereas, divers low and dissolute persons live at great expense, having no visible establishment, profession, or calling to maintain themselves, but support these expenses by gaming only, it is hereby enacted that any two justices may cause to be brought before them all persons within their limits whom they shall have just cause to suspect of having no visible establishment, profession, or calling, to maintain themselves by, but do, for the most part, support themselves by gaming; and if such persons shall not make the contrary appear to such justices, they are to be bound to their good behavior for a twelve-months, and in default of sufficient security, to be committed to prison until they can find the same, and if security be given it will be forfeited on their betting or playing for—at any one time—more than the value of twenty shillings.”

This act was further enforced and its deficiencies supplied during the reign of George I and George II, and the forfeiture under that act could be recovered in a court of equity; and, moreover, if any man were convicted, upon information or indictment, of winning or losing, at any one sitting, ten pounds, or twenty pounds, within twenty-four hours he forfeited five times that sum. Another statute also inflicted pecuniary penalties as well upon the master of any public house wherein servants were permitted to gamble, as upon the servants who were found in the act of gaming. Nor were the statutes against their masters less severe. During 166these reigns the games of faro and hazard were by law declared to be lotteries, subjecting those persons in whose houses they were played to the penalty of £200, and all who played at them to that of £50.

The records of Marlborough street police-court show that in 1797 information was laid against Lady Elizabeth Lutterell and others, for having, on the night of the 30th of January last, played at faro at Lady Buckingham’s house in St. James square, and a Mr. Martindale, then living in Broad street, was charged with being the proprietor. The defendants appeared by their counsel. Witnesses were called to support this information, whose evidence went to prove that the defendants charged had a game at their houses by rotation; that is, that they played at faro, rouge et noir, etc., meeting at different houses upon certain days of the week; that Mr. Martindale acted as master of the tables, generally, and that they began to play about eleven or twelve o’clock at night and continued to play until three or four o’clock in the morning. Martindale’s penalty was £200 fine, as proprietor of a faro table, and the Countess of Buckingham, Lady Lutterell and Mrs. Sturt were fined £50 each for playing. A Mr. Mathias O’Brien was subsequently brought in. He was also fined for participating in these same games.

In 1817 a prosecution occurred at Brighton which elicited a queer array of facts, illustrating the gambling methods of that day. A warrant was sworn out by one William Clarke against William Wright and James Ford, on the charge of feloniously stealing one hundred pounds. But Clarke did not appear to prosecute, and when the magistrate issued a warrant to compel his attendance he hastily decamped.decamped. The prisoners were discharged, but very shortly afterward Wright was summoned before the magistrate to give evidence in an examination against one Charles Walker, of the Marine Library, for keeping an unlawful gaming house. Wright testified that Clarke engaged him about five weeks previously as a punter, or decoy player, to a game called “noir, rouge, tout les deux,” and that at the game was a gentleman who lost £125. Clarke asked witness if he thought the gentleman was rich, and being answered in the affirmative, told witness to invite the gentleman to dinner, let him have all the wine he wanted, and to spare no expense to get him drunk. This was done, and the gentleman returned to play again. As he had nothing but large bills he was induced to go to London with witness to change them, witness being enjoined to be sure to bring him back. One of the firm, which was composed of Clarke, O’Mara, Pollett and Moreley, gave the gentleman a letter to certain London Brokers to enable him to change his bills. On their way back to Brighton witness told the gentleman that he suspected the firm would substitute a false table during their absence. However, the gentleman returned to play, and witness and another decoy named Ford were given £100 each with which to play and to lead the 167gentleman on, and if possible to fulfil the expectations of the firm, which were to fleece the gentleman of five or six thousand pounds. As they entered the library, Walker accosted them and wished them better success, but he trembled visibly and seemed ill at ease. The game was carried on in a room over the library, for which the firm paid rent of twelve guineas a week. As the gentleman ascended the stairs a porter locked the door, by Walker’s order, and when he came into the gaming room he became alarmed at the appearance of the men there, and hastily descending the stairs and giving a plausible excuse to the porter, was allowed to pass out and thus escaped. Witness had not returned the £100 to Clarke, and it was on that account that Clarke had sworn out a warrant against him. Afterward Clarke had visited him and offered him £100 if he would not tell what he knew to the magistrate.

Ford and the gentleman substantiated Wright’s testimony, and the latter said that he went to Walker and demanded back the £125 which he had been cheated out of at play at the start. Walker was very much confused and nervous, and finally offered to return £100 of the sum, which offer was refused; and thereupon he laid the whole matter before the magistrate. Walker was found guilty and sentenced to several years imprisonment.

Messrs. Houlditch, the coach makers of Long Acre, had a traveling salesman whom they sent to the Continent to dispose of their goods. Like thousands of other employes, holding responsible positions of trust, he fell a victim to the vice of gambling, and soon found himself a defaulter and reduced to the utmost desperation. While in this frame of mind he wrote the following letter to his employer, which was read in subsequent court proceedings, and is given here to illustrate how frightfully ruinous the passion for play becomes when once it gains possession of a young man. The letter reads:

The legal aspects of gambling in London early in this century are well treated in an article in Fraser’s Magazine for August, 1833, which says: “The officers of justice are regularly kept in the pay of the proprietors of the gaming houses, through whom timely notice is always given of any information laid against the establishment, and the intended attack guarded against. If this be doubted the same can be attested on oath, and otherwise proved beyond disputation. The expense of some of the gaming houses in London during the season (seven months) exceed £10,000. What, then, must be the gains to support this advance and profusion of property? Elegant houses are superbly fitted up, the most delicate viands and the choicest wines, with every other luxury, are provided to lure and detain those for whom the proprietors’ nets are spread. It is almost an impossibility to convict these wicked men under the present law; their enormous wealth is applied to the corruption of evidence, always unwilling, because the witnesses expose their own habits and culpability in attending these notorious dens of infamy. The sleeping partners are ever ready to advance money to oppose prosecutions, and often come forward to give evidence in opposition to the witnesses’ and to blacken the character of those who offer their testimony. Then there is always money to support those who may chance, once in ten years, to be convicted. Many practicing attorneys, too, are connected with these establishments, who threaten to prosecute for conspiracies, and not unfrequently, fictitious debts are sworn to, and arrests for large amounts made, to keep witnesses from appearing at court on the day of trial. One professional man in the parish of St. Anne has, to my knowledge, supported himself for thirty-five years by lending himself in this way to the middle-rate gambling houses, at the west end of town. His method is either to suborn or intimidate the parties, by threatening to indict them for perjury or otherwise persecute them to utter destruction.

“When it is considered that those who are competent to give evidence calculated to produce convictions well know the characters with whom they have to contend, and the phalanx of scoundrels there is always arrayed against them, it is not to be wondered at that they should be deterred from coming forward at the last moment, when even their persons are not free from danger, particularly as all minacious tricks are backed with a bribe, thus bringing fear and interest to bear against their antagonists. As every one who comes forward to give evidence against 169a gambling house must himself have been a participator in the offence of play, no man who has been the cause of a conviction has ever yet escaped ruin; no matter the motive which influenced him, whether it be remorse, pique, or public good, the conspiracy against him will be so powerful and ramified, through the leading men’s numerous emissaries and dependants, that his future course in life will be tracked, and his character blasted in every neighborhood where he may take up his abode. In one instance a young man who had laid information against a house, although no conviction followed, was hunted out of no fewer than eight situations. The clique of gamblers he had made his enemies contrived to find out in whose employ he was engaged, and then daily assailed his master with anonymous letters, defaming the young man’s character to such a degree that few could well retain him in their service, especially as the fact of having himself gambled at a public table could never be gotten rid of.

“When all other means of deterring a witness are exhausted, personal threats are used by ruffians, who are employed to cross him in whatever public company he may join, seeking every occasion to insult and quarrel with him until he is intimidated, and all other would-be witnesses, through fear of similar persecution, are prevented from offering any obstruction to their establishments.

“By these confederacies, backed as they are with enormous capital, notwithstanding the existing laws, houses have been kept open for the indiscriminate mixture of all grades, from the well bred gentlemen, the finished sharper, the raw and inexperienced flat, to the lowest description of pickpockets and other wretches of public nuisance, and, where all the evils the acts of Parliament were intended to annihilate, have for years past been in full activity. But in no period of our history have misery, distress—and crime, been so conspicuous, and the cause so manifestly and decidedly traced to the gambling habit of the community, as in the present day.

“As before observed, the incompetency of the magistracy, as now armed by law, to oppose the growing evil, is mainly attributable to the methodized system of confederacy and partnership concerns, wherein capitals are embarked by a large number of individuals, who have, (with a very few exceptions) sprung originally from the very scum of society. Now suppose one or more magistrates, employed especially as guardians of the public morality, whose peculiar duty it should be, acting on private information, to direct their officers to adopt any lawful mode of obtaining evidence to convict offenders against the law; could anything be more easy than to send two well-dressed men, under the authority of a magistrate, into the town with money in their pockets, who might in a short time, with very little tact, mix with gambling characters, and in a few weeks have free ingress and egress to all the hells in London, as 170amateur players? Nor can the keepers of these places ever by possibility guard themselves against this mode of attack, as the persons so employed might always be kept behind the curtain, introducing others of their friends, who could again, (as many as were needed) continue to introduce others, until every player and keeper of a gambling house was identified, and ample testimony for their conviction be prepared, when the blow might be struck against all in one day, and the fullest penalty of the law enforced on each offender.”

A writer in Bentley’s Magazine, speaking of the warfare that had been made on the gambling houses in England in 1838, said: “Hence arose appeals to the law and indictments against the parties which, in their success, gave encouragement to similar proceedings by others, and in the course of time this system was discovered to afford a fine source of profit to the prosecuting attorneys in the shape of costs, and they were, in consequence, frequently gotten up by some of the riff-raff of the profession, in the name of fictitious parties and with the sole view of extracting from the different houses large sums of money in settlement of the matter, without proceeding to trial. This was finally discovered, by the keepers of the houses, and after turning the tables on the prosecutors, and, indeed, convicting several for perjury, gambling houses went on again more vigorously than ever.”

The prosecution of gamblers and gambling house-keepers, in London, has been more thorough during the last quarter of a century than ever before and in these days there appears to be, on the part of the authorities, a sincere desire to exterminate the evil of common gambling, so far as they may be able to effect it. Every week, almost, the police raid one or more of the “dens,” which, though run solely as gambling resorts, assume to be “clubs,” in order to increase their chances of being unmolested. Usually, the proprietors are fined heavily. Yet, these “hells” resume business, or start up in a new place. The profits are so large that the proprietors willingly take all risks of being prosecuted. Gambling is indulged in, in the aristocratic west end clubs, but the authorities assume to know nothing of it.

The noted Englishmen who were addicted to gambling are very numerous, and many of the incidents related of them, in connection with the vice, are most interesting. Sir Arthur Smithouse, once possessed of a very valuable estate, and considerable ready money, lost everything at play and died in extreme want. Sir Humphrey Foster lost the greater part of his possessions, but by a fortunate run of luck, won them back, and could thereafter never be induced to jeopardize them again.again. The celebrated Mr. Hare meeting at Bath one day the well known Major Brereton, who was an habitual and heavy player, asked how the world went with him. “Pretty well,” replied Brereton, alluding to his success at 171the gaming table, “but I have met with a sad misfortune lately, I have lost Mrs. Brereton.” “At hazard or quine?” asked Hare. Major Aubrey was not only a great lover of gaming, but was very skillful. He won and lost three fortunes at play, and early in his career had the foresight to place a comfortable annuity for himself beyond danger of being swept away by any ill run of luck. He once lost £25,000 at billiards. It is related that he was once heard to say: “Play is like the air we breathe; if we have it not we die.” His life was a most eventful one. In early life he went to India, and the ship took fire. He jumped overboard and floated on a hen coop until picked up by another ship. “I was completely surrounded by sharks,” he said, “just as I have been ever since.”

Lord Barrymore and Sir John Lade, who had fine estates, lost them to sharpers. Mathias O’Brien, an ignorant Irish adventurer, yet a very shrewd man, succeeded in gaining the confidence of the high-born sportive gentry, of the latter part of the last century, to such an extent that he dined at the tables of the great, and entertained them at his own house in return. He boasted that he had at one time sitting around his table, two princes of the blood, four dukes, three duchesses and several counts, besides others of distinction of both sexes. One night he won at picquet £100,000 from a titled gentleman. Knowing perfectly well that his antagonist could not pay this immense sum, and suspecting that if he could not pay it all he would not pay any of it, he purposely allowed him to win back all but £10,000, which amount the gentleman paid. This incident caused Mr. Hare to give him the name of “Zenophon O’Brien,” on account of his “retreat with ten thousand.”

Fox, the celebrated statesman, was an inveterate and desperate gambler. A few evenings before he moved the repeal of the marriage act, in February, 1772, he went to Brompton on two errands, one to consult Justice Fielding on the penal laws, and the other to borrow £10,000 with which to continue his gambling. He was a most skillful whist and picquet player, and one of his contemporaries said that if he had confined himself to those games Fox could easily have won £4,000 a year. But he could not let faro and hazard alone, and he almost invariably lost heavily. He reduced himself many times to extreme want, and lacked such small amounts as were necessary to defray little daily expenses of the most pressing nature. He was often obliged to borrow a few shillings of the waiters at Brooks’. He had lodgings in St. James street, close by Brooks’ Club, at which he spent almost every hour that was not devoted to the House of Commons.

It is said by Lord Tankerville that Fox once played cards with Fitzpatrick, at Brooks’, from ten o’clock at night until near six o’clock the next afternoon, a waiter standing by to tell them whose deal it was, they being too sleepy to know. Fox once won about £8,000, and one of his 172bond creditors, who soon heard of his good luck, presented himself and asked for payment. “Impossible, sir,” replied Fox, “I must first discharge my debts of honor.” The bond creditor remonstrated. “Well, sir, give me your bond,” said Fox. The bond was produced and Fox tore it in pieces and threw it in the fire. “Now, sir,” said Fox, “my debt to you is a debt of honor,” and immediately paid him. Amidst the wildest excesses of youth, even while a perpetual victim of his passion for play, Fox cultivated his taste for letters, especially the Greek and Roman historians and poets, and he found solace in their works under the most severe depressions occasioned by ill success at the gaming table. One morning, after he had passed the whole night with Topham Deauclere at faro, the two friends were about to separate. Fox had lost throughout the night, and was in a frame of mind bordering on desperation. Deauclere’s anxiety for the consequences which might ensue led him to be early at Fox’s lodging, and on arriving he inquired, not without apprehension, whether he had risen. The servant replied that Mr. Fox was in the drawing room. Deauclere walked up stairs and cautiously opened the door, expecting to find a frantic gamester stretched on the floor bewailing his losses, or plunged in moody despair, but he was astonished to find him reading Herodotus. “What would you have me do?” said Fox, “I have lost my last shilling.” Upon other occasions, upon staking all that he could raise upon faro, instead of exclaiming against fortune, or manifesting agitation natural under such circumstances, he would lay his head upon the table, and retaining his place, but exhausted by mental and bodily fatigue, almost immediately fall into a profound slumber.

Fox’s love of play was frightful. His best friends are said to have been half ruined in annuities given by them as securities for him to the Jews. “£500,000 a year of such annuities of Fox and his estates were advertised to be sold at one time.” Walpole further notes that in the debate on the 39 Articles, February 6, 1772, Fox did not shine, nor can it be wondered at. He had sat up playing at hazard at Almack’s from Tuesday evening the 4th, until 5 in the afternoon of Wednesday the 5th. An hour before he had recovered £12,000 that he had lost, and by dinner, which was at 5 o’clock, he had ended by losing £11,000. On Thursday he spoke in the above debate, he went to dinner at half past eleven at night, and from thence to White’s where he drank until seven the next morning, thence to Almack’s where he won £6,000, and, between three and four in the afternoon, he set out for Newmarket. His brother Stephen lost £2,000 two nights afterwards and Charles £10,000 more on the 13th.

Monsieur Chevalier, Captain of the Grenadiers in the first regiment of foot Guards, in the time of Charles II., was one of the most remarkable 173gamesters known in history. He was a native of Normandy, and in his youth was a page to the Duchess of Orleans. Going to England to seek his fortune, he soon becamebecame an ensign in the first regiment of foot Guards. He took to gaming and met with such success that he very quickly was enabled to live in a style far above his station. He once won from a nobleman a larger sum than the latter could pay down, and upon being asked for time, granted it in such a courteous and obliging manner that the nobleman, a fortnight later, wishing to show him that he appreciated his kindness, went to him and told him that he had a company of foot to dispose of and that, if it was worth his while, it should be at his service. Chevalier gladly accepted it, and got his commission signed the same day, well knowing that it was immensely to his advantage to have a visible position and income, for without them, one who lives like a gentleman and makes gaming his sole occupation would naturally be suspected of not playing merely for diversion, if, indeed he was not charged with resorting to sharp practices.

“Chevalier once won 20 guineas from ‘Mad Ogle,’ the Life Guardsman, who understanding that the former had bitten him, called him to account, demanding his money back, or satisfaction on the field. Chevalier chose the latter alternative. Ogle fought him in Hyde Park, wounded him in the sword arm and was returned his money. After this they were always good friends.”

It is said that Chevalier was so skillful at “cogging” dice and throwing that he could chalk a circle the size of a shilling on the table, and standing a short distance away, could throw a die within it and have it show an ace, tray, six, or whatever he pleased. Aubrey de Vere, Earl of Oxford, had a consuming desire to rival Chevalier in dice throwing, but, though he practiced for days and weeks, Chevalier always worsted him, and won large amounts from him. Chevalier, it is said, was a thorough sharper, and knew all the tricks of gaming, such as loaded dice, etc. Occasionally he was detected, and was obliged to fight several duels to square the injury done his antagonist. He was severely wounded a number of times, and got so that he would avoid fighting whenever it was possible to do so. How he did this on two occasions is thus related: “Having once ‘choused,’ or cheated a Mr. Levingstone, page of honor to King James II, out of fifty guineas, the latter gave the captain a challenge to fight him next day, behind Montague House, a locality long used for the purpose of duelling. Chevalier seemingly accepted the challenge, and next morning, Levingstone, going to Chevalier’s lodgings, and finding him in bed, put him in mind of what he was come about. Chevalier, with the greatest air of courage imaginable, rose, and having dressed himself, said to Levingstone, ‘Me must beg de favor of you to stay a few minutes, sir, while I step into my closet dere, for, as me be going about one desperate 174piece of work, it is very requisite for me to say a small prayer or two.’ Accordingly, Mr. Levingstone consented to wait whilst Chevalier retired to his closet to pray, but hearing the conclusion of his prayer to end with these words: ‘Me verily believe spilling man’s blood is one ver’ great sin, wherefore I hope the saints will intercede with the virgin for my once killing Monsieur de Blotieres, at Rochelle; my killing Chevalier de Comminge, at Brest; killing Major de Tierceville, at Lyons; killing Lieutenant du Marché Falliere at Paris, with half a dozen other men in France, so, being also sure of killing him I’m now going to fight, me hope his forcing me to shed his blood will not be laid to my charge.’ Quoth Levingstone to himself, ‘and are you then so sure of me? But I’ll engage you sha’nt, for if you are such a devil at killing men, you shall go and fight yourself and be ——.’ Whereupon he made what haste he could away, and shortly Chevalier coming out of the closet and finding Levingstone not in the room, was very glad of his absence.”absence.”

WhenWhen King James ascended the throne, the Duke of Monmouth raised a rebellion in the west of England where, in a skirmish between the Royalists and Rebels, he was shot in the back, and the wound was believed to be given by one of his own men, to whom he had always been a most cruel, harsh officer, whilst a captain of the Grenadiers of the Foot Guard. He was sensible himself of how he came by his misfortune, for when he was carried to his tent, mortally wounded, and the Duke of Albermarle came home to visit him, he said to his Grace, “Dis was none of my foe dot shot me in the back.” “He was none of your friends that shot you,” the Duke replied. He died a few hours afterwards, and was buried in a field near Philip Norton Lane, as the old chronicler says, “Much unlamented by all who knew him.”

Monsieur Germain, born of low parentage in Holland in 1688, is celebrated for having introduced into the gambling circles of London a game called Spanish whist, by which those familiarfamiliar with the tricks of the game won great amounts. He was also noted for his expertness in playing ombre, which Pope describes entertainingly in his “Rape of the Lock.” Germain became intimate with Lady Mary Mordaunt, wife of the Duke of Norfolk, whom he first met at a private gambling party. The Duke obtained a divorce from her, in consequence, and thereafter she lived openly with Germain until her death.

Tom Hughes was a London gambler whose life well illustrated the ups and downs of the profession. He was born in Dublin and when a young man became a London sport. He played heavily and skill and good luck enabled him to win a great deal of money which he spent as fast as he made it, chiefly at a resort for frail females in the Piazza, Covent Garden. He was for a time proprietor of E. O. tables, in a house in Pall Mall, kept by a Dr. Graham, and was often to be found also at 175Carlisle House, in Soho Square. He once won £3,000 from a young man, just of age, who made over to him a landed estate for the amount. Being admitted a member of the Jockey Club, he was quite prosperous for a time but, his luck changing, he fell into the clutches of “Old Pope,” the money lender, and was obliged to give up to him the estate he had won. He fought several duels over disputes arising at the gaming table and finally died in a debtor’s cell leaving not enough to pay for his coffin.

It is narrated of Whig Middleton, who was wealthy, handsome and dressed in extreme fashion, that, after losing a thousand guineas one night, to Lord Montford, he was asked by the latter, in gambler’s parlance, what he would do, or would not do, to get home? “My Lord,” said he, “prescribe your own terms;” “Then” replied Lord Montford, “dress directly opposite to the fashion for ten years.” Middleton accepted the terms and lived up to them “dying nine years afterward,” as the narrator expresses it, “so unfashionably that he did not owe a tradesman a farthing, left some playing debts unliquidated; and his coat and wig were of the cut of Queen Anne’s reign.”

Wrothesly, Duke of Bedford, fell amongst a party of sharpers, including a manager of a theatre and Beau Nash, master of ceremonies, who had conspired to bleed him. After he had lost £70,000 the Duke rose in a passion and pocketed the dice, declaring that he intended to inspect them and see if they were crooked. He then threw himself on a sofa and fell asleep. The sharpers held a consultation, as to what they had best do, and it was finally decided that they would cast lots to see who should pick the Duke’s pocket of the loaded dice and put fair ones in their place. The lot fell on the theatre manager, and he performed the feat without being detected. The Duke examined the dice when he awoke and, being satisfied that they were all right, returned to playing and lost £30,000 more.

The sharpers had received £5,000 of the money they had won, and when they came to dividing it got to quarreling. Beau Nash was so dissatisfied that he went to the Duke and exposed the whole scheme of robbing him. The Duke believed this was done purely through friendship and, accordingly, made Nash a handsome present and patronized him ever afterward.

Beau Nash, as is well known, was an immense favorite with the aristocratic society of his time. He was both homely and clumsy, yet his wit, flattery and fine clothes made him a pet of the ladies. “Wit, flattery and fine clothes are enough to debauch a nunnery,” he was wont to say. Nash was a barrister and lived in Middle Temple, where, when still a young man, he organized and directed the grand “revel and pageant,”—the last of its sort—upon the accession of King William. This he did so successfully that the King offered to knight him, which Nash declined, 176saying: “Please your Majesty, if you intend to make me a knight, I wish it may be one of your poor knights of Windsor and then I shall have a fortune at least able to support my title.”

It is said of Nash, that when he submitted his accounts to the Masters of the Temple, this item was among them: “For making one man happy, £10.” Being asked to explain it, Nash said that he overheard a poor man declare to his wife and large family that £10 would make him happy, and that he could not resist the temptation to give him the sum. He offered to refund the money, if the item was not allowed. The Masters, struck with such good nature, not only allowed the bill but thanked him for his generosity and doubled the allowance.

Nash became subsequently Master of the Ceremonies, at Bath, then the popular fashionable summer resort, where he ruled with such undisputable authority that he was styled “King of Bath.” Gambling was deep and furious at Bath, and, in consequence of disputes over the table, swords were frequently resorted to in settling matters. Thereupon Nash commanded that no swords should be worn at Bath, and the order was obeyed. Nash’s later years were spent chiefly in gambling in a small way. He died at Bath, in 1761, and was buried with great ceremony in the Abbey Church, three clergymen preceding the coffin, aldermen acting as pall-bearers, the Masters of the Assembly Rooms following as chief mourners and the streets and housetops being thronged with people anxious to do honor to him, whom they regarded as “the venerable founder of the prosperity of the City of Bath.”

Richard Bennett is an example of a gambler, who, through a long life, enjoyed almost uninterrupted prosperity. He was of the unscrupulous sort, and rose from being a billiard sharper in Bell Alley, to be partner in several of the aristocratic “houses” or “clubs” in St. James street. He brought up and educated a large family. He was finally indicted for keeping several gaming houses, and sentenced to imprisonment until he should pay fines aggregating £4,000. He remained in prison for some time, but managed to effect his release without paying his fines.

A circumstance almost identical to the one related of the Duke of Bedford, is told of another noble duke. “The late Duke of Norfolk,” says the author of “Rouge et Noir,” writing in 1823, “one evening lost the sum of seventy thousand pounds in a gaming house, on the right side of St. James street, and, suspecting foul play, he put the dice in his pocket, and, as was his custom when up late, took a bed in the house. The blacklegs were all dismayed, until one of the worthies, who is believed to have been a principal in poisoning the horses at Newmarket, for which Dan Dawson was hanged, offered, for five thousand pounds, to go to the Duke’s room with a brace of pistols and a pair of dice, and if the Duke was awake to shoot him, if asleep to change the dice. Fortunately for 177the gang the Duke ‘snored,’ as the agent stated, ‘like a pig,’ and the dice were changed. His Grace had them broken in the morning, when, finding them good, he paid the money, and left off gambling.”

The Earl of March, better known as the Duke of Queensberry, who lived in the middle of the last century, was one of the most famous and genial “sports” that England ever produced. He was an adept, not only at all card games, but also at dice and billiards. And in the mysteries of the turf, and in all knowledge—practical and theoretical—connected with the race course, he was perhaps never surpassed. He won 2,000 Louis ($8,000) once of a German, at billiards, and time and again won thousands of pounds betting on the races, his intimate knowledge of all horse flesh and race track conditions giving him advantages which few possessed.

Dennis O’Kelly, if accounts of him may be credited, was a Napoleon of the turf and the gaming table, devoting his whole time to the former by day and the latter by night. He was accustomed to carry a great number of bank notes, crumpled up loosely in his waistcoat pocket. On one occasion he was seen turning over and over again a great pile of them, and, being asked what he was doing, replied, “I am looking for a little one—a fifty or something of that sort, just to set the caster.” At another time he was standing at play, at the hazard table, when some one opposite perceived a pickpocket in the act of drawing a couple of notes from O’Kelly’s pocket. The alarm was given, and many wanted to take the offender before a magistrate, but O’Kelly seized him by the collar and kicked him down stairs, exclaiming as he returned: “He’s punished enough by being deprived of the pleasure of keeping company with gentlemen.” A large bet was once offered to O’Kelly at the gaming table and accepted, whereupon the proposer asked him where lay his estates which would be surety for the amount if he lost. “My estates?” cried O’Kelly, “Oh, if that’s what you mean, I’ve a map of them here.” And he opened his pocket book and showed bank notes to ten times the amount of the wager, to which he soon afterward added the contribution of his opponent.

Dick England, one of O’Kelly’s associates, was also a notorious gambler. These two and several others plundered a clerk of the Bank of England, who robbed the bank of an immense sum with which to pay his “debts of honor.” Dick England and fourteen others once conspired to beat a Jew at dice, and upon their entry one of them laid a wager of £10, calling “seven the main.” Six was the cast, whereupon the player with great effrontery declared that he had called six instead of seven. After the matter had been disputed for a time, it was agreed to leave it to a majority of those present, whereupon Dick England and the twelve others in the conspiracy declared in favor of “six,” and then they went 178out and divided the plunder. This same Dick England, with two or three associates, once made a bold attempt to plunder a rich young man named D——, from the country, at Scarborough. They got into his company and set to drinking with a view of getting him drunk so that he could be bled more easily. They succeeded so well in this that the young man became so stupidly drunk that he could not play at all. Not to be frustrated, however, the conspirators played for a short time and then proceeded to make out three “I. O. U’s.,” two of which read: “D—— owes me eighty guineas;” and “D—— owes me one hundred guineas;” and the third, which Dick England had, read, “I owe D—— thirty guineas.” The next day Dick England and the young man met and the latter apologizedapologized for becoming intoxicated and hoped he had given no offense. Dick assured him that he had not and then producing the evidence of indebtedness, proceeded to discharge it by handing the young man thirty guineas. The young man declared that he had no recollection at all of playing, but finally took the thirty guineas, and paid Dick a high compliment for acting in such an honorable manner. Meeting the holders of the other papers shortly afterward he renewed his apologies and again complimented Dick England for having paid to him a bet which he had no remembrance of making. At this juncture the two produced their papers which purported to show that the young man owed them 100 and 80 guineas respectively. He was astonished, of course, and protested that he did not think he had played at all, but he had compromised himself by accepting his thirty guineas, and finally, he decided to make the best of a bad matter by paying the claims. Before he could do so, however, his friends interfered, and, after a little investigation, exposed the whole fraud, and saved him his money. At another time, Dick England won £40,000 from the son of an Earl, who was so broken up at the loss, that he went to Stacia’s hotel and shot himself, almost at the very hour that his father sent his steward to pay the debt, though being convinced that his son had been cheated out of the amount. Dick England is known to have fought eleven duels and to have ruined about forty persons at play.

The Gentlemen’s Magazine published the following account of a tragic occurrence in the life of Dick England.

“Mr. Richard England was put to the bar at the Old Bailey, charged with the ‘willful murder’ of Mr. Rowlls, brewer, of Kingston, in a duel at Cranford Bridge, June 18, 1784.”

“Lord Derby, the first witness, gave evidence that he was present at Ascot races; when in the stand upon the race course, he heard Mr. England cautioning the gentlemen present not to bet with the deceased, as he neither paid what he lost, nor what he borrowed; on which Mr. Rowlls went up to him, called him rascal or scoundrel, and offered to 179strike him, when Mr. England bid him stand off, or he would be obliged to knock him down, saying at the same time, ‘We have interrupted the company sufficiently here, and if you have anything further to say to me, you know where I am to be found.’found.’ A further altercation ensued, but his Lordship being at the other end of the stand, did not distinctly hear it, and then the parties retired.

“Lord Dartrey, afterward Lord Cremorne, and his lady, with a gentlemen, were at the inn at the time the duel was fought. They went into the garden and endeavored to prevent the duel. Several other persons were collected in the garden. Mr. Rowlls said, if they did not retire, he must, though reluctantly, call them impertinent. Mr. England at the same time stepped forward, took off his hat, and said, “Gentlemen, I have been cruelly treated, I have been injured in my honor and character, let reparation be made, and I am ready to have done this moment.” Lady Dartrey retired. His Lordship stood in the bower of the garden until he saw Mr. Rowlls fall. One or two witnesses were called, who proved nothing material. A paper, containing the prisoners defense, being read, the Earl of Derby, the Marquis of Hertford, Mr. Whitbred, Jr., Col. Bishopp, and other gentlemen were called as to his character. They all spoke of him as a man of decent gentlemanly deportment, who, instead of seeking quarrels, was studious to avoid them. He had been friendly to Englishman when abroad and had rendered some service to the military at the siege of Newport.

”Mr.”Mr. Justice Rooke summed up the evidence, after which the jury retired for about three quarters of an hour, when they returned a verdict of ‘manslaughter’‘manslaughter’ The prisoner having fled from the laws of his country for twelve years, the Court was disposed to show no lenity. He was therefore sentenced to pay a fine of ten shillings, and be imprisoned in Newgate twelve months.”

Dick England died in 1792 from a cold caught in jail, where he had been sent in consequence of having been arrested at a gaming table.

The celebrated Selwyn was a devoted patron of the gaming table, and often played high. In 1765 he lost £1,000 to a Mr. Shafto, and it is said, was frequently the victim of sharpers. Late in life he gave up his ruinous diversion. Lord Carlisle, who was second cousin of Lord Byron, was a victim of the infatuation of play and his losses brought him to financial straits. In his letters he reproaches himself deeply for yielding to the vice and shows that he fully appreciated the degrading effects of indulging in it. Like Selwyn he finally succeeded in emancipating himself from his terrible master. Pitt, the celebrated statesmen, was another eminent EnglishmanEnglishman who, at one time, in his career, was an inveterate gambler, and who subsequently reformed. “We played a good deal at ‘Goosetree’s’”‘Goosetree’s’”, wrote Wilberforce, “and I well remember the intense 180earnestness which Pitt displayed when joining in these games of chance. He perceived their increasing fascination, and soon after abandoned them forever.” Wilberforce once lost 500 pounds at the faro table. At another time he was at the club and, the regular dealer being absent, a gentleman jokingly offered him a guinea if he would take his place. He accepted the challenge and quit the table £600 winner.

“On my first visit to Brooks’” wrote Wilberforce, “scarcely knowing any one, I joined, from mere shyness, in play at the faro tables, where George Selwyn kept bank. A friend, who knew my inexperience, and regarded me as a victim decked out for sacrifice, called to me—‘What, Wilberforce is that you?’‘What, Wilberforce is that you?’ Selwyn quite resented the interruption, and, turning to him, said in his most expressive tone, ‘Oh, sir, don’t interrupt Mr. Wilberforce, he could not be better employed.’” And again: “The first time I went to Boodle’s I won twenty-five guineas of the Duke of Norfolk. I belonged, at this time, to five clubs, Miles’ and Evans’, Brooks’,Evans’, Brooks’, Boodle’s, White’s and Goosetree’s.”

Sir Philip Francis, who many believe was the author of the famous “Junius Letters,” was much addicted to gambling and was a boon companion of Fox. The career of the Rev. Caleb C. Colton is an interesting one. He was educated at Eton, graduated at King’s College, Cambridge, as a Bachelor of Arts, in 1801, received the degree of Master of Arts in 1804 and held a curacy at Tiberton. He speculated heavily in Spanish bonds and yielded to the ruling passion of gaming, and his financial affairs becoming involved, he absconded. Subsequently, he reappeared in order to retain his living, but he lost it in 1828. After some time spent in the United States, he returned to Europe and became a frequenter of the gaming resorts in the Palais Royal in Paris, where, it is said, he won in a year or two £25,000. Part of his wealth he devoted to establishing a picture gallery.

Upon Lord Byron’s death he composed and printed for private distribution an ode on that event. Having become afflicted with a disease which necessitated a painful surgical operation, he blew out his brains rather than submit to it. This occurred at Fontainbleau in 1832.

Beau Brummell was even a greater gambler than was Beau Nash, and his end was far more sad. He frequented “Wattier’s,” where the play was so high that the club and almost every one connected with it, were ruined. One night in 1814, it is related, Pemberton Mills entered the club just in time to hear Beau Brummell, who had lost heavily for five successive nights, exclaim that he had lost his last shilling and that he wished some one would bind him never to play again.

“I will,” said Mills, and taking out a ten-pound note he offered it to Brummell on condition that he should forfeit a thousand if he played at White’s within a month from that evening. The beau took it, and for a 181few days discontinued coming to the club, but about a fortnight after, Mills happened to go in, and saw him hard at work again. Of course the thousand pounds was forfeited, but his friend, instead of claiming it, merely went up to him, and touching him gently on the shoulder, said, “Well, Brummell, you may at least give me back the ten pounds you had of me the other night.”

One night at Brook’s club, Alderman Combe, the brewer, then Lord Mayor of London, was busily playing at hazard in company with Brummell and others. “Come, Mash-tub,” said Brummell, who was the caster, “What do you set?” “Twenty-five guineas,”guineas,” answered the alderman. “Well, then,” returned the beau, “have at the mare’s pony” (a gaming expression for twenty-five guineas). He continued to throw until he won twelve ponies of the Lord Mayor, and then, getting up and making him a low bow, whilst pocketing the cash, he said, “Thank you, alderman; for the future I shall never drink any porter but yours.” “I wish, sir,” replied the brewer, “that every other blackguard in London would tell me the same.”

Brummell was concerned in an incident which occurred at Wattier’s club one night which threw all present into consternation. One of the players was a Mr. Bligh, whom every one knew to be a mad-man, but did not think especially dangerous. The incident is thus told by Mr. Raikes:

“One evening at the maco table, when the play was very deep, Brummell, having lost a considerable stake, affected, in his farcical way, a very tragic air, and cried out, ‘Waiter, bring me a flat candle-stick and a pistol.’ Upon this, Bligh, who was sitting opposite to him, calmly produced two loaded pistols from his coat pocket, which he placed upon the table, and said, ‘Mr. Brummell, if you are really desirous to put a period to your existence, I am extremely happy to offer you the means without troubling the waiter.’ The effect upon those present may easily be imagined at finding themselves in the company of a known mad-man who had loaded weapons about him.”

Brummell lost all of his money and a large amount beside, which he succeeded in borrowing of the money-lenders on bills signed by himself and several friends. Serious trouble over the division of one of these loans caused Brummell to flee to France. He used to say that up to a particular time in his life he prospered in everything, and that he attributed his good fortune to the possession of a silver sixpence with a hole in it, which a friend had given him “for luck.” One day he gave it to a cabman by mistake and from that time nothing but disaster had attended him in everything. One person to whom he told this asked him why he did not advertise for his lost sixpence. “I did, and twenty people came with sixpences having holes in them to obtain the reward, but mine was not 182amongst them.” “You never afterwards ascertained what became of it?” “Oh, yes,” he replied, “no doubt that rascal, Rothschild, or some of his set got hold of it.”

Beau Brummell died at Caen, in 1840, at the age of 62, having long been in great poverty, and for some time in a demented condition.

Tom Duncombe was one of the high-flyers of his day. He was heir to an income of more than £12,000 a year but he anticipated the whole of it before he was thirty. His father, at one time, intending to pay off the debts contracted by his reckless son, caused a schedule of them to be made and it was found that they aggregated £135,000. He increased them to a still larger amount before he finished his career.

The cases of Lords Halifax, AngleseyAnglesey and Shaftesbury, and hundreds of others might be referred to were it necessary, to show how great havoc the passion for play has caused in the English aristocracy. But it is not necessary. Enough has been said to point a moral, it would seem, that all cannot but heed.

It may be questioned whether any other country on the globe affords a more striking illustration of the prevalence and the power of the gambling mania than does the great Republic of the North American Continent. Nor are the reasons far to seek. Hereditary titles of nobility are not recognized by the American constitution. In the general scramble for position and power, wealth counts for more in the United States than in any other land under the blue vaulted dome of Heaven.

At the same time it should not be supposed that an insane desire to accumulate fortunes lies at the root of American gaming. The hard, practical common sense of the average Yankee convinces him that he is not likely to win a competence at the green cloth. A large majority of American gamesters (i. e., local, as distinguished from professional) gamble because their brains are in a constant whirl of excitement. Rest has no charms for them; they seek recreation in the substitution of one form of mental stimulant for another. The “operator” on the exchange, whose days are spent in watching the rise and fall of commodities purely speculative, finds the ordinary paths of life too quiet, too monotonous, to elicit more than a passing thought. From the moment when he leaves “the floor” until he returns to it next day, his brain is in a mad whirl of excitement. What more natural than that he should seek relief for an overtaxed mind through exchanging one avenue of activity for another?

The application of these remarks, however, cannot be confined to “stock-jobbers” and manipulators of “corners.” The same spirit pervades all classes of society. This accursed thirst for gold—sacra auri fames—enters every American home, as the serpent insinuated his wiles into the Garden of Eden, and destroys at once domestic happiness and individual peace. The mechanic stakes and loses his week’s wages; the clerk risks his month’s salary; the husband and father ventures upon the turn of a card the money which should be devoted to the support of wife and children. Yet, as has been said, this reckless improvidence cannot be ascribed solely to a hope of acquiring rapid gains. The feeling of dissatisfaction with his condition which lurks in the breast of the average American, leads him, insensibly to himself, into all sorts of rash excesses, among which is gambling at cards.

American gambling, however, presents some distinctively characteristic features. In the first place it is mainly conducted on the floor of the exchange, rather than in public gaming rooms. The Stock and Produce 186Exchanges are sapping the very vitals of the country’s morality. For “stakes” are substituted “margins;” for “winnings” read “profits;” while the designation of “players” is changed into the more euphonious appellation of “speculators.” With these changes in nomenclature, the game is the same in principle; the same in the method of its manipulation; the same in its demoralizing results. Even “suckers” are known, but they are termed “lambs.”

Professional gamblers have not been slow to recognize this fact, nor have they scrupled to avail themselves of it. From this circumstance has sprung into existence the “bucket shops,” those preparatory schools for the penitentiary in which the young, the poor and the unsophisticated are incited to avarice, duplicity, embezzlement and actual theft. The school boy, the artisan and the bootblack read or hear of colossal fortunes, accumulated on the “floors” of commercial exchanges. To operate a “corner” is beyond their means; but the conviction is not slow in forcing itself upon their minds that they may at least follow humbly in the footsteps of men whose faults the public is willing to condone in view of their success. Herein lies the chief danger—to the perpetuity of the Nation—in those marble halls wherein gambling is conducted upon a scale in comparison with which that at Monaco and Monte Carlo is dwarfed into insignificance, and where one man rides triumphantly into wealth and power upon a sea whose bottom is strewn with wrecks.

Yet another form of gambling which prevails in the United States more than in any other civilized nation on the globe is the mania for lottery speculation and particularly for “policy playing,” by which latter term—as is elsewhere more fully explained—is meant betting on the particular numbers which will win a prize at any given drawing. These forms of gaming are confined to neither sex, nor do they know the limitation of age, occupation or social rank. The official list of drawings is scanned with equal solicitude by the leaders of society and the outcasts of the slums; by the reckless young “blood,” who “takes a flyer” by day and leads the german at night and by the decrepteddecrepted old negro, who risks his last dime upon “4-11-44;” by the veteran and the school-boy, by the philosopher and the proletaire. That the general sentiment of the country as voiced by the exponents of public opinion has uniformly and unhesitatingly condemned the practice is unquestionable. While the vice is peculiarly American, in the number and character of its devotees, it is totally un-American in so far as the moral countenance of the Nation is concerned. Minor principalities of Europe have sought to replenish treasuries drained by the extravagance or debauchery of their rulers through the institution and legal authorization of lottery schemes, whose world-wide advertisement might draw to the country English pounds, French Napoleons and American Eagles. It has remained, however, for 187the State of Louisiana to bring disgrace upon the Republic by accepting, through her law-makers, a direct pecuniary bribe to consummate her public shame. Even the new State of North Dakota with its farmers crying for seed wheat showed the moral courage to resist the fastening into its vitals of the delicate, but deadly tendrils of the octopus which saps the morals of the commonwealth which tolerates its embrace as does its physical prototype the very life blood of the individual victim on which it fastens its fangs. Louisiana prides itself on its cognomen of the “Pelican” State. What a misnomer! While the pelican robs her breast to minister to her young, her mistaken namesake robs her own young to feed the vulture which first whets its appetite on her own offspring and later gorges its distended veins and arteries on the very vital fluid of other States and Territories. Out upon the indifference to public morals which recognizes, in this matter, a mere question of sectional lines. Shame upon the venality which would bring a nation into disrepute before the whole world in order that a purchasable Syndicate of corrupt law-makers might be enriched. The remedy for such a state of public morals is not easy to find. It is idle for any given community to insist that their chosen representatives do not represent the average morals of the district which places the latter in positions of responsibility. And yet the commonwealth of Louisiana would consider its character impugned should the palpable inference be drawn. It remains to be hoped that the legislators of the future may be able to devise some method by which the escutcheon of this great State may be relieved of the shadow which just now dims its brightness. This sort of dissertation, however, is hardly in place in the present connection. Gambling on the exchange and in the bucket-shops is discussed elsewhere. The history of the Louisiana lottery, from its inception, is given in another chapter. Nevertheless in an introduction to the general subject of American gambling, it is impossible to avoid these allusions although they are, perforce, of a somewhat desultory character.

What we are particularly considering in this section of the volume, Part II, is gaming as practiced in the halls, the club room and private houses in the United States. For those who, from poverty or other causes, are unable to gratify their taste for public gambling in rooms devoted to the purpose there is a multiplicity of devices, found upon fair grounds and at various other localities at which large crowds are wont to gather, which offer to the casual gamester an opportunity for gratifying his thirst for excitement at an expense sometimes trifling and sometimes costly.

At the gaming houses proper, the preference is given to what are known as “banking games.” By this term is meant games where the deal never passes from hand to hand, and where all players bet against 188one central fund, known as the “bank,” which is owned and operated by the proprietors of the resort. Of this class of games, faro, roulette and rouge et noir, are by far the most popular, the star of the former being decidedly in the ascendant. Another game of this description which holds a high place in public favor is keno (a full explanation of which may be found in Chapter IV) the popularity of which is due, primarily, to the small capital necessary to play, and, secondarily, to the belief that the legitimate percentage in favor of the bank is so great that the temptation to fraud is reduced to a minimum, if not an infinitesimal quantity.

Next to the banking games in the estimation of the bettors comes poker, both “draw” and “stud.” The former is played according to recognized rules, but the “house” exacts a percentage from the holders of certain winning hands. This percentage is technically known as the “rake-off,” and insures the proprietors of the establishment a handsome royalty on all winnings. In “stud” poker the dealer always represents the “house.” The players are never permitted to handle the cards. To quote Tennyson’s poem of The Brook, the “man in the chair might say—

In the public gambling rooms, also, many of the gaming devices seen upon fair and circus grounds are to be found, notably the wheel of fortune. These various contrivances are fully explained in subsequent chapters.

Public American gaming resorts are ordinarily classified under two general headings—“square” and “brace.” Under the former caption are included those where the “occasional player” is supposed to enjoy an opportunity of laying a wager with some possible chance of winning. “Brace” games, as the term is understood among the fraternity, are veritable “hells,” into which a victim is enticed for purposes of downright robbery under the pretence of a game of “chance.” The dupe who enters a room of this character, seals his own doom by the mere fact of entrance. The proprietors, from that moment, mark him as their own peculiar prey. If he has but little cash, he is promptly and incontinently relieved of it. If he is a “pigeon” whose future “plucking” promises a rich harvest, his mentors are merciful, and he is encouraged to “call again.” “Luck” appears variable, although, as a matter of fact, in a “brace” house—otherwise yclept a “skin game”—“luck” is dependent solely upon the will of the dealer.

In regard to American gambling houses generally, it may be remarked that there exists a popular misapprehension as to the relative proportion of “square” and “brace” resorts. It is unquestionably of no small value to any resort that it should enjoy the reputation of being “square,” and it cannot be denied that there are those where, under ordinary circumstances, the “bank” contents itself with its legitimate (?) 189percentage. Yet, as a matter of fact, it may be doubted whether there is a “square” hell (what a contradiction in terms!) in the country which has not conveniently at hand and ready for use, all the fraudulent contrivances so dear to the heart of the “brace” dealer. Not always are they brought into requisition, but, like the reserves of an army, are always at hand, and always ready to be brought into action.

The fact that the statutes of nearly every State prohibit gambling, necessitates a sort of sub-rosa activity. At Monaco, Baden-Baden and Monte Carlo gaming is carried on, not only under the very eyes, but even under the sanction and patronage of the government. Not so in the United States. The genius of American institutions has stamped upon gambling the seal of its statutory condemnation. Two elements have combined, incidentally, against any action which would enforce the will of the people.people. The first is the half-heartedness of the war waged against gambling by municipal authorities; the second is the assistance which proprietors receive from outside confederates. The latter “goes without saying.” Every habitue of a gaming house knows that there are “cappers.” Equally thorough is the knowledge enjoyed by every proprietor that some sort of satisfactory arrangement can be made with the municipal authorities. What is the result? Each of the operating causes produces its own effects. Guests at the hotels of every large town are persecuted by solicitations to gamble, while the Mayor and Common Council of the average city indulge in raids at a set time, for the simple reason that the officers of the law exact and receive a percentage on the profits of every game which they tolerate.

Outside of “banking” games, however, there is one which is almost as peculiarly American as is base ball. “Poker” seems to be, for some unexplainable reason, looming up as a National pastime. Some reference has already been made to gambling at the fashionable club house and in the family circle. Under such circumstances poker is the game par excellence. Stakes ordinarily run high, no matter how small the introductory ante may be. As a matter of fact there is scarcely a club house in any prominent commercial center of the Union in which there is not an apartment curtained from the vulgar gaze, where play is not carried on for high stakes. And these very gentlemen who play a friendly game rarely suspect that into their midst there is sometimes introduced a professional, who not only wins a handsome stake for himself, but also assists in recouping losses sustained by the gentlemen who introduced him. This statement may seem incredibly absurd upon its face, yet the author knows whereof he speaks.

There is still another distinctive feature of American gambling which deserves notice. Men who know that they cannot be admitted as members of any recognized club form an association by themselves, also known 190as clubs, which are organized for gambling purposes, pure and simple. Associations of this character are primarily conducted for the convenience of players, yet the keeper of the room rarely fails to “earn a profit” through selling liquid refreshments and the manipulation of the “rake-off,” which is conducted in a manner similar to that followed in public houses.

The interference by the municipal authorities with the “hells” is regarded by the proprietors as a contingency too remote to be worth seriously considering. There are various reasons for the excellent understanding which usually exists between the gamblers and the “powers that be.” Political influence sometimes lies at the bottom of the friendliness. It is also a sad truth that too often the explanation is to be found in actual venality on the one hand and corruption on the other. Yet there is one circumstance which should not be lost sight of. The “fraternity” not infrequently renders valuable assistance to the officers of the law by disclosing the habits, haunts, and sometimes the whereabouts of criminals who are being sought for by the authorities. Not that they are anxious to serve the ends of justice, but that they look upon the rendering of such assistance in the light of a quid pro quo for the “protection,” otherwise immunity, which they enjoy. The reader who will thoughtfully peruse chapter X of this part of the book will gather much interesting information on this point which will afford him food for no little serious reflection.

Another pronounced feature of American gaming is the number of itinerant gamblers who wander about the country, infesting railway trains and steamboats, invading the summer resorts, and coming down upon country towns after the manner of a wolf upon the sheep fold. These peripatetic sporting men are adepts at all card games and thoroughly versed in every fraudulent device. They combine the arts of the card sharp and the confidence man. For them honor is a by-word and virtue a mockery. They are destitute alike of conscience and of pity, and ill fares the luckless wight who falls a victim to their blandishments.

Hitherto, except in a few comparatively isolated localities, legislation has proved powerless to repress gambling in the United States. The “Johnson law,” so called from the name of its author, the Hon. Charles P. Johnson, of Missouri, making gambling a felony, operated to check it in that State and brought about a positive hegira of the men who had been thriving upon the gullibility of a too confiding public. Similar results have followed its adoption and enforcement in other States. But it is idle to encumber the statute book of any commonwealth with laws whose enforcement is not demanded by public sentiment. The vice of gaming, like its twin relic of barbarism, drunkenness, will be suppressed only when an outraged nation rises in its righteous wrath and forever stamps out of existence the viper which has buried its fangs deep in the very vitals of the body politic.

The general belief that cards were invented in the fourteenth century to amuse the imbecile Charles VI. of France is one of those popular errors which, despite the proofs arrayed against them by modern research, seem destined to be perpetual truth, though booted and spurred, seldom overtakes a plausible historical fable if the latter has the advantage of a start of three or four centuries, and therefore the idea that cards were originated by Gringonneur, a Parisian portrait painter, to tickle the fancy of a royal idiot, will probably continue to exist in the public mind for centuries to come. The public journals, in their answers to correspondents, reiterate the same old stereotyped tale, which seems destined to have an immortal lease of life.

The truth, however, is that cards, like chess, originated in the Orient, and were first introduced into Southern Europe by gypsies toward the close of the thirteenth century. How long they had been in use in the East is a matter of conjecture, pure and simple, but there is ground for the belief that they are as old as the Pyramids. This is a question for archaeologists to settle, and the answer to it does not fall within the scope of the present work. It is certain that they rapidly grew in public favor. During the seventeenth century the passion for card-playing became a veritable mania among the nobility and gentry, royalty itself setting the example. Louis XIV., in whom were united the incongruous characteristics of a gambler and a miser played nearly until the day of his death. During the regency, and throughout the dissolute reign of Louis XV., under the influence of Madame de Pompadour and the infamous Dubarry, the court gambled from morning till night and from night till morning, while the nation followed suit. So in England, substantially the same state of affairs existed, Charles II., with his courtiers and favorites, setting the fashion. In a word, all Europe was card-mad.

America’s turn came later. With prosperity came a taste for sumptous amusements—the legitimate offspring of wealth and leisure—and it may be questioned whether there is any country in the world where card-playing is so universal, or where so much money is staked upon the issues as in the United States.

The origin of the game of faro, like that of most games of cards, is obscure. There is a tradition that it emanated from the shores of the Nile, and that its antiquity is as venerable as that of the pyramids. Perhaps this rather fanciful theory has grown in favor from the fact that its 192name is sometimes spelled “pharo,” the name of the founder of the great Egyptian dynasty, whose head is said, in ancient times, to have been depicted upon one of the cards. Be this as it may, it is certain that centuries ago it was popular among the gamesters of France and other countries of Europe, whence it crossed the channel to the British isles and later was brought across the Atlantic to America. In the United States, it is a game par excellence at every gambling establishment, being at once the most absorbingly fascinating to players and the most profitable to the bank. Across the green cloth which separates the former from the latter, fortunes are hourly lost and won. The monotonous, droning call of the dealer, falling upon the ears of players, whose interest is breathless in its intensity, has proved to thousands the knell of doom to wealth, honor, integrity, and happiness. With its allurement of excitement and its tempting bait of gain, it woos its votaries to shipwreck equally certain and no less terrible than that which befell the mariner of old, whose charmed senses drank in the intoxicating music of the siren’s song. Faro has been happily likened to the “tiger,” which, crafty, treacherous, cruel and relentless, hides under cover waiting, with impatient eagerness, for the moment when it may bury its velvet covered claws within the vitals of its unsuspecting victim and slake its fiery, unquenchable thirst with his life blood.

The principles of the game as fairly played to-day do not materially differ from those laid down by Hoyle a hundred years ago. Be it understood, however, that this remark applies to modern faro, as played in the “hells” of this year of grace, only in the abstract. The principles (sic) upon which it is practically conducted by the dealers of to-day are of a sort calculated to astound that eminent authority on the doctrine of chances. In order, however, that the reader may thoroughly comprehend to how great an extent the player is at the mercy of the banker, it will be necessary to explain first the method of legitimate playing (i. e., if any gambling can be properly called legitimate) and then some of the devices whereby the dealer may transform his naturally overwhelming chances of winning to a practical certainty.

As preparatory to a discussion of the first branch of the subject, it may be remarked that faro is pre-eminently a game of chance. Even when played with absolute fairness, success or failure, fortune or misfortune, depend—not upon the skill of the player, but upon the caprice of blind chance. It is true that mathematical science has attempted to reduce this chance to some sort of law, and has formulated a theory as to the inherent probability or improbability of certain events happening or failing to happen, and there are devotees of faro who play upon what they believe—with a faith which approaches the sublime—to be an infallible “system.” But the doctrine of chance is, after all, but an approximation 193to accuracy, and the only certainty about any system, however cunningly devised, is the certainty that at the supreme moment it will prove a delusion and a snare.

But, to return to the method of playing: Any number of persons may participate in the game, which requires a full pack of fifty-two cards. The dealer acts as “banker,” and may, at his discretion, limit the sums to be played for, according to the amount of his capital. At public games, this functionary, assisted by one or more persons known as “lookers-out,” whose duty it is to watch the table, the players and the bets, with a view to seeing that the bank’s winnings are promptly gathered in, and that the interests of “the house” are properly guarded. In order to facilitate the making of bets, players purchase checks, usually made of ivory or bone or composition, though sometimes of paste-board, from the banker, who redeems them at the option of the holder. Their value is denoted either by their color, or figures stamped upon them. The banker usually limits the sums that may be bet in accordance with his capital, and the limit may be of two kinds, known as the plain and the running limit. The plain limit is usually twice as much for double, treble or quadruple cards as for single cards. That is to say, if a player may bet fifty dollars on either or all of the latter, he may bet $100 on all or any of the double. The running limit is any sum named and its multiple of four. To illustrate, the running limit may be 50 and 200; in that case, the player may bet fifty dollars, and if he wins, may suffer the original stake and its increase (which would amount to $100) to be where it is or move it to another place, where he may win another $100, thus giving him with his first stake $200, which is the limit. This is known as parleeing a bet, and if the first bet is five, the second will be ten, the third twenty, 194the fourth forty, and so on. Almost all bankers will allow a player to “parlee,” as the percentage is largely in favor of the bank.

Each banker is provided with a “board” about three by one and one-half feet in dimensions, which is placed on a table about four by two and one-half feet. This “board” is covered with green cloth, on which one suit of thirteen cards of the ordinary pack are portrayed in the order shown in the foregoing illustration.

In the centre of the cut given above, the arrangement of the cards in the “lay-out” is shown. The outer line of the parallelogram represents the table. Letter “G” indicates the seat of the dealer; “I” that of the “lookout;” “F” that part of the table on which the “case keeper” (the use of which will be explained later) is placed; and “H” shows where sits that important functionary who operates the “case keeper.” The players sit or stand all around the table. “A” represents the dealing box, and “B” and “C” the two piles into which the cards are divided as they issue from the box. “D” shows the “check-rack,” or the apparatus for holding the “checks,” and “E” shows the position of the money drawer.

The ace, deuce, queen and king are called the big square; the deuce, tray, queen and jack the second square, and so on; the six, seven and eight are called the pot. The players select their cards upon which they wish to bet, and lay upon them their checks.

All preliminaries being settled, before any bets are made the dealer shuffles and cuts the cards and places them face upward in a metal box, containing an aperture at the top, sufficiently large to allow the full faces of the cards to be seen. Originally, the cards while being dealt, were held in the dealer’s hands, and in Germany they are nailed to the table and torn off one by one. For many years, however, it has been the practice to deal from an uncovered metal box, a little longer than the pack, in which are placed the “pasteboards” faces upward, so that the top card is always exposed to view. Near the top of one end of this receptacle is a horizontal slit, wide enough to admit the passage of a single card, and at the bottom are four springs, which, pressing upward, automatically force the pack toward the top of the box, thus keeping one card always opposite the slit. The top card, called the “soda,” having been seen, is not used for betting, and is laid aside. The card immediately below is the banker’s card, and it wins for him all stakes placed upon it in the “lay-out,” provided it has not been “coppered,” as explained below. The next is the player’s card and wins for him in the same manner. Each pair of cards taken from the box and exposed constitute what is denominated a “turn.” It may happen, however, that the player may wish to bet that a certain card may lose. In that case he places a copper (which is provided for the purpose) upon the top of his stake. 195This is called “coppering,” because originally old fashioned copper cents were employed for this purpose instead of the wooden checkers.

Whenever two cards of the same denomination appear in the same “turn,” the dealer takes half the money found upon such card. This is called a “split,” and is, in effect, a percentage taken by the bank. If a player wins his bet and allows both stake and winnings to remain on the same card for another “turn,” he is said to play a paroli or parlee. At the end of a “turn” a pause is made, to permit the paying of bets already determined and the making of new ones. And the same routine is followed until the pack is exhausted, when a fresh deal is made and the process repeated. It will be seen that there are twenty-five “turns” in every deal. The dealer may close the game at the end of any deal when he may see fit. The last card remaining in the box at the end of each deal neither wins nor loses, although originally it was claimed by the dealer, who took all the money staked upon that card. The bank thus had the certainty of winning such stakes, with no possibility of loss; hence, that card came to be called “hock” or “hockelty,” which means certainty, and by that name it is known.

A player may avoid risking his stake on any particular turn by saying to the dealer, “I bar this bet for the turn”—pointing to it—in which case it can neither lose nor win, but remains barred until he says “it goes.” Again, he may reduce his stake one-half, by saying to the dealer, “one-half this bet goes,” and this, unless the order is revoked, will be understood to be his intention until the close of the deal.

When there is but one turn left in the box, the player may “call the last turn;” that is, guess the order in which the cards will appear. If he guesses correctly, he receives either two or four times the value of his stake, according to the advantage which he enjoys through the character of the turn. If the three cards are three denominations, they may come out in any one of the six different ways; if, on the other hand, two of the three cards are of the same denomination, only three arrangements are possible. Hence, in the former case, if he guess correctly, the banker pays him four times the amount of his wager; in the latter (which is technically called a “cat hop”) he wins double its value.

As has been shown, there is a multiplicity of methods of betting open to the player, but it remains to explain one of the most common, as well as fascinating, modes in vogue among the patrons of the “green cloth,” a method, too, which more than any other has been prolific of disputes. It consists of placing bets not only upon any card or cards, but upon the margin of the “lay-out.” These are called “string bets,” an explanation of which would tend rather to confuse than to enlighten the inexperienced reader.

196It being of the utmost importance to both dealer and player that the cards remaining on the box should be known, an effort is made to keep an accurate record of the deal in such a way that its every phase may be seen at a glance. For this purpose a printed card, known as a “cue card,” is given to each player if he desires it, with the characters A, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, J, Q, K, arranged in a perpendicular row, “A” representing the ace, the numbers indicating the spots, and the letters “J, Q, K” standing for the court cards. As each card is dealt the player denotes the denomination on his “cue card” by placing in the proper line a zero (0) if it lose, and a straight perpendicular mark (I) if it wins, the last or “hock” card being indicated by a double dagger ([++]).

The following statement of the odds against winning any number of times consecutively is applicable to faro or any other game of chance. The computation is that of Mr. Hoyle, who, as an honest man, had not forecast the devices of the modern sharper.

Champions of this game, however, claim that when fairly conducted, the percentage of the bank against the player is less in faro than in any known game; and it is probable that the fact of this belief being wide spread accounts for its wonderful popularity in the United States. In fact, when fairly dealt, the only percentages in favor of the game are the “splits” and “calls.” Mr. Hoyle gives the following computation of the odds at the game.

The chances of doublets vary according to the number of similar cards remaining among those undealt. The odds against the player increase with every “turn” that is dealt.

Having briefly outlined the method of playing, and shown how even when fairly played there is a very large percentage of odds in favor of the bank, it remains to point out some of the practices resorted to by those professional gamblers known as “advantage players,” “brace dealers,” 197etc., to take advantage of the gullible and unwary, called among the fraternity “chumps,” or by the still less euphonius term of “suckers.”

These practices may be grouped under three different heads: First, the cards themselves; second, the dealing box; and third, a system of confederates. These will be taken up in the order given.

1st. The cards themselves. The “skin gambler” never deals a game of faro without making use of cards known as “strippers,” or “humps.” These may be bought from dealers in gambling implements, or may be prepared by the gambler himself by using “trimming shears,” a tool devised for this special purpose, and costing from forty to seventy-five dollars per pair. “Strippers” are ordinary playing cards of the same size and form as the “square” ones used in dealing faro, from the edge of which a very little “strip” has been trimmed, thus making them a fraction narrower at one end than at the other. The “strip” cut off does not exceed one thirty-second part of an inch at one end and runs to a point at the other. These are used that certain cards may be reversed and known; that is, the narrow ends of some turned with the wide ends of others. Thus, the dealer may take all the cards under seven, and turn their narrow ends with the wide ends of the rest of the pack, thus greatly increasing the chances for “splits,” on which the banker wins half the stakes; moreover, the cards are used more in bunches, whereby the odds in his favor are still further increased. When the wide ends of such a pack are all together, it is difficult to detect them; but when a part only is reversed they are more easily distinguished, since if the pack be taken by opposite ends all those turned opposite ways will easily come out if pulled by the ends.

The cards just described are known as “side strippers.” Another variety, which has some advantage over these is called “end strippers,” or “rakes.” As their name implies, they are cut on the end instead of the sides, but are arranged, sanded, and used as are the others. Before making a deal, the cards are “pulled” and “run in” endwise, after which they may be shuffled any number of times without changing their relative positions. They will apparently change their positions, but owing to the manner in which they are cut and their being sanded, they adhere in pairs all through the pack. When the cards are trimmed on the side, displacement during shuffling is unavoidable; hence, the advantage of using “rakes.”

Other prepared cards are called “hollows” and “rounds.” These are cut in plates made for the purpose, and a portion of the pack is wider across the middle, and tapers a very little toward the ends. The rest of the pack is hollowed out a little in the middle and broader at the ends. Strippers of this sort are used for the same purpose as those first described, but are used by taking hold of the pack at the middle and one end instead of at both ends.

198The very closest observation is necessary to detect cards prepared in either of these ways, and soft, smooth hands are necessary to use them advantageously. The advantages resulting to the skillful dealer from their use, however, are too palpable to call for further elucidation, except in connection with the explanation of fraudulent, or “fake” dealing boxes, which will be given below. Sometimes the odd spot cards, the jack and king are trimmed differently from the remainder and then reversed. They are then “run in,” an odd against an even, and can be told through the difference in their size. This stratagem insures, at the pleasure of the dealer, the effectual bankruptcy of the man who plays upon a “system.”

“Squares and rounds” are made in much the same way. They are cut to pull from the ends like “rakes.”“rakes.” Like “hollows and rounds” they can be turned around without producing any effect upon them; and, like both, when properly “sanded” (which process is explained below), they can be shuffled without changing their relative positions. They are used in the same way as common “strippers.”

Another process to which the cards of the “skin” faro gambler are subjected is the preparation of them in such a way that they will adhere together. This is accomplished by rubbing them, sometimes with sandpaper, sometimes with rosin and glass, and sometimes with pumice stone. If, however, the surface be too much scratched, the abrasion will become visible when the cards are held up to the light. To accomplish the result desired most effectually, and at the same time with the least possible risk of detection, a powder composed of fish bone and rosin is sprinkled over them. When it is remembered that the dealing cards are extremely thin and smooth, the ease with which this device can be carried into successful operation can be imagined. Sometimes the backs of certain cards are roughened and the faces of others; the adhesion is then rendered very close and the added thickness so slight as absolutely to defy detection. To facilitate the use of cards thus prepared, a special dealing box, known as the “sand tell” box, has been devised, a description of which may be found in its proper place.

Still another resource, however, remains to the dealer of a “fake” game. He marks his cards along the edges on the faces, by which simple but effective plan he can always tell, with approximate accuracy, the denomination of any card below the top. This is accomplished by putting dots on the edges and it is absolutely essential to the successful operation of most of the “faked” boxes described below. Similar dots may be seen along the left hand edge of the card shown in the accompanying cut of the dealing box.

2nd. The Dealing Box.—When the dealing box was first introduced, more than half a century ago, it was claimed in its behalf that it 199insured absolute protection against fraud on the part of either dealer or players. Practically, as years have passed and new features have been engrafted upon it, it has become the most effective agency for unlimited fraud that the most nefarious dealer could desire. Indeed it may be questioned whether the original object of its introduction was not to render more easy the task of completely stripping every man who should venture to play against the bank. Hoyle points out that the odds, even in legitimate play are always in favor of the banker, and it seems hardly probable that he would himself suggest an innovation which might in any degree lessen his chances. The first boxes were made of brass, a very little larger than the pack, and about half an inch wider, with one side left open for the admission of the pack. The side opposite had an opening, close to the top, large enough to allow a single card to slip out, and in the top of the case was another of sufficient size to permit the insertion of the end of the finger to slip off the top card. At the bottom were springs to keep the pack constantly pressed up to the top of the box. That such a contrivance might be used with perfect fairness in dealing faro cannot be disputed. The fact remains, however, that almost every American gambling den to-day has at hand boxes which are cunningly contrived devices to facilitate the fleecing of the ignorant, to convert chance into certainty, to transform the unsuspicious player into the victim and the dealer into the harpy.

In order to have a thorough comprehension of the following description of some of the “fake” boxes now in use, it may be well that the reader understand the object sought to be gained through them. The rules of the game require that but one card shall be dealt at a time. To a dealer determined to win, it is of the utmost importance to know, before the card issues from the box, what that card is going to be. In this, he is greatly aided by the preparation of the cards as described above. Still, he needs some mechanical device through which he may put this knowledge into practical operation, either by failing to deal any certain card at a moment when its issuance from the box means loss to the bank, or by putting out a card which is sure to win for himself. To give him this advantage he uses a box so constructed that he can control its operations at will. It will thus be seen that his cards and his box supplement each other. To know the cards would avail him nothing unless he might use those which he needed; to be able to deal fraudulently would be of no possible advantage, unless he knew precisely which card to deal. Taken together, they form a combination so strong as to be impregnable to the dupe who fancies that he and his crafty opponent meet on a fair field in open, even if not honorable, combat.

At the present time, the “fraternity” generally use one of three varieties of boxes, known respectively as the “lever,” or “end squeeze 200movement,” the “needle movement,” and the “sand tell” box. Of these, the former is the most common, and the second the most expensive, while the third is commonly employed for a special purpose, which will be explained.explained.

The accompanying cut shows the mechanism of the “screw box,” at one time very popular with gamblers, and still used in some houses.

The front side of this box, “A,” is provided with three thin perpendicular plates, of which two are stationary, but all of which seem to be solidly joined together. Between the stationary plates “B” and “D,” whose inner surfaces are so highly polished as to reduce friction to a minimum, slides another and invisible plate, marked “C,” and which is adjustable and highly sensitive to the secret manipulation of the practiced dealer. This centre piece “C,” when properly placed and at rest, presents an upper edge a trifle above the two stationary plates, leaving an aperture so narrow that the dealer can take but one card from the box at a time.

“F” is a screw which operates a secret lever, “E C,” between the two plates “B” and “D.” This lever hangs on a pivot, and by slightly pressing the screw with the thumb the adjustable plate “C” quickly responds, and drops until its edge is even with those of the stationary plates “B” and “D,” thereby enabling the dealer to take two cards from the box at one time without observation.

Upon removing the thumb pressure from the screw “F,” the adjustable plate “C” rises to its original position.

There is a flat metal piece in the inside of the box at the bottom, which, when pushed forward, instantly and securely locks the box, preventing the discovery of its mechanism, should any of the players request permission to examine it. Such permission is always cheerfully, and usually courteously given.

Finally, inside of the box, as in all others, is a thin plate the size of the cards, which is placed in a level or horizontal position, upon which the cards rest, and which is supported by four steel springs, that force the cards up to the top of the box so that they may always be ready for dealing.

201The “lever,” or “end squeeze” box—the one which is perhaps just now most in favor among “skin” gamblers—is operated on the same principle as is the “screw” box. The screw, however, is replaced by a mechanical contrivance which enables the dealer to raise the middle plate (lettered C in the illustration) by means of pressure or “squeezing” applied at the end of the box. The “lever” box also differs from the “screw” in the manner of locking the secret mechanism. In the essential principles of the “fake,” however, the two closely correspond. The underlying fraud in both consists of the manipulation of a concealed middle plate, substantially in the manner already explained.

The “needle” movement box is so called from the fact that at one end, on the inside, is a small spring, lying the thickness of three cards from the top, and having a fine point, like that of a needle, which catches on the edges of the cards. The dealer remembers which cards are round—which, as has been said, may be the odd numbers or may be those having a less number of spots than seven; the remainder of the pack is, of course, cut hollow at the ends. By the aid of the spring, the dealer is enabled to tell whether the first card is round or hollow, and also what the second card is; as when the round card comes in contact with the spring, it pushes it in, and as the latter slips it makes a slight noise, similar to the grating of the finger nails.nails. He can thus tell whether it is for his interest to take the second card or not, and—thanks to his previous preparation of the cards—it is as easy for him to take one as the other. An incidental advantage of this box is, that in case any of the players object to the apparently undue advantage in favor of the bank, it is possible for the dealer to offer to permit any player thus dissatisfied to deal in his stead, while he himself bets against the bank. Should his offer be accepted and a player open a bank, the latter, of course, not being acquainted with the secret spring of the box, will derive no benefit from the grating noise even should he notice it; while by reason of the professional dealer understanding the sound made by the secret spring, the latter is able to tell very nearly, if not absolutely, what card is coming next.

The “sand tell” box is particularly designed for the use of gamblers who desire to induce a player to deal the game. As its name implies, the cards used in it are “sanded,” while the “tell” consists of a small extra perpendicular plate near the front of the box on the inside, a trifle below its mouth, which causes the top card to stand slightly in advance of the deckdeck, so that the gambler can readily distinguish the card underneath.

A record of the game is kept by means of an implement known as a “case-keeper,” which is usually placed in care of an employe of the 202establishment. This device is a miniature “lay-out,” with four buttons attached to each wire as shown in the illustration. These buttons run on wires, one of which extends from the end of each card. When the deal begins, all the buttons are shoved up close to the cards; as soon as a “turn” is made, the two buttons opposite the cards dealt are shoved to the opposite ends of their respective wires. This enables anyone around the table to see, at a glance, how many cards of each denomination remain in the dealer’s box. When all four cards of any one denomination have been dealt, that is said to be “dead.” When three cards of any one denomination have been dealt, the one remaining in the box is called the “case,” or “single card.”

It may sometimes happen that the tally of a player will not agree with that of the case keeper, owing to the fact that the dealer has withdrawn two cards where he should have taken one. In such a case, a trick known as the “put back” is employed. A confederate of the dealer attracts the attention of the players while the extra card or cards taken from the box are adroitly returned to it by the dealer. Of course, there must be a perfect understanding between the latter and the case keeper, so that when two cards are dealt at once a signal may be given showing the denomination of the second card.

In case a player making a bet finds that he has been misled by the incorrectness of the record kept by the cue keeper, the invariable rule is that the bet must be determined by the cards remaining in the dealing box, a regulation which is, to say the least, not at all to the disadvantage of the bank.

But the cheating is not all on one side, and a device called a hair “copper” is sometimes employed by players to guard against a possible loss on a certain description of bets. This hair “copper” consists of a piece of shoemaker’s wax, the color of the check, a horse hair, and a string of rubber attached to a band around the wrist, secreted in the sleeve. The wax adheres to the copper at one end of the horse hair, which is invisible, the other end being fastened to the rubber string which is extended in the hand to the tops of the fingers. Placing this copper on a bet, if the turn comes in favor of the dealer the player quickly and without observation loosens the rubber which jerks the “copper” into his sleeve, causing the dealer to pay the bet he may have fairly won.

Another scheme for beating the dealer is not infrequently resorted to by professional gamblers. It is technically known among them as “snaking” the card. This consists of “ringing in” upon the proposed victim of certain prepared cards, which are placed among the other dealing 203cards in some secret manner, and at a time when he is not aware of it. Sometimes, when no other opportunity presents itself, the faro dealer’s room is entered by false keys during his absence, and his cards are so operated upon that the operator can, to a certainty, break the bank at the first opportunity. There are gamblers who travel through the country for the purpose of “snaking” games, seldom engaging in any other species of gaming, and it often happens that many professionals are badly bled through this means without suspecting it. Sometimes the services of some person who is a stranger to the dealer are secured to play against the bank in order to allay suspicion.

The modes of “snaking” are various. One of the earliest consists of placing an extra plate in the dealing-box, in connection with a piece of steel not larger than a cambric needle. The cards are then cut on the edges in such a way that the appearance and disappearance of this piece of steel tells whether the next card will win or lose. This steel point, in the rapidity of its motion, was compared to a snake’s tongue, and it is probable that the origin of the term “snaking” is to be found in this fancied resemblance.

Another method of “snaking” cards is as follows: The deck is prepared. Let us suppose that the “pot” cards—the six, seven and eight—are the ones selected. A pack of cards is taken, and the sixes, sevens, and eights sanded on the backs and the remainder of the pack on the faces. Small dots are then made on the face of each card in the deck, near the edge. The position of these dots is determined by measuring on the card with the plate which belongs to the dealing box. Now, when a sanded deck of cards is placed in a “sand tell” dealing box, every time a card is taken from the box the card next to the one taken moves a little forward in consequence of the card taken from the box pressing on the one underneath it. But, with these “snaked” cards, the case is somewhat different; while dealing with these cards, should a smooth one be next to the one drawn from the box, it would be drawn a little forward, i. e., if there is not one of these “sanded” cards underneath this smooth one. If there should be one of the sanded cards under the smooth one, the card left on the top, after making a turn, will be held back by the sanded card which is underneath it, and it will not be pulled forward at all. Now, when a card which is left on the top, after making a turn, is pulled forward, these dots (above mentioned) are visible on the face of the card, denoting that neither of the pot cards can lose on the first turn; consequently the pot cards are played to win as long as this dot is visible on the face of the top card. But, in case, after a turn is made, the top card should not move forward, then the dot on the face of the card underneath could not be seen, which shows that one of the pot cards (which are the six, seven or eight) will certainly lose on that turn; of course the pot is instantly coppered, that is, betting that these cards will lose.

204Another and simpler plan is to perforate all the cards of a certain description, perhaps of either dark suit, from the two to the ten, with an instrument known as the “card punch,” of which the accompanying illustration will enable the reader to form a fair conception.

It is made of the finest steel, and is employed to puncture cards at the center. A “deck” thus prepared is substituted for that which the banker intends to place in the box. Sometimes, however, in this “diamond cut diamond” game, an entrance is effected to the dealer’s room and the “punch” is employed on his own cards. The substitution of the prepared pack for that of the banker is the fundamental point to be attained, and occasionally resort is had to desperate expedients. A fight is raised, and in the melee which ensues the dealer’s box is thrown upon the floor and the substitution quickly accomplished.

This shameless trick is played by one gambler upon another without the slightest compunction. What a commentary does this afford upon the hollowness of the old adage regarding “honor among thieves.” The author having never been guilty of larceny, as defined by either the common law or the criminal code, cannot speak for “thieves” technically defined as such. As to those greater thieves known as gamblers, however, he does not hesitate to say that among them “honor” is a word as unmeaning as the mirage of the desert is illusory.

But to return to the punctured cards. The holes made by the punch are so small that the player is often “beaten” by it. Whenever a white surface is seen through this small hole, the player is perfectly certain that the card underneath is the deuce, four, six, seven, eight or ten, and may accordingly back these cards to win for himself with absolute certainty. If a colored surface is discerned, he is equally certain that the next card will be of another denomination.

Yet another method is to sandpaper the edges of one-half the cards. Then, as the edge of the under card is seen through the slit in the dealing box, the outside player can tell in which half it belongs by noticing whether it is bright or dull. Of course, to practice this successfully, the player must remember correctly the cards making up each half; but when the division is made upon a system, this is an easy matter.

Besides the methods of cheating already described, which relate more particularly to the preparation of the cards and the construction and operation of the dealing box, there are other methods well known to professionals, which may be employed with comparative immunity and great success against the unsuspecting.

A favorite stratagem is to use a prepared deck containing fifty-three cards, one more than the legitimate pack contains, known among the fraternity 205as the “odd.” The odd card is never seen by the player; and as the cues come out correct, there is nothing of which he can complain. The advantage of its use to the gambler is that it gives him one sure turn during each deal, and he usually prefers to employ it on the last turn. In such a case, it is impossible for the bettor to win on the call, and he is equally certain to lose on any bet which he may make on that turn. The advantage of such a large additional percentage in favor of the game is palpable. A large proportion of players are fond of calling the “last turn,” because of the greater odds given by the bank; they are also more disposed to bet high on single cards at this stage of the deal, for the reason that a “split” is impossible. This is called playing cases. The manner in which a deck of fifty-three cards may be manipulated to the certain loss of such bettors may be best shown by means of an illustration. The denomination of the extra card is a matter of no importance, but we will suppose it to be an ace; its introduction would then make five aces in the pack. All the cards are then sanded except these five aces, which are marked on the edges with one or two dots, so as to be instantly recognized. The deck, having been thus prepared, is played in the following manner: The cards are first shuffled a few times from bottom to top, the dealer not then knowing the position of any card. The latter then commences finding the aces, which is easily accomplished, inasmuch as they are the only cards not sanded and are marked on the edges. While shuffling he places one ace on the top of the deck, over this he places a card of some other denomination, and on this another ace, and over this again yet another card. A false cut (which is accomplished in various ways, and is really no cut at all) is then given to the cards, which are next placed, faces upward, in the dealing box, the arranged cards being of course now at the bottom. Let us suppose that when the last turn is reached it consists of an ace, king and queen. Of course there are really two aces in the box, though only one is shown. If the dealer wishes to make the ace lose, all that he need do is to turn one card and then take two cards instead of one, through the aid of his “faked” box, the bottom one of these two cards being one of the aces, this leaves one card in the box, as there should be. Should he desire to make the ace win, he draws two on the first pull, and only one afterward, which results in one of the aces never being seen, making the cues on the last turn come out correct. Sometimes the cards are cut fairly, and the extra card comes in the middle of the deck; in such a case, when the dealer arrives where the aces are arranged, he is aware of it and acts in the same manner as has been already described when they are placed so as to fall in the last turn. Sometimes two odd cards are added to the deck, making the pack consist of fifty-four cards. When properly manipulated, the dealer has the advantage of being able to manage two turns instead of one.

206Even when both cards and dealing box are perfectly “square,” it is still in the power of the professional gambler to take such advantages of persons not posted as to be morally certain of winning their money. For instance, should a player select certain favorite cards on which to bet (as is often the case), on the next deal the dealer may easily cause such cards to win or lose all the way through as he may desire, the bettor never suspecting that the run was not a matter of pure chance. As these favorite cards come out of the box, the dealer—at a moment when the bettor is not observing—places them at the bottom at the end of the deal, where they are not disturbed while shuffling. The deck is then “run in” endwise, and these cards being separated, will either win or lose throughout the game.

“Faked” dealing boxes are not always the “thing of beauty” and perennial source of joy which their manipulators would like to see them. They occasionally “get out of order;” a little sand works its way between the plates, and even an expert “brace” dealer finds it more or less difficult so to use the device that its employment cannot be detected. At Laredo, Texas, a few years ago, a “professional,” who is now dealer at a famous house in a Western city, encountered a difficulty of this sort. He “pulled” two cards, but so clumsily that the “sucker” observed it. “What’s the matter with your box?” the player asked. “O, it’s a little old, and don’t work just right,” was the answer. “Well, see here,” said the Texan, “that was an almighty short deal, somehow. Reckon I’m going to lose money any way; but hadn’t you better go a little slower and make one of them long deals? I’d like to take a little more time.” The game progressed and the stranger rose from the table a loser to the amount of three hundred dollars. “Look here,” he remarked to the dealer, “I reckon you’d better give me back the money you’ve cheated me out of.” The gambler, with an air of the utmost nonchalance, replied that he would be blanked if he gave back any of it. “Well,” remarked the countryman, as he drew down his slouch hat over his eyes and left the room, “I’ll be back in a few minutes.” No sooner had he left than one of the employes of the establishment took the proprietor aside and advised him either to return the money or close the place at once, if he did not want the victim to return and shoot him “on sight.” The proprietor was a capital “brace” dealer, but physical courage was not his chief characteristic. He lost no time in acting on his subordinate’s suggestion. Hastily raising the window he called out to the victim—whose rapidly vanishing form was still in sight—“I say, you! Come back here a minute; I want to see you.” The “sucker” came back; the gambler greeted him cordially. “You old idiot,” said he, “can’t you take a little joke? Of course I knew that you were ‘capping,’ (i. e. acting as ‘capper’) for the 207game. Here’s your money old man.”man.” He handed him a roll of currency, which the stranger pocketed with a grim smile of satisfaction. But subsequent events proved that the proprietor “had builded better than he knew.” Sitting around the room were other men who had lost money and seen a fellow sufferer receive back his losses, it did not take long for the crowd to extinguish the lights, and in the darkness the unlucky dealer was “held up” for every dollar that he had with him.

3rd. The third adjunct to success in a “brace” faro game is by no means the least important. Confederates on the outside are considered sine qua non in every “skin” gaming hell. They are technically known as “ropers” or “steerers.” This euphonious appellation sufficiently indicates at once their character and the nature of the duties with which they are charged. The man who for a percentage and under the guise of friendship lures a man to loss is, if possible, morally lower than the scoundrel who robs him.

To be a good “steerer,” a man should possess some education and be endowed with a courteous and affable demeanor. The more polished his manners, the greater the value of his services. Men of this stamp hang about the depots, infest the corridors of hotels of every grade, and patrol the streets with far more watchfulness than does the average policeman. Their methods do not vary, in any marked respect, from those employed by “cappers” and “steerers” in other games, which are fully disclosed under other head lines. About the same qualifications are expected of faro and “bunko steerers,” and those required of the latter are plainly indicated in Chapter VIII.

There is, however, a class of “ropers” who do rather more than “dirty” work. These men hang about the entrances to houses which are alleged and believed to be “square,” turn out the gas in the stairway, and when a would-be player presents himself, assure him that “the house is closed for the night, but that they (or he) can ‘show him where a game is running.’” Should the verdant dupe be sufficiently gullible to believe the story, one of these miscreants “steers” him to a “brace” house, sees that he is “plucked,” and then claims and receives his percentage on the amount which the victim has lost.

Among broken-down gamblers who have lost the last vestige of self-respect, another game is popular. Individuals of this sort will hang about the side-walk in front of a “hell.” When a player goes up-stairs into the rooms, they watch him. If they can gain access to the house they watch his play; if they are too disreputable in appearance to be allowed inside the doors, they await his return. In either event, they ascertain whether he has lost or won. If the former, they promptly present themselves before the proprietor and claim the usual percentage paid to a “steerer,” 208and usually receive it. This sort of scamp is known among the fraternity as a “gutter snipe.”

Once in a while one of them proves himself of some service. On a certain evening, two young men had been playing faro at a “skin” house on the Bowery, in New York. They had pooled their resources and one of them had been doing all the betting. Their losses footed up about eighty dollars. After coming down stairs they stood upon the corner, bewailing their hard luck, when they were accosted by an individual who, although decidedly seedy, presented the appearance of being the wreck of what was once a gentleman. He told them that he had overheard their conversation and asked them if they would like to get a part of their money back. Being answered in the affirmative, he went on to say that he himself did not dare to go up into the rooms, but that if the man who had not done the betting would return alone and claim to have been acting as a “steerer,” he would receive from the proprietor a “capper’s” percentage of the house’s winnings. The advice was acted upon; one of the two again mounted the stairs, entered the apartmentapartment, demanded his forty-five per cent. of the money lost and received it without objection. The stranger was made happy by receiving a five dollar bill, and the friends walked away considerably wiser, if somewhat poorer, than when they first entered the den.

While speaking of “steerers” there is one fact which should not be overlooked. Not a few of the proprietors of the so-called “square” houses run “brace” games at other localities, “on the quiet.” These men keep “ropers” at the foot of the stairways leading up to their respectable (?) establishments, whose duty it is to inform any particularly verdant “sucker” that there is “no game being played here to-night,” and then “steer” him to the place where he can be fleeced with more ease and expedition. The same tactics are employed at times when public sentiment compels the closing of the gaming hells. The “reputable” gamblers shut their doors, and open a room either at a hotel or in some out of the way location, whither their “steerers” guide victims, thus partially at least, recouping their losses resulting from the closing of their regular rooms. Where they do not open other places they sometimes “stand in” with the keepers of “skin” rooms, to have their employes “steer” their patrons to the latter resorts, the “square” players, of course, receiving a percentage of the winnings.

The better class of houses of play close at about two o’clock in the morning, when the cards, dealing boxes and other paraphernalia are given a few hours rest. Others are open all night, and at Pueblo, Colorado, there is a resort whose doors are never closed. At all establishments, however, there are at least two sets of employes, known respectively as the “day” and “night-watch.” The day men arrive about nine in the 209morning, the dealer having the combination of the safe. He takes out the money, chips, cards, etc.; the “house is ready for business,” or to state it more accurately, the trap is set and baited for fresh game.

It is generally during the earlier hours of the day-watch that the game is “thrown off,” if at all. This term is a bit of gambler’s slang, and always means that some one is victimized through a gross breach of good faith, in other words, the victim is “thrown” to a confederate as a bone to a dog. The “throwing off a game” is usually worked as follows: Suppose that A, B and C enter into partnership to conduct a gaming house. A and B secretly agree to defraud C of the capital which he has advanced. C closes the house at night and A opens in the morning. B arranges with an outside party to come to the house in the morning while C is absent, and by collusion with the dealer, A, “win out the roll,” as it is technically termed, that is, win the money of the firm so that C’s share may be divided among the two scoundrels. Of all dastardly confidence games this may be probably set down as the meanest, and the fact that it is ever done shows how far the maxim “honor among thieves” applies to professional blacklegs.

The establishment at Pueblo to which reference has been made above, is probably the largest in the United States. It contains six faro tables, four roulette wheels, four hazard tables, two “stud” poker tables, two “draw” poker tables, one “short faro” table, one vingt-un table, one hieronymus bowl, and one table for playing a game known as “high suit.” They are all in one large room, which opens directly off the street, without any pretense of concealment, and contains, besides, a bar and a lunch counter. Back of this is an apartment in which occur two drawings daily, and yet farther in the rear is a keno room, where a game is run every night. This mammoth hell never closes its doors. Three sets of employes relieve each other, each “shift” (a designation for the alternate “watches,” borrowed from the phraseology of the Colorado miners) being on duty eight hours. As may be imagined, the cost of running such an establishment is enormous, and the fact that the proprietors continue to prosper financially shows that dupes are found in abundance.

There is one feature in the management of this Pueblo resort peculiar to itself. It is a very common thing in all gambling houses for a player who “has lost his roll” to ask a donation—or a “loan,” as he prefers to call it—of a small sum, wherewith to get a drink, procure a meal, or pay for a night’s lodging. Only in the lowest dives is such a request refused. In the Pueblo den, however, a different system is pursued. The proprietors never give money to any man, for the reason that they apprehend 210that the beneficiary might use it in playing against the house. At the same time no sober applicant (unless a chronic “dead beat”), whether player or stranger, is ever refused a drink, a cigar, a square meal, or a night’s lodging. Instead of cash, however, he is given a brass check which, while not receivable at the tables as stakes, is good at the bar, the lunch counter, or at a lodging house owned and run by the establishment, for refreshments of whatever kind he may desire.

This is a vastly simplified modification of the game of faro. The lay-out consists of six cards—ace, king, queen, jack, ten, and nine. The dealer commonly uses two or more packs, which he shuffles and usually deals from his hand, though sometimes from a box. The first three cards run off are for “the house,” and are dealt faces down and not exposed. The second three cards are for the player and are shown. Bettors place their stakes on the card or cards in the lay-out which they may select before the deal begins. The mode of play may be best shown by an illustration: Suppose a player wagers a dollar on the queen. If one of the three cards exposed happens to be a queen he wins one dollar; if two are queens he receives double the amount of his stake; if all three should prove to be queens the dealer returns him his original stake augmented by three times the amount; if no queen is shown the “house” gathers in the stake. It does not require a particularly erudite mathematician to discover that the odds at this game are enormously in favor of the bank. In the first place the player can win only should one of six cards out of fifty-two turn up. Moreover, of the six cards dealt he is allowed to see only three, thus reducing his already insignificant chances by one half. Even when fairly played the game, like roulette, is little short of downright robbery by the dealer, and when to this preponderance of chances one adds the numerous advantages which a professional “brace” dealer has over a greenhorn it is easy to foretell who will have the money at the end of the game.

The attentive reader will find, at various parts of this volume, allusions to the tacit understanding which often exists between the fraternity of black-legs and the police. The personal experience of the author is referred to and the chapter devoted to local gambling is replete with recitals of facts which afford food for reflection.

It may not be out of place here, however, to describe briefly the methods adopted for rendering ineffective even a carefully planned and honestly executed raid, if undertaken or managed by inexperienced or incompetent officers. The latter on gaining entrance to a room do not 211find any gambling in progress and are therefore unable to capture any property or make any arrests. The outer doors of the resorts are usually constructed of ponderous oak timbers, from four to ten inches thick, fastened together by means of heavy iron bolts. Of late years steel has been substituted for wood, and it is said that at one of the Chinese gambling hells in San Francisco the doors are made of thick rubber, resembling car springs in texture, the elasticity of which repels the blows of a sledge hammer as a marble pavement gives a rebound to a rubber ball. The object of making such doors is, of course, to prevent forcible intrusion. It is not of the employment of violence, however, that I am about to speak, but of those raids where the officers are given admission. It should be added that not infrequently entrance is granted, after a short delay, because the hospitable proprietors have been privately warned of the intended visit.

A small aperture in the door enables the door-keepers, one of whom is always in attendance, to inspect applicants for admission before undoing the bolts. If the custodian is in doubt as to the character of the callers, the proprietor is summoned. If the visitors are recognized as officers, an electric bell sounds a note of warning, and a parley between the blue-coats and the Cerebus at the portal follows. In the twinkling of an eye the cards, boxes, chips, lay-out, case-keeper, and money disappear into the safe. The table is at once transformed into an ordinary round-topped affair, covered with a crimson cloth. Scattered around the room are well dressed, quiet mannered gentlemen engaged in reading the newspapers, in discussing politics, or in general conversation. The police see nothing, and after apologizing for their intrusion, withdraw. Often the proprietor accompanies them to the stairway, and, cordially shaking hands, leaves in the honest (?) palm of the one in command a substantial token of his readiness to “bury the hatchet.” Scarcely have they reached the sidewalk before the table is placed in position, the safe unlocked, the money and paraphernalia taken out, the players resume their seats, and the game goes on as before. Is it surprising that the man who witnesses such a farce as this should entertain a contempt for the very name of law?

From what has been said, some unsophisticated reader may be led to suppose that running a faro bank is a short and easy road to fortune. No more fatal mistake could be made. Professional gamblers, almost without exception, die paupers. Nor is the reason far to seek. The gambler “on the inside,” is likely to win, even if the game is fairly played; and the skin dealer never loses, even by accident. But the curse of Heaven seems to attach to money thus accumulated. The winners rarely keep it long. The terrible fascination of the mania for gaming 212is no less potent with professionals than amateurs. The author might multiply illustrations, drawn from his own experience. A successful proprietor of a faro game will often draw from his safe thousands of his nefariously won money to drop it on the table in another house. Even Morrissey, the gambling king of the country, twice a member of the New York State Senate and later of the United States House of Representatives, owner of the most luxuriously appointed gambling house of the American metropolis and of the world famed “club house” at Saratoga, which vied with Monaco and Monte Carlo in its elegance—even Morrissey, the “prince of good fellows,” the idol of his friends, the once millionaire, died insolvent. The history of American gambling abounds in incidents scarcely less striking. Ephemeral success, debauchery, drunkenness, poverty, suicide or death from violence—this is the epitome of the career of the average blackleg. O! young men of America, you who are upon the very threshold of life, you who are in doubt as to “which way” you will direct your steps, you in whom are centered the fondest affections of so many hearts, you before whom so bright a future is opening, you upon whom depends the future of this great country, listen to the advice which comes from a heart that would avert from you the pangs which it has suffered. Believe one who has drained the cup to its very dregs, that at the bottom you will find only a serpent!

William Close,Close, one of the best known and most expert manipulators of a brace box known to American gamblers, who won heavily and bet as freely, died a pauper.

John Timmins, a successful dealer, “went broke” and in a fit of desperation, ended his miserable existence with a bullet.

Sam Cade, a “faro bank fiend” and one of the best poker players known in the “hells” was buried by a fund to which I was myself a subscriber.

These are but a tithe of the many instances that I might adduce in corroboration of the truth of what has been said.

An illustration of the well-nigh irreclaimable depravity of the case-hardened professional happened not many years ago in a St. Louis gambling house. A well dressed young man entered, sat down at the faro table, and in a very short time lost $500. His money gone, he hurriedly rose and left the room without a word. After his departure one of the “profession,” who was sitting in the room, looked toward the door and remarked, “Well, he dropped his little roll rather sudden.” Then he added, with a pensive air, “but it comes easy?” “What is he?” asked the dealer. “Why don’t you know?” was the inquiry of the first speaker. “He’s one of the finest ‘dips’ in the country.” “What’s a dip?” was the next conundrum of the proprietor. “Why, you driveling idiot,” replied his confrere, “a dip’s a pick-pocket.” “Well,” answered the winner, 213with a yawn, “I don’t care. Glad he makes money so easily. Hope he’ll ‘dip’ some more. A dip’s money is just as good to run bank with as any other.” And with this remark he wheeled about in his chair and was soon immersed in the newspaper, awaiting the arrival of another victim.

I cannot close this chapter on faro without a passing reference to an old gambler who at one time was a prominent figure all along the Mississippi valley, and whose face was as familiar to patrons of the river steamers as were the sand-bars which blocked the channel. I refer to “Colonel” Charles Starr. His long yarns were proverbial. According to his own story he owned half the plantations skirting the river. Occasionally some one would “pick him up” by telling him that he (the skeptic) was the owner of those broad acres. No such trifling circumstance as this abashed the “Colonel” in the least. Like Banquo’s ghost, he peremptorily and perennially refused to “down.”

Stories about him were as plentiful as “pickaninnies” about a negro cabin. It is said that once, at an Arkansas watering place, he was approached by an itinerant blackleg who asked for half a dollar with which to get something to eat. The “Colonel” surveyed him leisurely, from head to foot, before either granting or refusing his request. Finally he said: “How long did you say it was, young man, since you had anything to eat?” “Two days, Colonel.” “Well,” drawled Starr, “I reckon I don’t want to give you a half a dollar, but if you go without eating two days longer, I’ll give you a hundred dollars for your appetite.”

Starr was a gourmand, though a dyspeptic, and withal rather selfish. He went into a restaurant in New Orleans one day and ordered a sumptuous repast. A hungry, penniless gambler entered while he was eating, and approaching him, said: “Colonel, I’m awful hungry and I’m dead broke. Can’t you ‘stake’ me with some of that?” “Oh, no,” answered Starr, “you see, I’m a capper for the house, and my play doesn’t go.”

He accumulated a fair competence, but gambling and dissipation reduced him to poverty, and he died a pauper. The evening of the day preceding his death he entered a fashionable restaurant and ordered a dinner costing some seven or eight dollars. The proprietor called him on one side, and told him frankly that he did not feel disposed to “carry” him any longer, that he must pay cash for his order or it would not be filled. Starr said nothing, but went out and borrowed five dollars from a friend; returning, he threw it on a table and ordered the best meal obtainable for that sum. When it was set before him he deliberately turned every dish upside down upon the cloth, and walked out of the place. The following morning he died.

The game of poker is undoubtedly one of the “peculiar institutions”institutions” of the United States and, like base-ball, may be called a “National game.” It finds an abiding place alike among the pineries of the frozen Kennebec and the orange groves of Florida, in the gilded salons of Manhattan Island, the backwoods of Arkansas, and the mining camps of California. It numbers among its devotees men of letters and of the proletariat, the millionaire and the shoe-black, the railway magnate and the tramp. It recognizes no distinction of “age, color, or previous condition of servitude.” It draws not the line at sex, and is equally at home in the fashionable club house and the gambler’s den, the private parlor and the cheap lodging house. Men who avowedly abhor it, play it behind closed doors and drawn curtains, and ladies of culture and high social position are among its most devoted and most skillful patrons. To describe its fascination is as difficult as to account for it, yet the undisputable fact remains that of the vast army of men connected with mercantile pursuits in the United States, comparatively few can be found who have not some knowledge of the game; and were the whole truth disclosed, no insignificant number might reveal a tale of losses of no little magnitude.

Gentlemen, who would not, for worlds, enter a gaming hell, and who are apt to pride themselves upon their ignorance of faro, play poker at their clubs and by their own firesides, without either compunction of conscience or pretence of concealment. Intelligent, thoughtful men, eulogize the game as far removed from vulgarity, as calling into exercise some of the highest faculties of the human mind, and as resulting in healthy, moral effects.

This enthusiastic laudation of the game is all very well, but the naked facts remain, that whatever argument may be advanced against any form of gambling, may be urged with equal force against poker; and that this game sanctioned as it practically is, by the countenance of the reputable men who never set foot within a gaming house, has done more to weaken the moral sense of the country at large as to the general question of gambling than any other single agency. Its growing popularity and increasing prevalence constitute a menace by no means to be ignored to the prosperity, the morals, even the perpetuity of our people. A nation of gamblers is a nation whose course is already turned towards the setting sun.

215As in the chapter devoted to the game of faro, the game will be first described as squarely and fairly played, after which the principal tricks of “card sharpers” will be taken up.

Going Better.—When any player makes a bet, it is the privilege of the next player to the left to raise him, that is, after making good the amount already bet by his adversary, to make a still higher bet. In such a case it is usual to say, “I see you, and go (so much) better,” naming the extra sum bet.

Going In.—After making good the ante of the age and the straddles (if any) for the privilege of drawing cards and playing for the pool.

Limit.—A condition made at the beginning of a game, limiting the amount of any single bet or raise.

Making Good.—Depositing in the pool an amount equal to any bet previously made. This is done previous to raising or calling a playing, and is sometimes called seeing a bet.

Pat Hand.—An original hand not likely to be improved by drawing, such as a full, straight, or flush.

Pass.—“I pass,” is a term used in Draw Poker, to signify that a player throws up his hand and retires from the game.

Say.—When it is the turn of any player to declare what he will do, whether he will bet, or pass his hand.

The dealer, beginning with the person at his left, throws around five cards to each player, giving one card at a time.

The dealer shuffles and makes up the pack himself, or it may be done by the player at his left, and the player at his right must cut.

To begin the pool, the player next to the dealer on his left, must put up money, which is called an “ante,” and then in succession, each player, passing around to the left, must after looking at his hand determine if he goes in or not; and each player deciding to play for the pool must put in twice the amount of the ante. Those who decline to play throw up their cards, face downward on the table, and per consequence in front of the next dealer.

When all who wish to play have gone in, the person putting up the ante can either give up all interest in the pool, thus forfeiting the ante which has been put up, or else can play like the others who have gone in, by “making good,” that is, putting, up in addition to the ante as much more as will make him equal in the stake to the rest.

The players must throw away their discarded cards before taking up or looking at those which they draw.

216In poker, as fairly played, every player is for himself and against all others, and to that end will not let any of his cards be seen, nor betray the value of his hand by drawing or playing out of his turn, or by change of countenance, or any other sign. It is a great object to mystify your adversaries, up to the “call,” when hands have to be shown. To this end it is permitted to “chaff,” or talk nonsense, with a view of misleading your adversaries as to the value of your hand, but this must be without unreasonably delaying the game.

When the drawing is all complete, the betting goes around in order, like the drawing, to the left. The ante man is the first to bet unless he has declined to play, and in that case the first bet is made by the player nearest to the dealer on his left. But the player entitled to bet first may withhold his wager until the others have bet round to him, which is called “holding the age,” and this being considered an advantage, is very frequently done.

Each bettor in turn must put into the pool a sum equal at least to the first bet made; but each may in turn increase the bet, or “raise” it, as it comes to him; in which case the bets proceeding round in order must be made by each player in his turn, equal to the highest amount put in by any one; the party who fails being required to go out of the play, forfeiting his interest in the pool.

When a player puts in only as much as has been put in by each player who preceded him, that is called “seeing the bet.”

WhenWhen a player puts in that much, and raises it, that is called seeing the bet and “going better.”

When the bet goes around to the last bettor, or player, who remains in, if he does not wish to see and go better, he simply sees and “calls,” and then all playing must show their hands, and the highest hand wins the pool.

When any one declines to see the bet, or the increase of bet, which has been made, he “lays down” his hand; that is, throws it up with the cards face downwards on the table. If all the other players throw down their hands, the one who remains in to the last wins, and takes the pool without showing his hand.

To “bluff” is to take the risk of betting high enough on a poor hand or a worthless one, to make all the other players lay down their hands without seeing or calling you.

When a hand is complete so that the holder of it can play without drawing to better it, that is called a “pat” hand. A bold player will sometimes decline to draw any cards, and pretend to have a “pat” hand, and play it as such when he has none.

A skillful player will watch and observe when each player draws, the expression of the face, the circumstances and manner of betting, and 217judge, or try to judge, of the value of each hand opposed to him accordingly.

No one is bound to answer the question, how many cards he drew, except the dealer; and the dealer is not bound to tell after the betting has begun.

1. A Sequence Flush—Which is a sequence of five cards, and all of the same suit.

3. A Full—Which is a hand consisting of three cards of the same denomination and two of likewise equal denomination.

5. A Sequence—Which is all five cards not of the same suit, but all in sequence. [In computing the value of a sequence, an ace counts either as the highest or the lowest card; that is below a deuce or above a king.]

6. Threes—Which is three cards of the same denomination, but the other two of different denominations from each other.

When a hand has neither of the above the count is by the cards of the highest value or denomination.

When parties opposed each hold a pair, the highest pair wins, and the same when each party holds threes or fours.

When each party holds two pairs, the highest pair of the two determines the relative value of the hands.

When each party holds a sequence, the hand commencing with the highest card in the sequence wins; so, also, when two or more parties hold flushes against each other.

That full counts highest of which the three cards of the same denomination are highest. The two cards of same denomination help only to constitute the full, but do not add to the value of the hand. When hands are equal so far that each party holds a pair, or two pairs, of exactly the same value, the next highest card or cards in each hand must be compared with the highest card or cards in the other hand, to determine which wins.

In case of the highest hands, (which very seldom occurs) being exactly equal, the pool is divided.

Ante.—The stake deposited in the pool by the age at the beginning of the game.

218Blaze.—This hand consists of five court cards, and, when it is played, beats two pairs.

Blind.—The ante deposited by the age previous to the deal. The blind may be doubled by the player to the left of the eldest hand, and the next player to the left may at his option straddle this bet, and so on, including the dealer, each player doubling. The player to the left of the age, alone has the privilege of the first straddle, and if he decline to straddle it debars any other player coming after him from doing so. To make a blind good costs double the amount of the ante, and to make a straddle good costs four times the amount of the blind. Each succeeding straddle costs double the preceding one.

Call.—When the bet goes round to the last bettor, a player who remains in, if he does not wish to see and go better, simply sees and calls, and then all those playing show their hands, and the highest hand wins the pool.

Chipping, or to Chip.—Is synonymous with betting. Thus a player, instead of saying “I bet,”“I bet,” may say “I chip” so much.

Discard.—To take from your hand the number of cards you intend to draw, and place them on the table, near the next dealer, face downwards.

Draw.—After discarding one or more cards, to receive a corresponding number from the dealer.

The following descriptions of what are known as “jack-pots,” a modification of the game of draw-poker, is taken from “Trump’s American Hoyle,” which Blackbridge pronounces the standard authority on this as on all other card games:

When all the players pass up to the blind hand, the latter allows his blind to remain in the pot, and each of the other players deposit a similar amount. The blind now deals, and any player in his regular turn may open or break the pot, provided he holds a pair of jacks or better, but a player is not compelled to do so, this being entirely optional.

Each player in turn, commencing with the one at the left of the dealer, declares whether he can and will open the pot; if he declines to open, he says, “I pass.” If he has the requisite hand, and elects to open, he says, “I open.”

If no player opens the pot, then each player deposits in the pool the same amount that was previously contributed, and the deal passes to the next player. The same performance ensues until some player holds the necessary cards, and is willing to break the pot.

219A player may break the pot for any amount within the limits of the game and each player in turn must make the bet good, raise it, or pass out.

After all the players who determined to go in have made good the bet of the player who opened the jack-pot, and the hands have been filled, then the opener of the pot makes the first bet.

If all pass, up to the player who broke the pot, the latter takes the pool, and can only be compelled to show the jacks, or better, necessary to break the pot.

One of the most vital adjuncts to poker games as played in the many “club-rooms” scattered throughout the United States is technically termed the “take off.” It is an amount taken by the proprietors out of the pots as a percentage due the “house” on every hand “called,” and shown down; a pair of aces and another pair, and you must “go to the hole” with a check. The “hole” is a slot cut in the middle of the table, leading to a locked drawer underneath, and all checks deposited therein are the property of the keeper of the place. At other resorts the house “takes off” for each pair of jacks or any better hand shown on the call, while at others the percentage is exacted for any two pairs shown. It will be readily seen, by any intelligent reader, that it is only a question of time when all the player’s chips will go into the “hole.” The exaction of the “take off” is justified on the score of incidental expenses, lights, etc., but a compound interest note, on which interest is computed quarterly, will not take away your money more surely or more rapidly than this innocent looking “hole.”

In “stud-poker” the dealer attends to the “take off.” He is supposed to take one check for every pair in sight, and for every “call,” but owing to a manual dexterity acquired through long practice he is enabled considerably to exceed the stipulated limit, and it is but a short time before all the money played against the game is in the table drawer.

Having briefly outlined the principles of the fair game of poker, and explained the relative value of the hands of cards which may bebe held by players, it is next in order to explain the various advantages obtained by professional gamblers over those whom they propose to fleece, such as stocking the cards, employing marked cards or cards previously prepared, “crimping,” “ringing in cold decks,” “holding out,” false shuffles and cuts, “convexes” and “reflectors,” &c., &c.

First will be described the simplest of all known methods of stocking the cards, viz.:

Prepared cards are either “Strippers” or “Briefs.” In preparing “Strippers” the professional selects from the pack two hands, which may be either “Fulls,” “Flushes,” or “Fours.” The sides of the remaining 220cards are then prepared so that they shall be a little narrower than the hands selected. The cards withdrawn for stripping are then cut slightly convex on the sides, somewhat after the manner of strippers prepared for faro.

The number of cards taken out varies according to the character of the hand to be made up. If the sharper wishes to deal flushes he will require ten cards of the same suit. If full hands are desired he picks out two sets of three of a certain denomination together with four smaller cards of a kind. The object of this selection is to give variety to the hands to be dealt. The manner of conducting this scheme of fraud is substantially as follows: As the gambler shuffles it is not difficult for him to feel along the sides of the pack with the fingers of his right hand; he then draws out the wider cards, which he places upon the top of the pack. When he has succeeded in getting the wide cards on top he next divides the pack, then taking each portion by the outer ends, he places the two halves evenly together and then, with comparative ease, so shuffles them in that no two cards of the same size shall lie together, but instead shall alternate over and under each other throughout the whole deck.

The reader who will carefully study the foregoing explanation will see that the cards will run off “Four-handed;” that is that they will fall to the hands of opposite players.

In the practice of this trick the professional finds the services of a partner of great value to him. If, however, he have none, when he deals he places one card above the hands which he has set up in order that his antagonist may receive one of the arranged hands while he takes the other. Let us suppose that the hands have been arranged as “Flushes.” If the dealer finds that in his hand he has not an ace, as a matter of course he refrains from betting. If, however, the hands be “Fulls,” the professional’s acquaintance with the arrangement enables him to know which is the better hand, and he bets, or refrains from betting, as he knows is best.

It is also possible to employ strippers in a two-handed game. In the latter case the dealer strips the pre-arranged hands, but does not mix them as in a four-handed game, preferring to “shift” on his own deal and allow the cards to run without cutting on that of his antagonist.

Sometimes in using strippers in a four-handed game the dealer will place a “Jog,” that is a hand, over them and allow his confederate to cut the pack down to the prepared place. At first sight the employment of cards thus prepared may appear rather difficult, yet the professional blackleg finds it comparatively easy after a little practice. “Full” hands and “Fours of a kind” may be set up without difficulty. The swindler knows which the ten strippers are, and in taking up his five cards he is, of course, well informed as to the value of the five cards which his opponent has, and guides himself accordingly. To illustrate: Suppose there are 221ten strippers made up of four fives, three aces and three kings, and that the sharper secures three aces and two kings. Naturally he refuses to bet, being well aware that the four fives and the king must be held by his antagonist.

The “Brief,” which is a card used not only in poker, but also in various other games, is a card nicely trimmed on the sides to such a width that it can be readily distinguished by the dealer’s touch.

The advantage of using such a card is that it enables the party knowing of its existence to cut at the point where it lies. Sometimes the “brief” is placed on the top of the prepared hand and the confederate of the dealer uncovers the pre-arranged cards by making precisely the correct cut.

By far the most common description of frauds employed by professional gamblers in playing poker, however, is that of “stocking” the cards. Four varieties of “stocks” are employed by the fraternity, commonly known as the top stock, the bottom stock, the jog stock and the palm stock.

Of all these, perhaps the one most ordinarily employed—possibly because the one most easily accomplished—is the top stock. In preparing the pack for the perpetration of this fraud, the dealer selects a pair and places between the two cards as many others as there are players at the table, less one. Thus, if there are four persons playing he inserts three cards between the two constituting the pair; if five, he places four; and so on, as the number of players is greater or less. His next step is to place above the pair thus arranged, the same number of cards which he has placed between them, the result being that when he deals, the two cards which he desires must necessarily fall to his own hand. A partner is also a desirable adjunct in this case, as he ordinarily sits at the right hand of the dealer, in order that he may either give the cards a false cut, or allow them to run. If, however, the dealer has no partner, he ordinarily has to resort to the device of “shifting the cut” (a trick which will be explained below), in order that the arrangement of the pack may not be disturbed. If the sharper can manage to get hold of the three cards of the hands which are thrown up, he may sometimes find it practicable to arrange “threes of a kind” in this way, as well as a pair.

In executing the bottom stock the tactics employed are substantially the same as in the top stock, by that the pair are placed on the bottom of the pack instead of on the top. The dealer takes great care in shuffling that he shall not disturb the lower part of the pack. The point at which the deck is cut makes considerable difference in the success of this maneuver. If, after cutting, it is found that all of the pack, except the cut, is necessary to supply the players with the requisite number of cards, then the pair will fall to the hand which has the last card, for the reason that the player who receives the bottom card must necessarily have also received the other; but if the dealer sees that the bottom card is not destined to fall to himself, when he reaches the last two cards he “shifts” them, that is, reverses the order of dealing so that the party who should receive the top one receives the lower, while that uppermost falls to the next player. It may be readily perceived that by this trick the dealer has separated the pair, one falling to one hand, and the other to the player seated immediately upon the dealer’s left. I have already stated that the point at which the deck may be cut plays no unimportant part in the successful accomplishment of this maneuver. In fact, in order to succeed it is essential that the sharper have a partner at his right who will cut so near to the bottom of the deck that the lower cards will have to be run off. It is immaterial to the two scoundrels which of them receives the pre-arranged pair, inasmuch as the winnings are to be divided between them, consequently the bottom stock affords a double chance for the perpetration of fraud.

Occasionally a blackleg who has no partner, but who observes that some particular player is in the habit of cutting the pack very deep, will so arrange matters that he may sit next to him, this renders an innocent party inadvertently an accomplice to his nefarious practices. When two sharpers sit in a game with honest players and have resort to the use of the bottom stock, especially if to this be added “signing up,”—by which is meant “signaling” to one’s confederate the cards which one has—it is, however, a moral impossibility for the unsophisticatedunsophisticated to beat the combination of the sharpers.

Should the trick be suspected the sharp rogues will place the remainder of the pack on top of the cut, suffering a “jog”—which will be explained later—to lie over it, by which means they are enabled to deal from the entire pack, which usually tends to counteract suspicion. Sometimes, after the pair has been placed on the bottom of the pack another card is put underneath, the result being that the player who receives the next to the last card will receive the pair. This very simple trick has been found most efficacious in puzzling a suspicious player, who is ordinarily greatly 223surprised to find that the hand into which falls the last card has not received the prepared pair. Sometimes two, or even three cards are placed on the bottom, the principle being the same, although in this case it is necessary that the dealer should carefully remember the number of cards so placed, in order that he may know precisely when he reaches the lower card of the pair.

The “jog” stock is a device which it is absolutely impossible to execute without the aid of a confederate, yet it is regarded by professionals as one of the most effectual means of defrauding an honest player. As in the case of the top and bottom stocks, a pair is arranged by the dealer, who places upon it a sufficient number of cards to make the pair fall to his own hand. He next shuffles the pack once or twice in such a manner as to keep the arranged cards on the top, after which he slides a portion of the deck over the pair, leaving a narrow break or jog along the side, thus separating the hand which he has put up from the remainder of the pack. His confederate, it should be remembered, always sits on his right, then takes that part of the deck which rests upon the top of the stocked hand, with the thumb and finger of his right hand grasping them by the ends. Then with the thumb and middle finger of his left hand he seizes, in the same manner, the pre-arranged cards underneath; he draws out the latter and places them on top of the others, leaving them in precisely the same position as they were before his confederate offered them to him to cut.

An expert sharper, after winning once through these means, on his next deal so arranges the pack that the pair shall fall to his partner, with whom he bets, and to whom he apparently loses money. After this the cards are permitted to run naturally for one or two hands, when the second scoundrel repeats the same tactics.

The reflecting reader will readily perceive that this device is far less likely to arouse suspicion than the employment of either the top or bottom stock, and for this reason is more popular with experts than either of the other two.

In playing this trick many sharpers have resorted to the use of glazed cards. Usually the backs have been previously prepared by slightly roughening them with very fine sand-paper. The object of doing this is to cause the cards to adhere together and prevent them from slipping about during the process of shuffling. This enables the dealer to place the pack to a very fine break, which renders the cutting more easy and attracts less attention. I have known experts who were able to set up “three of a kind” in this way as easily as a single pair, although for the successful accomplishment of this it is necessary that the two confederates should understand each other thoroughly. In such a case the partner sitting on the dealer’s 224right observes what pair the latter has, and, if possible, either by cutting the third card into his own hand or from the hands thrown down, and turns it to his confederate with the proper number of cards beneath. If the dealer allow the hand to pass to his partner, the latter, if he wins and deals, passes the cards on to the bottom, in order that the hand may run out on the bottom stock.

No little dexterity is required to manipulate the “palm stock.” I have seen professionals attempt its execution and come to no small grief through its being detected in consequence of their clumsiness. In order to execute this maneuver effectually, the party intending to employ it must be on the left of the dealer. He obtains possession of a high pair—perhaps kings or aces—and while he is holding one in each hand in such a way that neither can be perceived, he asks that he be allowed, after the shuffling and cutting, to cut the deck again. Permission having been granted, he seizes the pack in his right hand, places one of the cards which he has withheld in his hand on top of the pack, and as he cuts he leaves as many cards on the table as may be necessary to intervene between the pair in order that they may be “Put up.” Then as he grasps these cards with his left hand he places the other card of the pair on the top and throws them on top of the pack. It is not difficult to see that the result of this maneuver is to place the two cards which he has “palmed” in such a position that they will inevitably fall to himself. Of course it is not possible to practice this trick frequently without exciting suspicion, but I have, myself, by employing it judiciously, managed to win no inconsiderable sums. As a rule, after executing the “Palm Stock,” the black-leg “goes a blind,” and the trick is rarely attempted unless there is a large “ante.”

Another favorite practice among the black-legs is the “False Shuffle.” Almost all sharpers have their own individual methods of shuffling; but perhaps the one which is most approved is that known among the profession as “the intricate shuffle.” It is executed substantially as follows: The cards are “ripped,” that is, the deck is divided into two halves, which are pushed entirely through each other, after which they are drawn out at the ends, and the half which was previously on top is replaced in the same position. Some professionals shuffle only the lower half of the pack, not disturbing the top, but concealing the upper cards by means of keeping three or four fingers over the end of the pack which is towards their antagonist. Sometimes a very quick shuffle is employed which does not disarrange the cards on the top, and after this the pack is 225given a double false cut, by means of which the cards originally uppermost are retained in the same position. The device, which, if rapidly executed, appears to the unsophisticated player a perfectly fair shuffle, only a practical acquaintance with the operation of the trick enables the verdant amateur to detect this trick when executed adroitly.

Besides false shuffles, professionals also have resort to false cuts. Of these, there are but two varieties in common use, known respectively as the “over hand” and “double” cut. In the former about one-third of the pack is taken with the right hand, while one-half the remainder is concealed in the left. The party cutting brings the left hand towards him, that portion of the deck which is left on the table is then covered by the dropping of the cards held in the right hand, the hand still being kept over them, while those in the left hand are thrown over and beyond the others; the maneuver is completed by placing the cards in the right hand on the top.

In the execution of the “double” cut, the middle of the pack is drawn out at the end with the thumb and middle finger, after they are brought to the top of the deck, the cards originally uppermost are caught by the lower part of the thumb and three fingers, drawn out at the end and once more placed on the top. In either case the pack is left in precisely the same position as it was before the seeming cut had been made. The object is the same in the case of both false shuffles and false cuts; that is, to leave the pre-arranged pack in precisely the condition in which the dealer wished it to be.

Sometimes, when a perfectly fair cut is made by an honest player, the professional finds it desirable to “shift” the cut, or, in other words, to replace the two sections of the pack in the same condition in which they were before they had been offered for cutting. The methods of executing this trick are multiform. Ordinarily, however, the operator finds it desirable to have a partner on his left; in fact, in draw-poker it is difficult to execute the maneuver without some assistance. Three of a kind having been placed on top in the shuffle, the cut is left on the table, and the professional deals from the remainder. The deal being completed, removed from the table with the right hand, the cut “shifted,” and the pack dropped into the left hand ready for his partner’s draft.

This piece of chicancery, if successfully performed, is almost impossible of detection by a greenhorn, and even the professional gamblers are not infrequently deceived by its dexterous manipulation.

The accompanying illustration affords a view of two “skin” gamblers engaged in victimizing a “sucker” by means of a trick familiarly known among the fraternity as “tipping” or “signing the hand.” Large sums of money have been won through this means, not only from verdant dupes, but even from professionals who prided themselves upon their astuteness. In order to work it successfully, marked cards are indispensable, and at least one of the confederates, who act in unison, must be an expert at the use of “paper,” as marked or “advantage” cards are called among the gamblers.

The cut shows the method in which the trick is carried on. Player number 3 represents the “sucker;” player number 2 the swindler who has induced him to play on the promise of “tipping” the “hand” of number 1, who is in reality the partner of number 2, although, of course, this latter fact is unknown to number 3. The method of playing this nefarious confidence game may be best shown by an illustration. Number 2 always faithfully signals number 3 precisely what cards are in the hands of number 1. The latter being an expert marked card player, of course, knows with absolute certainty what cards are held by number 3. Let us suppose that number 1 holds a pair of sixes and number 3 a pair of fives. Number 2 signals to number 3 that number 1 has in his hand a low pair. Number 3 is naturally in the dark as to whether the pair in question is of a lower denomination than his own, and in the hope that it may prove to be makes his bet. Number 1 immediately “raises” him, and this is continued as long as the victim can be induced to wager, or until number 3 has “staked” his “pile.”“pile.” The hands being “shown down,” of course number 1 takes the stakes.

Perhaps one of the most successful feats accomplished by the professional gambler is that known as “running up two hands.” Under such circumstances the game is no longer a contest, but a certainty. It is sometimes played with a partner, sometimes without. If the operator have no partner, he usually selects his seat on the right of the man whom he considers the most verdant of the players. When he observes that his left hand neighbor has a prospect of winning, he immediately “passes,” and taking up the pack prepares the hand as follows:

He selects the individual to whom he proposes to give, let us say, three tens; also, the one upon whom he intends to bestow the larger set of threes, say three kings; in putting up the hands, however, he commences with his own, and while the cards face him for the reason that he knows that when the pack is reversed for the purpose of dealing the uppermost card facing him will be the last one dealt, and as he sits on the right of the dealer, it will of course fall to him. Having selected a king (the face of the pack being uppermost) he places as many cards below as there may be players on his right between himself and the person to whomwhom he wishes to give the three tens. Below these he places another ten, and underneath that as many cards as there are players between himself and the player who is to receive the tens. In the same manner he arranges the other tens together with the kings, so that the three tens may be brought to the bottom. This being done the pack is turned over and as a matter of course the ten placed on the bottom now becomes the top card. His next move is to place as many cards over these as there are players on the left of the dealer, between the latter and the unfortunate individual who is destined to receive the tens.

This explanation may not be as clear to the reader as some of those which have preceded it, yet to go into full details would require more space than can be afforded to a description of the trick. The preparations having all been arranged, the expert very rapidly gathers in the cards as they are thrown down, placing them underneath the pack. He then begs to be permitted to shuffle before the regular dealer. If the request be granted he takes care so to shuffle as to not disturb the hands which he has arranged with so much care. In fact he usually has recourse to the device which has been already described as a “false shuffle.” Sitting on the dealer’s left, of course the cut falls to him, and he either gives the deck a false cut, or says “let them run.”

The consequence of this maneuver is that the blackleg receives the three kings, while one of the other players obtains the three tens. The three tens being considered a safe hand upon which to bet, it is not a difficult matter to induce the verdant player to stake a considerable sum, 228which the expert invariably wins. The sharper, however, finds it far more easy to accomplish his nefarious end if he has a partner. The latter individual, after the cards have been stocked, gives a “false shuffle.” Professional No. 1, who sits at his partner’s right, gives the deck a false cut, and professional No. 2 runs the cards off. It may seem incredible to the average reader that men will sit around a poker table and permit such dallying with the pack.

After long experience, however, I must say that the cases are exceptional in which a smart operator may not manage to arrange three or four such hands in the course of an evening’s play. Sometimes two sharpers, acting as partners, manage to keep the deal between them for two or three consecutive times; meanwhile they arrange the cards on the bottom by degrees, and when everything has been completed the bottom of the pack is transferred to the top. Sometimes hands are arranged in this way and dealt in the same manner as from the bottom stock, which has already been explained, the confederate, as a matter of course, being fully aware which is the best hand.

The ease with which even those hands which at first sight appear most difficult to arrange, may be prepared in this way, is almost inconceivable to the novice. “Flushes” seem an intricate hand to arrange, yet in fact they are among the easiest. A detailed explanation of their arrangement, however, would hardly be either intelligible or interesting to the average reader.

A favorite method of cheating at poker is that known as “crimping” the cards, which is effected in one of either two ways: The former is when the player is at the left hand of the professional dealer, in a four-handed game, or his opponent in a two-handed game.

The second method is when the sharper deals himself. In the former case the player so stocks a hand that it shall fall to himself, after which he “crimps” or bends down the sides of the cards of which it is composed. This having been done, after the shuffle has been made the sharper may readily cut to the hand prepared, since there will be a hardly perceptible space between it and the cards above it. If the dealer shuffles “over-handed,” the hand will rarely be broken. If crimping is to be resorted to on one’s own deal, the expert usually waits until he has secured a high hand, when he bends it down, as above described. He then places it on the bottom of the pack, and shuffles in such a way that it shall not be disturbed. After dealing, he lays down his own cards as quietly as possible, close to the deck; then, with his left hand, he draws the “crimped hand” from the bottom, and with his right places the remainder of the pack on the top of the hand which he had originally received. 229He then shoves them aside, and at the same moment lifts from the table the prearranged hand, which is thus substituted for the one which he has secretly discarded. In order to guard against detection, the moment when the other players are engaged in examining their hands is the one usually selected by the blackleg for the execution of this maneuver.

The use of “cold decks” in almost all card games has become so common, among the professionals, that the term, “ringing in a cold deck,” has achieved a recognized place in the vocabulary of American slang. Almost every one knows that the expression refers to a substitution of one thing for another, yet not every one knows whence the phrase has its origin.

A “cold deck” is a pack previously prepared, in which the hands of the dealer and all the other players have been carefully arranged. To “ring in” such a pack, is to substitute it for the one which has been fairly shuffled and cut. There are many ways of accomplishing this substitution. Sometimes a bill is dropped on the floor, and while the dealer is engaged in looking for the greenback the “cold deck” is raised, the original pack being secreted. This method, however, has become ancient, not to say effete. The most approved method now-a-days, is to place the prepared pack in the lap, to raise it nearly to the line of the table with the left hand, and, after the true deck has been cut, draw the latter to the edge of the table with the right hand directly above the “cold deck;” at the same time the latter is raised, the discarded pack is simultaneously dropped into the lap, where it falls into a handkerchief previously spread in order to receive it. The deal having been made, the sharper folds up his handkerchief and places it in his pocket.

Marked cards are among the favorite and most profitable “tools” of the professional blackleg. Among the fraternity they are technically known as “paper.” When successfully used every element of chance is eliminated from the game, and the play is practically reduced to a cut-throat contest, in which the professional alone carries the knife. In a two-handed game no honest player can ever hope to win against a gambler who employs them. They are usually marked so as to indicate not only the suit, but also the denomination of each card in the pack. As he deals the professional reads and remembers the hand of his opponent, and bets only when he knows that he has the advantage. At the same time it is sometimes deemed expedient to place a wager even upon an inferior hand, lest suspicion be excited by the too pronounced uniformity in winning. It is hardly necessary to point out the tremendous percentage of profit which is bound to accrue to one using cards of this character. Marked cards may be bought, from all dealers in what are known as “gambler’s 230goods,” but some experts prefer to purchase cards which are entirely “straight,” and mark them themselves. The sight of the name of a well-known manufacturer of playing cards, whose reputation is unblemished, will usually prevent or disarm suspicion on the part of a greenhorn.

In a two-handed game the cards thus prepared are usually marked to indicate only the size, the suit being a matter of comparative indifference. The method of using them in a four-handed game differs somewhat from that employed where one party plays against a single antagonist, but the reader may readily imagine that in either case the advantage in favor of the professional is simply enormous. A detailed explanation of the method in which they are employed would hardly prove profitable reading to the general public, and for this reason the subject is passed over somewhat lightly. Some are marked with a representation of the American eagle (what a travesty on the emblem of equality and fraternity!), and during the war thousands of the brave boys who took their lives in their hands in defense of the “old flag” were defrauded of the scanty pittance paid them by the government, through the machinations of unscrupulous scoundrels, who cheated them at poker through marked cards on whose backs was depicted a mimic representation of the standard for which they fought. Satire could not well go farther, inasmuch as the government which they had sworn to defend, tolerated the rascally proceedings even under the very folds of the starry banner itself.

Besides the “stamped” cards—i. e., those on which the secret marks are printed—professional blacklegs use others. An ordinary pack may be prepared by an “artist in coloring” in such a way that he may read the backs as easily as the faces. For this purpose a paint composed of chloroform, alcohol and some pigment is applied with a camel’s hair brush. The pigment may be of any hue—ultramarine, vermillion, etc.—the color selected being always the nearest approximate shade to that of the backs of the cards played with. Card sharpers who are expert marked card players (and it must be remembered that not every professional gambler possesses the necessary qualifications) always travel with a full outfit of packs. On steamboats they will buy out the entire stock of the bar keeper, furnish him with a fresh supply gratuitously, and even pay him a bonus to handle their goods. The result is that when any player on the boat wants a fresh pack, he finds himself compelled to buy the cards whose backs the professionals can read. In towns these manipulators of the pasteboards will either secure the introduction of their cards at the gaming houses through the payment of a percentage, or will see that they are placed on sale at some jewelry, drug, stationery or cigar store near the locality where the game is to be played. The next move is to introduce them at the card table, which is sometimes found to be a very easy matter. In some of the succeedingsucceeding paragraphs of this chapter the 231reader will find related some of my own experiences in this direction which may not prove uninteresting.

A favorite method of “ringing in” these cards—as gamblers term their introduction—is as follows: Two sharpers act in concert. One goes to a town and selects a victim, who is usually a country youth who has money. He tells his dupe that he is “dead broke,” perhaps because of sickness, perhaps for some other reason; that he is a professional gambler and can teach any man how to win at cards. The cupidity of the young man from the rural districts is aroused. The gambler shows him some marked cards and teaches him how to read the backs. Then he sends for his confederate. When the latter arrives the first swindler professes not to know him, and pretends to make his acquaintance for the first time. He then tells the selected victim that he has found a “soft mark,” (which in the vernacular of the profession means a particularly gullible dupe), and offers to introduce him, so that the countryman may win his money through the marked cards. The game is begun; of course the supposed “stranger” is as familiar with the marks as is the greenhorn, besides being master of innumerable other arts of the blackleg, of which the greenhorn knows nothing. The result is a foregone conclusion; the sharper wins all the money which the verdant young man can be induced to bet.

Sometimes it happens that the dupe becomes discouraged at his poor success and declines to play further. In such a case, if the rascals believe that he has any more money, the first confederate will secretly offer to “tip off” the new comer’s hand, a device which rarely fails to prove successful under such circumstances, and an explanation of which has been already given.

As a rule, professional gamblers who travel through the country with a view to defraud the unsophisticated by means of poker-playing, ordinarily work in partnership. Sometimes two—sometimes more—players compose the traveling combination, and divide the proceeds with more or less equality. A thorough understanding among the confederates is, of course, absolutely essential. But this having been once attained, the advantages of the partnership are obviously very great. They convey to each other surreptitious information across the table as to the nature of their respective hands, so that only the one who has the better chance may “go in.” I have already explained how they may co-operate with one another through means of false shuffles and false cuts. They may also prove of material assistance to each other in holding out, and in various other ways, to such a degree that the verdant individual who supposes that he is enjoying a “fair show” for the amount of money he has wagered, is, as a matter of fact, absolutely at their mercy.

232At the same time the members of such a dishonest firm have little confidence in one another, but watch each other as though they were enemies rather than confederates. Yet on one point they are at perfect harmony and act in absolute unison; that is, in the fleecing of greenhorns; and woe betide the unlucky wight who finds himself between the upper and nether mill-stones of such a combination.

Yet another device of the professional poker-player is known as the “Double discard.” The blackleg does not discard until after he has made a draft. He separates the cards which he wishes to discard from the four which he nominally proposes to retain, holding the former in his left hand and the latter in his right, ready for a fraudulent discard, in case he sees fit. Calling for four cards, he drops those which he has in his right hand immediately in front of him. Next, he lifts the draft with his left hand, the odd card of course coming on top; if now he finds in the draft one or more cards which he perceives will, with the aid of the four cards lying in front of him on the table, improve his chances, he retains that, and again discards the four cards. He then drops the one which he has retained, upon the four originally rejected, raises the hand, and of course is prepared to wager, with an approximate certainty of success.

These hands are more difficult to arrange than either “pairs” or “threes,” although an expert blackleg is soon able to reduce the art to a science.

The manner of setting up a “flush” differs from that of arranging a “full” or “fours.” In preparing flushes ten cards of any suit are first selected, and being placed face uppermost before the operator, are so arranged that the highest card shall be either the second, fourth, sixth, eighth or tenth in order. The ten cards are then put on the top of the deck, which the sharper takes in his left hand. He uses the fore-finger and thumb of his right hand in shuffling, placing the former on top and the latter underneath, and drawing one card from the top and one from the bottom at each “pull.” These he throws upon the table in pairs. The same tactics are repeated ten times, each two cards, as drawn off, being laid over the preceding pair. The rest of the cards are then similarly treated, but thrown on the table at a short distance from the twenty first drawn. The sharper then places the latter upon the larger half of the pack, and a false shuffle and false cut are made.

If the player sitting on the left of the blackleg happens to be the dealer, (and in no other case can the trick be successfully worked as here 233described), the professional who has arranged the cards will always receive the higher flush, and the player sitting at the dealer’s left, who is of course directly facing the blackleg, is bound to receive the smaller one.

The method of arranging “fulls” is very similar to that described above. The hands, however, are first made up singly, the highest threes being put in alternately as the second, third, fourth and sixth, counting from the top of the pack as it lies face uppermost before the operator. The latter then “strips” one card each from the top and bottom simultaneously, as in the preparation of the flush. The hands fall to the players in the same manner, the larger one falling to the dealer’s right and the smaller on his left.

In stocking the cards for a hand containing “four of a kind,” the hands are put up separately, the higher four being so arranged as to be second, fourth, sixth, and eighth, from the top of the pack as it faces the manipulator. The latter draws a card from the top and bottom at the same time, as in the arrangement of the “flushes” and “fulls,” but instead of drawing ten cards he pulls eight. The result in all three cases is precisely the same, that is, the larger hand will invariably fall to the player on the dealer’s right—(that is, the sharper)—and the smaller one to the individual facing him, who sits at the dealer’s left.

Of all the practices of a dishonest gambler at poker, “holding out” is perhaps the most frequently resorted to. It consists of abstracting one or more cards from the pack, which are secreted either about the person of the player, or beneath the table. It is most commonly employed upon the blackleg’s own deal. Several cards may be “held out,” provided that the number is not sufficient to attract notice by perceptibly diminishing the size of the pack. The object of course is that the sharper may have desirable cards ready to produce when a favorable opportunity offers. If the person to be deceived is especially verdant the cards withdrawn from the pack are sometimes concealed behind the collar, or under the joint of the knee or may be laid upon a handkerchief in the lap.

Professionals, however, usually prefer either the vest or the sleeve as a place of secreting them. Different sorts of apparatus are also employed to facilitate the operation; now-a-days nearly all professionals employ some one of the four mechanical contrivances which are described below.

I. The Bug.—This instrument is very simple in its construction, and although sold by dealers in “fake” goods, is often made by gamblers themselves. Its mechanism is shown in the accompanying cut. “B” represents a piece of watch spring which is fastened to the table by means of an awl “A” in such a way that the point may curl over. The awl is pressed into the under side of the table, just far enough from the edge to permit the placing of a card. The watch spring snaps up against the bottom. The method of using it is as follows: Some high card, for example, the king or an ace, is slipped under the bottom of the table, the watch spring holds it firmly in place. As soon as the party receives, in the regular course, a card, or perhaps a pair of the same denomination as the one which he has secreted in the “bug,” he puts his hand over the edge of the table, under which he puts his thumb, he then deftly raises the card which he has concealed, at the same time taking an inferior card from his hand and placing the latter in the “bug” instead of the one which he has taken out. It will be seen that he thus obtains a high pair, or possibly three high cards of the same denomination.

II. The Sleeve Hold Out.—This apparatus consists of a leather band, (lettered A in the illustration) fastened around the right arm, beneath the coat sleeve, near the elbow, to which is attached a spring, pressure upon which works a rod which connects with a plate (lettered B in the cut). The method of using this device is shown in the illustration. The cards which are “held out” are placed beneath the plate B, which holds them in position. When the player wishes to draw them from his sleeve, he presses his arm against his body, thus setting in operation the spring which works the rod and throws forward the concealed cards from behind the plate, as shown in the cut.

III. The Table Hold Out.—As are the three other contrivances above described, so is this a device for concealing cards abstracted from the pack during the progress of a game of poker. It differs from the others, however, in that it is permanently attached to the table, instead of being carried about by the player himself. The illustration shows the plan of its construction. A card may be seen protruding above the surface of the table, directly where the cloth covering joins the wooden border. This card is forced up through a concealed slit at the will of the gambler, by means of a hidden mechanism. The 235dotted line running from the slit to the foot of the table’s leg represents a wire which operates a spring whereby the card is forced upward, or lowered, through the slit, at the option of the manipulator. “A” is a point at which is inserted a small knob, or button, pressure upon which works the spring. By pressing with his foot at “B,” the player accomplishes the same result. The method of its use is as follows: The abstracted cards are placed in the slit, the player holding his hand of cards in front of it; they are then drawn down and retained beneath the table until the moment arrives when they are to be used. Pressure at either “A” or “B” forces them up, and the sharper takes them in his hand, at the same time discarding an equal number of cards from his hand into the slit.

IV. Vest Hold Out.—Some gamblers prefer this contrivance to any other, for the reason that it permits the holding out of an entire hand if the player so desires. The accompanying illustration shows the method in which it is worked. “A” indicates the location of that part of the mechanism which holds the abstracted cards; “B” is a piece of catgut attached to that part of the apparatus concealed beneath the vest, and running underneath the clothing to the heel, where it is fastened either to the shoe or the clothing. The cards selected to be “held out” are placed inside the clamp underneath the vest. When the player stretches out the leg along which runs the catgut, the plate inside the vest comes forward and the cards may be easily withdrawn; when the heel is drawn back beneath the chair the tension on the catgut is increased, and the clamp recedes behind the vest.

Of all the devices for defrauding at poker, the “shiner,” or “convex” is perhaps the most simple and the most effective. They are of various forms. At first a circular piece of silver highly polished and convex in form, about the size of a five-cent piece, was used. The player employing it places it on the table in front of him, using the utmost pains to conceal it from observation. The advantage resulting from its employment is its power of reflecting whatever is held above it at any angle, thus enabling the dealer who used it to read the face of each card as it was taken, face downward, from the pack. Of late years, however, the makers of these implements have greatly improved the process of manufacture. 236Looking glass has been substituted for silver, the reflection being much more brilliant. Modern convexes are also considerably larger than those of former days. Some players attach them to the knee, some to the thigh—as shown at point “C” in cut illustrating the “Vest Hold Out”—and some fasten them to the coat. In one description of the convexes, a slender bar is attached to the article at its end, a joint containing a spring being fastened to the other extremity of the bar. In using this contrivance the cheat places it on top of a few bank notes, and then with the other bills entirely conceals it from view. In dealing he apparently carelessly rests his hand upon the joint, in doing which he necessarily brings pressure to bear upon the spring; this in turn forces the convex to fly upward toward the dealer, and enables him to see the face of each card as it is dealt. Occasionally magnifying glasses, technically known as “reflectors,” are used. The blackleg places one of these on his lap, or attaches it to the table in such a way that he may cause it to drop by means of a spring. The forms of the “reflectors” are numerous, and no good purpose can be served by describing any further varieties. It may be observed, however, that new shapes are being constantly invented, as well as new contrivances to enable cheats to use them without detection.

I have seen a convex employed upon a Mississippi steamboat with remarkably confusing effect. Two professionals were each trying to take advantage of the other, supposing him to be an amateur. For a time neither gained any advantage. At length, one of the sharpers temporarily excused himself. Going to his state room, he returned with his “shiner.” Meantime his antagonist had arranged a “cold deck,” which he proceeded to “ring in” on his own deal, much to the betterment of his finances. Thus emboldened, he bet wildly on his adversary’sadversary’s deal, the result being that the caller recouped his losses, with interest.

Once at the Mound City Hotel, in St. Louis, I had succeeded in bringing two “skin” gamblers together. I had told each that I intended to “throw off” the other to him, consequently I felt certain of receiving my share of the winnings, no matter which of the pair succeeded in fleecing the other. One of them had prepared a table which he could take apart and carry with him. On the top of it was a box about a foot square, inside of which was a “shiner” made of looking-glass. Half of the side facing the operator was a slide which was raised, when occasion required, by means of a string which passed down the leg of the table to the foot. As the game progressed and the excitement increased, the foot of the operator accidentallyaccidentally slipped from the pedal. The result was that instead of the cover returning quietly to its place, it fell with a sharp click, which attracted the attention of his opponent, who quickly springing to his feet ran around the table and asked, “what’s that?” and then realizing its meaning, laughingly remarked: “Say, the tail piece of your wagon just fell out. What’s that dog-house you’ve got on the table, anyway?”

This is a device practiced by professional gamblers with great success. In order to play the “second” effectively, the operator trims the thumb nail on his left hand to a fine point, as shown in the accompanying cut at letter “A.” Sometimes, instead of trimming his nail he attaches to the ball of the thumb, by means of a small piece of kid and a little shoemaker’s wax, a fine needle point, lettered “B” in the illustration. As the game progresses, he gradually pricks the aces and kings on the face in the left hand corner of each, which, when they are turned over, becomes of course, the right hand corner. The cards are dealt from the end, the dealer seizing them by the corner with the thumb of the right hand. When one of the pricked cards is felt, the dealer slips it back and deals from under it until he comes to himself, when he secures it for his own hand, thus gradually obtaining a pair of aces or kings, sometimes two pairs, and occasionally three of a kind. When this trick is successfully performed, the professional is usually able to “clean out” a greenhorn with the utmost ease and dispatch. It is a favorite mode of swindling at poker, inasmuch as it requires no partner, no stocking of cards, and admits of their being fairly shuffled.

By the word “telegraph” as employed in gamblers’ parlance, is by no means meant the ordinary electric wire through which are transmitted messages upon which depend not only men’s safety and lives, but even the welfare of nations and the peace of the civilized world. The gamblers‘ “telegraph” is used for entirely different purposes. It consists of a wire running from a poker table to some point of vantage, usually behind a “peep-hole,” by means of which one confederate advises another when to bet. Of course collusion between two is essential. The man at the peep-hole, which is not infrequently in an upper room, sees through the aid of a magnifying glass the hands of all the players. He controls one end of the wire, the other extremity of which is attached to the clothing of his partner. A pre-arranged system of signals conveys to the latter all the information necessary to enable him to place a wager with the absolute certainty of winning. On its face this species of fraud appears so disreputable that the average reader will question whether the device may not have originated in the author’s brain. Alas, for human nature! The telegraph is an actual fact, no less deplorable because its existence is assured. The number of saloons which employ it is “legion,” and it may sometimes be found in places which would be considered most unlikely. The only safe plan to be pursued is never, under any circumstances, to sit down to a game of poker, no matter how trifling the ante.

Reference is made elsewhere to the advantage taken by professional gamblers and confidence men of the cupidity, venality and dishonesty of a certain class of “suckers.” It is not an uncommon experience with black-legs to be invited by some man of good repute in the community in which he resides, to visit the town with a view to fleecing some moneyed friend of the latter individual, the gain accruing from the execution of the rascally enterprise to be equally divided between the confederate scoundrels. This is known in gambler’s slang as “throwing off a sucker.”

Under the present title will be explained one of the most effective methods by which the scheme is executed. The author can best illustrate it by recounting a bit of his own experience:

In a certain western town once resided a man whom we may call Mr. X—--, who had an intimate friend—a man of some means—who will be referred to in this connection as Mr. Y——. Mr. X—— conceived the idea of winning some money from his friend, and appealed to me to assist him in the enterprise. At that period of my life I was little troubled with qualms of conscience, and I lent a willing ear to the suggestion. I went to the city in question, and in due course was introduced to Mr. Y—— by Mr. X—— as a verdant sort of an individual, almost too green to be attractive to a bovine quadruped, but with plenty of money. Mr. X—— proposed to his friend that they should engage me in a little game of “draw;” that he, Y——, should sit behind me and “tip off” my hand, a knowledge of which was certain to enable X—— to win all my cash. Mr. Y—— was nothing loth, and readily consented to become a party to a transaction which was, on its face, a bold scheme of fraud. Undoubtedly he was a “sucker,” but it is a question whether sympathy would not be wasted upon him.

The plan worked admirably. X—— and myself met at a pre-arranged “trysting-place,” and sat down to play poker. Y—— dropped in and took a seat where he could over-look my hand. A “cold deck” had been prepared—need I say by whom?—and after I had lost a few trifling stakes X—— proceeded to “ring it in” on me, in accordance with his previous understanding. Regarding the operation from a “professional” standpoint, I may say that I never saw a trick more clumsily performed. Had I been, as Y—— supposed, a mere tyro, I could hardly have failed to detect it, so bunglingly was it done. However, I preserved a stolid demeanor, and proceeded to examine my hand. I found a pair of queens with three nines. Mr. X—— had a “full”—three jacks and a pair of tens. Of course this latter was a strong hand. He bet; I promptly “raised” him one thousand dollars, putting the money on the table. Naturally, he professed to regard my “raise” as a mere “bluff,” and asked his friend, 239Y——, to lend him enough money to “see” me. Y—— rose from his chair, and, walking around the table, looked at X——’s hand. Seeing a “full house,” with jacks at the head, as against a smaller one, “nine full,” he willingly loaned the money. With a tolerable simulation of tremulous excitement, Mr. X—— contrived to display his cards. I promptly called for two cards, discarding a like number, and received, as I knew I should, two queens, thus securing “four of a kind,” which always wins against a “full.” The reader who has perused the explanation of the fair game, as given above, will, of course, perceive that in his intense anxiety to win a dishonest $500, Mr. Y—— had overlooked my right to “draw,” although he was satisfied that on the hand which he had seen me hold, I was morally certain to be content with the cards which I had. Yet, cupidity often over-reaches itself in a similar way.

Of course I won and pocketed the stakes, although, in justice to myself, I may add that I divided my winnings fairly with Mr. X——, who received exactly one-half of the money out of which his friend had been cheated.

If the inexperienced, unsophisticated reader will carefully peruse the foregoing paragraphs, he will have but little difficulty in reaching the conclusion that playing poker is about as hazardous as “encountering the tiger in his lair.”

Another variety of poker in great favor among the gambling fraternity is called “stud poker,” a stud poker table being now considered a necessary adjunct to every first-class gambling house. The necessary outfit for the game consists of checks, cards and a table large enough to seat 10 or 12 persons. Regular dealers are employed and usually four or five “pluggers” (by which term are designated men who play for the house and with money belonging to the proprietors). The game is very simple, and any one acquainted with the value of draw poker can play, and lose his money as easily and rapidly as he could possibly desire. The game may be illustrated as follows: Suppose four persons, whom we will designate as A, B, C and D, sit down to play. In some games, in fact usually, each player puts up one check as an ante. This having been done, the dealer deals the first card, face downward, to each player, beginning with the one who sits immediately on his (the dealer’s) left; another card is then dealt around with the face exposed, as must also be the other three cards in case a hand of five is dealt. Let us suppose that A’s exposed card is an ace, B’s a queen, C’s a nine spot, and D’s a ten. It is then A’s first bet because he has the highest card in sight. He can wager any amount he chooses, and the others can throw away their cards or “stay in,” by putting up an equal stake to that of A’s. If B, C and D should throw down their cards, the checks in the “pot” belong to A, and the 240dealer shuffling, begins another deal. Should either B, C or D “see” A’s bet or “raise” him, the dealer, deals off another card, face upward, when the player who has the highest cards in sight, has another opportunity to “pass” or bet, while the others have the choice of throwing away their cards or “seeing” the bet, and so on until five cards are dealt, when the players must guess at each other’s buried card, or “hole card” as it is technically called.

Sometimes at stud poker an instrument known as “The Buck” is used. This is employed where all the players do not “ante.” Any article may be used for this purpose. Sometimes an ivory chip with a string running through it; sometimes a circular piece of leather, its material and form are unimportant. It passes in rotation, one to another, the player in front of whom it is placed being required to “ante” a chip and receiving the first card dealt. The game then proceeds as already described. The chances for “crooked work” at this game are legion. In a word nearly every fraudulent device employed in “draw” poker may be utilized in “stud” poker. “Stocking,” “palming,” “holding out,” “false cuts,” “paper,” “partnerships,” etc., etc., are just as useful in one case as in the other.

The vicissitudes of the life of a professional gambler are numerous and shifting, and perhaps the ups and downs of a poker player’s career are as varying as those which attend the checkered experience of any other description of gambler.

I remember some rather startling experiences of my own in this direction. I was once traveling in partnership with a man named Enyert. At a town in Missouri we fell in with a mule-buyer named Brown. Enyert was cursed with one of the most violent tempers that falls to the lot of man. So also was Brown. Both of them were known as “dangerous” men, i. e., ready with the pistol. I was dealing marked cards and my knowledge of Brown’s character made me extremely nervous. I knew that if he detected any cheating my life would be exacted as a forfeit. An expert marked card player always needs his wits, and my nervousness prevented me from using mine. On the other hand, I knew that if my partner (Enyert) did not win he would accuse me of “throwing him off” to Brown, i. e., of playing in collusion with the latter, in which case I was quite as likely to be shot by him. To use a slang expression, I was too badly “rattled” to be of any use as a dealer and brought the game to a close as soon as possible.

This man Enyert shot the son of the Mayor of Ottumwa, familiarly known as “Billy” Orr, and would, on one occasion, have carved up my anatomy with a bowie knife, had I not dissuaded him by showing him 241the muzzle of a six-chambered navy revolver. Brown’s son inherited his father’s disposition. Having some trouble with his wife’s parents, he emptied both barrels of a shotgun into them, killing Dr. Parish, his father-in-law, and seriously wounding the Doctor’s wife. He was tried, convicted, and sentenced to be hanged. His wife visited him in his cell and contrived to convey to him, secretly, a dose of poison. They mutually agreed to end their lives at an appointed time. The hour fixed fell in the night preceding his execution. When it arrived the woman blew out her brains with a pistol, but Brown lacked the physical courage to carry out his part of the contract, and was publicly hanged on the following day after making an impassioned appeal to the crowd in behalf of his son. He and his devoted wife were buried in the same grave.

I was once playing marked cards with a Boston “drummer,” whose name need not be mentioned. At the time I had a partner. I had instructed the traveling man in the art of reading the cards by their backs and proposed to him that I would “throw off” a “sucker” to him. He assented, and I introduced my partner. We practised the same game which we had worked together many times before. I began to “hold out” cards and did it so clumsily that any one might detect it. My partner waxed furious at the fraud and I was promptly “barred out,” leaving the drummer and my confederate to play single handed, which was precisely what we wanted. The commercial traveler rose from the table a loser to the amount of $400. I condoled with him; and inasmuch as we were supposed to be acting in unison probably I ought to have stood half the loss but I still owe him my share.

One more narrative of my experience with marked cards, and I have done. While traveling in partnership with a man named Sam Martin, whom I have mentioned in my autobiography, we were going down the Mississippi in a steamboat. Martin had placed a number of packs of marked cards with the bar-keeper, with instructions to “ring them in,” that is, to sell them to customers asking for playing cards. We wandered about the boat, separately, looking for victims. At length I formed the acquaintance of a tall, handsome man, who suggested a game of euchre for the cigars. We had not played long when the stranger proposed poker for a small ante. I said that I was not accustomed to playing for money, but that if he would promise not to expose me if I lost I would chance a few dollars. Martin was in the cabin waiting for me to give him a signal to approach. On receiving it he drew near the table and I accosted him with: “Well, stranger, will you join us in a game for a small ante?” He answered that he would if my friend had no objections, although it was near his bed time. We played a few games and quit losers. We knew that our “mark” was going to Memphis, and that we would have an abundance of time in which to win our money back. The 242next morning we resumed play. I lost fifty dollars (which of course was won by Martin), and said that I would have to withdraw from the game unless they would consent to place stakes against a draft. [In those days I always traveled with a liberal supply of worthless checks.checks.] I left the table and Martin and the stranger (who gave his name as Walton) played single-handed, which was precisely what the former wanted. They were using the marked cards which my partner had placed with the bar-keeper. It was not long before Martin had won all the stranger’s money—some $800—besides a valuable gold watch and chain. At the conclusion of the game the winner invited his dupe to take a drink at the bar, which invitation was accepted. As they were drinking Walton looked at Martin and said: “You are a very lucky man. I believe that you might fall overboard without getting wet, and I certainly should expect to see your body floating up stream. You have all my money, and I don’t mind telling you, now, that I was cheating all the time. I was ‘holding out’ and playing the ‘double discard’ from the beginning, and I don’t see how you managed to come out ahead.” “Well,” said Martin, “since you have been so frank I will be equally so. I am an expert marked-card player, and each pack that we played with was one of mine. I knew that you were cheating, but didn’t care. My ‘percentage’ was too strong for you. Here is your watch and chain and fifty dollars for a ‘stake.’ But I can tell you right here that you won’t ever have any show against an artist who can read your hand at sight, and remember it.” And there is no doubt that “Sam” was right. Yet if an accomplished card sharp like Walton can be thus taken in, even while practicing his professional tricks, what possible chance remains to a greenhorn?

The name “short” games is applied among gamblers to those which require comparatively little time in which to determine the issue of the hazard. In the present chapter, those best known and most commonly played in gaming houses will be described and the methods of trickery employed by those who conduct them will be pointed out.

Chief among games of this description are “rouge et noir,” “roulette,” “keno” and “rolling faro.” These will be taken up in the order indicated.

As played in this country, this game differs materially from the mode of playing in vogue on the continent of Europe. In foreign gaming houses—particularly at the more famous resorts, such as Monte Carlo or Baden-Baden—the game is probably conducted fairly. In other words, the proprietors are satisfied with the revenue which they can derive from the legitimate percentage which accrues in their favor under the operation of the ordinary laws of chance. In this country, however, not only is the method of play vastly simplified, but it has degenerated into a mere scheme of robbery. The players are utterly at the mercy of the manipulators of the machine.

The game is always played with the adjunct of a “lay-out,” which is depicted in the accompanying cut. The outer line, as shown in the illustration, represents the outer edge of the table, which is covered with a green cloth. The middle line serves no special purpose, but adds one more striking feature to the device. The inner line serves to mark off that portion 244of the table on which are depicted the representation of the four jacks found in every pack of cards. At the two ends of the table and on the right hand side are blank spaces. Those at the ends are colored—the one at the top red, the one at the bottom black. The space on the right hand side is for the placing of wagers.

Bets may be made in either one of the four ways—on the red; on the black; on either jack, or on any one of the four jacks. In the two cases first mentioned the bettor places his wager on the color which he selects. If he wishes to bet on any particular jack (that of hearts, clubs, diamonds or spades), he lays his money on that one which he chooses. If he prefers to bet that some jack (without indicating which) will win, he lays his venture upon the blank space at the right hand side of the table, as shown in the diagram.

If he bets on the winning color, the bank pays him an amount equal to the sum staked, which latter, of course, he receives back. If he selects a particular jack and the one on which he has placed his wager happens to win, his stake is returned to him, together with an increment of ten times the amount. If he places his wager on the blank space to the right he is understood to have bet that some one of the four jacks will win, and if his hazard prove successful, his gains are measured by a sum twice that of his original bet.

The bets having all been made and placed, the play commences. The banker places a full pack (fifty-two cards) in a dealing box, similar to those used in playing “faro,” which have been already described, but with this variation: In “faro” the cards are inserted and dealt face uppermost, the opening being large enough to afford a clear view of the card; in rouge et noir they are inserted and dealt face downward, and the apertureaperture in the box is only large enough to permit the dealer to run them off readily with the index and second fingers of the left hand.

The first two cards, after being withdrawn from the box, are laid upon the table, faces downward, and the third is turned over. This constitutes a “run,” and the gains or losses of the players are determined by the color (and sometimes the denomination) of the third card. If it happens to be red the bank pays all bets placed on the space at the upper end of the table, marked “red,” and gathers in all other wagers placed upon the table. If it chance to be a jack, and any player has placed his money on the representation of that particular jack upon the “lay-out,” the fortunate individual wins ten times the amount which he ventured. If a player has bet upon “jacks,” without naming any particular one—placing his money in the space at the right hand side of the table—and a jack of any suit is turned up, he is given, as his winnings, double the amount of his wager.

245On the other hand, if the bettor has laid his stake either upon “jacks” or on any particular jack, and no jack turns up, he loses.

Even when fairly played, the chances in favor of the bank are large enough to satisfy any banker whose greed for gain is not abnormal. But as in all other games, the rapacious sharks who operate it are not satisfied with even the most extraordinary percentage of chances. What they seek is absolute certainty, and in the game of rouge et noir, as conducted even in so-called “square” houses, they have contrived to secure it.

In dealing the cards, resort is had to many of the same tortuous devices which are employed in “faro,” an explanation of which may be found in the chapter devoted to that game.

“Faked” boxes, similar in construction to those used in “faro,” are employed, and the cards are “stripped” and “sanded” as in that game. The “strippers,” however, are arranged on a somewhat different principle. The red and black cards having been separated so that the pack shall be divided into two lots, one-half being red and the other black, the narrower ends of the two colors are placed opposite each other. The dealer then takes the red cards in one hand and the black in the other. Through long practice he is able to put the two packs of cards together in such a way that a card of one color shall rest directly upon a card of the opposite color all the way through the pack. The cards are then pressed together, so that the entire pack shall lie, one card upon the other. The reader will perceive that, owing to the use of the “strippers,” the end of each card is a trifle narrower than the end of the one directly above it. The manipulation of the pack in the box is practiced in the same way as has been already explained under “faro.” The result of this arrangement of cards is that the dealer knows perfectly well the color of the card under his hand at any given moment. If he considers it worth his while to change the color before exposing the card to the view of the players, the “sanding” and “stripping” of the cards, in connection with the “faked” box, enables him to draw two cards instead of one through the aperture, thus reversing the run of the colors.

A player having laid a wager on either the black or red, and having lost, naturally supposes that if he suffers his money to lie upon the table long enough, the color on which he has made his bet must win before the entire pack shall have been run out of the box. Accordingly, if he has a wager of one dollar on the black and the first run shows that he has lost, he doubles his stake and awaits the result of the second run. If he finds he has lost again, he doubles his stake once more, and continues playing in this manner until the entire pack has been run out 246of the box. If he is a loser when all the cards have been dealt, he may, if he choose, continue to double his stake as long as his funds will permit.

The reader can scarcely fail to perceive how soon this sort of play will bankrupt the unsophisticated gamester. Every time he doubles his stake he is offering the bank enormous odds. It requires a very short time, for a bet of one dollar under such circumstances, to run up to a wager of $128, $256, $512, etc. As a matter of fact, the player, under such circumstances, is offering the bank odds amounting, sometimes $4,000 to one. Thus, if a player starts in, with a wager of one dollar, and continues to double it as he loses until he has risked $100,000 or more, he is still actually betting that enormous sum that he will eventually win the trifling sum of one dollar. If he should continue to play for seventy-two consecutive hours on the same principle, and the doubling of his stake run up into the millions, all that he could possibly hope to win at the close of the play would be a dollar.

But there is another device known to the manipulators of this game which is even a more bare-faced robbery than the use of “strippers” and “faked” boxes. When a “soft mark” is playing at the table and has repeatedly doubled his stake, and begins to see the bottom of the pile of money which he has brought with him, he very frequently asks the dealer how long he will be permitted this mode of play. The dealer, after estimating in his own mind the amount of money which the dupe may have in his possession, tells him that the doubling must quit on either the second or third run. As soon as the proprietors are satisfied that the unfortunate victim has staked his all, the dealer turns a jack, and remarks that “this is the only percentage that the bank has,” whereupon he at once gathers in the player’s entire stake without any sign of shame or compunction of conscience. Should the player manifest any unwillingness to continue doubling his wager, the banker informs him that if he loses at the end, his money will be returned to him, less five per cent. Relying upon this assurance, and always hoping that his luck will turn, the poor fool keeps on, only to be confronted at the end by the turning of a jack and to be assured that this entire venture has been incontinently swept away.

“Steerers” or “ropers” are invariably employed by the proprietors of this game. Their duty is to select victims and guide them into the resort where this knavery is carried on. They are paid the usual percentage allowed “cappers;” that is, forty-five per cent, of the bank’s winnings from the dupe whom they may allure.

While a rouge et noirnoir table is considered a necessary adjunct to the outfit of every American gaming house, the game is not so popular in this country as in Europe nor is the method of play precisely the same in both continents. An explanation of the devices used in the old world may be found in Part I.

Roulette, as will be seen from the illustration, is played upon a table in the form of an oblong square, covered with green cloth, at one end of which is a round cavity, around the sides of which, equi-distant one from the other, are arranged several metal bands—usually of copper—which, commencing at the top, descend to the extremity of the machine. The cavity is movable, and in its centre is a circular bottom containing thirty-nine holes to which the bands are attached, and upon which are painted, alternately, in black and red, thirty-six numbers, running from 1 to 36, besides (0), a (00), and a picture of an eagle or the word itself printed thereon. In the middle of the cavity, are three or four little metal prongs, centering at “D,” which are used in imparting a rotary motion to the bottom. The revolution of the ball is checked by slender metal plates (indicated on the diagram by the letter “B”) about two inches in length and rising about one-quarter of an inch above the lower surface.

The remainder of the table is laid out as shown in the cut. The figures are arranged in three columns, and above them in two divisions nearest the Roulette wheel, are single and double 00 respectively. The figures are painted black or red, to agree with the corresponding color of the numbers on the wheel. At the head of each column there is a compartment for placing a stake which is made on the column. On each side of the foot of the columns of figures are three spaces, each of which contains the number twelve. These are known, respectively, as the 1st, 2nd and 3rd twelves. Stakes placed on the first 248space are considered to be bets on the numbers 1 to 12; the second space is for bets on numbers 13 to 24; the third space for numbers 25 to 36, all inclusive.

The space on either side of the entire length of the columns is divided into three parts. The upper left hand division is for bets on numbers 1 to 18; the corresponding right hand division is for numbers 19 to 36. The large division in the middle of the left hand side, lettered “B” in the illustration, is for bets on the black; the similar one upon the right, marked “R,”“R,” is for wagers on the red.

The lower division on the left hand is for bets on even numbers; the division opposite on the right is for odd numbers.

There is a banker and several assistants; an unlimited number of persons may play.

One of the assistants sets the machine in motion, at the same instant throwing an ivory ball into the cavity in the opposite direction to the movement which he has given to the movable bottom. The ball makes several revolutions with great rapidity until its momentum being exhausted, it falls into one of the thirty-nine holes formed by the copper bands. It is the hole into which the ball falls that determines the gain or loss of the numerous chances which this game affords to players.

If the reader will examine the cut showing the lay-out, he will perceive that there are numerous chances to be played for: Single and double (0); the “eagle;” black and red; the three columns; the first and last halfhalf of the numbers, respectively, consists of 1 to 18, and 19 to 36 inclusive; the three 12’s, consist of 1 to 12, 13 to 24 and 25 to 36; odds and even; and lastly, the numbers, either single or in small groups.

Stakes bet on black or red; the first or last half of the numbers; also on odd and even, are called single stakes. Stakes on either of the three 12’s, or on either of the three columns, win double the amount. Stakes on any single number, or on either of the (0’s), or the eagle, are paid thirty-five times their amount if they are successful.

Bets may be made on groups of not over six consecutive numbers, and win as many times the amount of the stakes as the grouping is contained in thirty-four, omitting all fractions; so that a bet on any four designated consecutive numbers would win eight times the amount of the stake, provided any one of these numbers comes out.

It has already been stated that the space occupied by thirty-six numbers are all either red or black; and as the numbers are equally divided between the colors eighteen to each, a stake on either color is a single bet. The 0’s and the eagle are painted green, and if a zero or eagle turns up, bets on either black or red are lost by the players.

It is only of late years that the majority of roulette wheels contain a picture of an eagle, a similar picture being painted upon the cloth. Bets on the eagle, if won by the player, are paid in the ratio of 35 to 1.

249The legitimate percentage of chances in favor of the bank in this game is enormous. Out of thirty nine chances, the bank runs eighteen of losing and has twenty-one of winning, or three additional chances in its favor, which is equivalent to fully 5½ per cent. in favor of the bank in all cases, even where a bet is placed upon either of the zeros or the eagle. In the latter case, the bet on either zero or on the eagle is paid 35 to 1, the same as on any single number.

Here the bank has thirty-five chances out of thirty-nine of winning, and only one of losing, or four more chances in its favor than the payments warrant, thus yielding the same 5½ per cent.

It follows that the odds against the players in the various chances may be expressed as follows:

In the case of a bet on the first or last eighteen numbers, the odds are ten to nine, the same as on odd or even, or red or black.

When, however, a stake is laid on all the numbers, and the bank only pays the winner thirty-five times his stake, it clears four; thus, supposing thirty-nine dollars to be a stake, and that the ball is thrown twice in a minute, the gain of the bank, without incurring the slightest risk, would be eight dollars per minute, or $480 per hour. Although, in whatever way a player may bet, the chances are always in favor of the bank, still the latter’s risk varies in proportion to the number of chances which are not filled up. To illustrate, if only ten numbers are filled, and the ball were to enter one of them, the bank would, in that case, lose thirty-four dollars, and only win eight; whereas, when all the numbers are filled, it wins four without risking a cent.

From what has been said, as to the chances in favor of the bank, it would seem to be hardly necessary to use any additional means of swindling, inasmuch as the percentage in its favor is so large that the game is very seldom beaten, even if “played on the square.” An old gambler once remarked in my presence, that the percentage of the game was forty per cent. worse than stealing. However, despite this fact, the gambler is not satisfied, and has succeeded in devising schemes, whereby he may win every bet made against him, if he sees fit.

The first method of cheating which I will describe, is as follows: The roulette is manufactured for the purpose, the machinery being entirely concealed from view. The gambler who manages the game can 250cause the ball (A) to fall in a red or black number, as he may think proper. After throwing the ball he watches it closely, and if it should fall in the red, when he wished it to go into the black, while still revolving, its course can be quickly changed to the desired color. This is accomplished by means of a lever attached to the circular wheel, and connecting with one of the legs of the roulette. This leg has the same appearance as others, but is a trifle shorter, not quite touching the table on which the roulette rests. The gambler has only to touch this leg while the wheel is revolving, and in a second the ball is changed from one color to another, as he may prefer. In fact, so quickly can the ball be changed, that it is difficult to detect the motion after one has been shown how it is managed, unless the wheel is turned slowly. This is one of the most ingenious contrivances in use.

There is yet another kind of roulette, which is made in the following manner: One-half of the small pieces of metal which form the pockets for the ball are made a trifle longer than the others, lettered on the diagram E E E. After the stakes have been placed, if the proprietor wishes the ball to fall in a red color, it is necessary for him merely to throw the ball around to the right hand, and if he wishes it to fall in the black, he casts the ball toward the left. The players may observe that he throws the ball in a different direction on different occasions, but the action appears to be so trivial that it excites no suspicion.

Another fraudulent contrivance used in playing this game consists in the gambler’s having two centers to a wheel, apparently identical, one of which, however, is “square” and the other “faked.” This device is known to the members of “the profession” as the “double center.” The “square” wheel is used at first, and, at an opportune moment, the “fake” is substituted, after which the sharper has everything his own way. This wheel is operated on very much the same principle as the “needle wheel,” for the construction of which the reader is referred to the chapter containing a description of that device. A system of levers radiating from the centre of the apparatus is operated by a rod terminating at the edge of the table. By bringing to bear the requisite pressure, these levers cause fine needle points (lettered C C C on the diagram) to rise through the cloth, one coming up in front of each alternate compartment on the rim, thus obstructing the entry of the ball and causing its course to be so changed that it shall fall into one of the next adjacent divisions, as in the case of the “needle wheel” above referred to.

It is easily perceived that the players can have no possible chance when playing against such roulettes as these, and there is a large number of them in use all over the country.

This game is a favorite one with nearly all non-professional gamblers, not only because the risk of loss involved is not large, but also because of the popular impression that it is always played “on the square.” As a matter of fact, it usually is conducted fairly, although, as will be explained, sometimes bare-faced swindling is resorted to by the proprietors.

The game very closely resembles the children’s pastime of “lotto.” Any number of persons may play. Each one desiring to participate in the game buys a card on which are three horizontal rows of five numbers each, arranged altogether without regularity. The price paid for a card is commonly twenty-five cents, although sometimes the stakes are considerably higher. None of the cards contain a higher number than ninety-nine. The conductor of the game—who is known as the “roller”—takes his position, usually upon a raised platform, in full view of the players. Before him is placed a globe containing ninety-nine balls, numbered consecutively from one to ninety-nine, to correspond with the figures on the players’ cards. The balls having been thoroughly mixed, the “roller” presses a spring at the bottom of the globe, opening an aperture just large enough to permit one ball to drop at a time. As soon as the first one has fallen, the aperture is closed and the “roller,” in a loud voice, calls out the number inscribed upon it. If a player finds the number in either of the three horizontal rows on his card he places a button over it. When any player has all five, numbers in any one of his rows thus called out, he exclaims “keno,” after which the “roller” takes no more balls from the globe. His card is then inspected by one of the “collectors”—of whom there are usually two—and if his tally is correct he is given the entire amount of money paid by all the players (which is called “the pot”) less a discount of fifteen per cent., which is retained by “the house” as its “percentage.” Thus, if there are a hundred players, each of whom has paid twenty-five cents for a card, the winner receives twenty-one dollars and twenty-five cents, the bank reserving to itself three dollars and seventy-five cents as “percentage.”

252Matters having been thus arranged, fresh stakes are advanced by those wishing to play again, the balls put in the globe and the game is resumed.

It may be readily seen that the “bank” incurs no risk whatever, and its sure percentage on the stakes is large enough to satisfy the cupidity of most gamblers. Fortunes have been won by the proprietors of these games, one concern alone in St. Louis having made $190,000 thereby. Still, the instinct to cheat is strong in the breast of the professional sharper; and sometimes a confederate of the proprietor plays in the game and wins the “pot,” through the co-operation of the “roller.” The latter withholds from the globe several balls, which he substitutes, from time to time, for the ones which he should have taken from the globe. The numbers on these withheld and substituted balls correspond to those necessary to fill out one of the horizontal rows on the confederate’s card and the latter is thus enabled toto win through fraud.

This game is similar in its general principles to those of the “squeeze spindle,” “needle wheel,” and “corona,” which have already been described. It is a favorite game upon fair-grounds, as are the others, but it is frequently found in resorts which are known as “first-class” gambling houses. There is scarcely a “hell” in the city of Chicago in which this apparatus cannot be found. This circumstance, in itself, affords a striking commentary upon the principles which underlie the management of what the uninitiated are wont to call “square houses.”

The accompanying cut shows the device used in playing the game, not only as it appears to the outsider, but also with the “fake” element exposed. A circular ring of wood, about three inches broad, is attached to a square board which is placed upon a table. At four points in the ring, equi-distant from each other, are the painted representations of four jacks. Between each pair of jacks are eight blank spaces, each one of which is usually numbered, the numbers running from one to thirty-two, consecutively. Sometimes ordinary playing cards 253are substituted for the numbers. Each of the four blocks of numbers is painted a distinct and separate color. In the centre of the inner circle is placed a metal arrow, having a pointed quill attached to the smaller end, the whole swinging upon a central pivot. Prices are placed at intervals upon the numbered squares. When the game is played at gambling houses, the only prizes offered are sums of money, varying in amount, and between these the numbers are left blank. When the device is operated upon a fair-ground, there are no blanks, articles of jewelry of trifling value being placed between the money prizes.

The mode of play is usually different upon fair-grounds from that which is followed in the regular gaming houses. In the former case, players pay twenty-five cents each for the privilege of swinging the arrow, and take the prize opposite the quill point when it stops revolving. At regular gaming houses players place their stakes upon whatever number or color they may select, and if they win the bank pays them the amount due them. The bets may be made either upon any one of the four jacks or on either of the four colors. If the player stakes his money upon a jack and wins, the proprietor pays him ten times the amount of his stake. If he lays his wager upon any given color,—if he is playing upon a fair-ground,—he receives simply his original stake, together with an equal sum. If, however, he is playing in a house, and names the lucky color, he receives two for one.

The chances having been bought or the bets laid, some one—either one of the players, or the proprietor, or a bystander—sets the arrow in motion. When the pointer comes to rest, if any player has laid his bet upon the number at which it stops, he receives either the prize thereon placed or the amount of his winnings in cash.

The “fake” element, as has been said, is shown in the illustration. There is a wire rod running from points B and C to the central pivot. As in the “squeeze spindle,” they are sunk into the table and concealed by the cloth covering. That which runs to point B is manipulated by pressure with the hand; that which terminates at point C is operated by pressure from the hip. When the operator pushes against either of these rods, he checks the revolution of the arrow by creating friction at the pivot, and brings the pointer to a standstill at any part of the circle which he may desire.

Very little reflection is necessary to show the reader how great is the legitimate percentage in favor of the bank, even were this game played without any resort to trickery. There are four colors and four jacks upon which a player may bet. It follows that the odds are seven to one in favor of the house against any individual player naming the winning color or card. And when to this percentage against the players there is added the absolute certainty of winning which the bank gains 254through the operation of the fraudulent device above explained, it is apparent that no one can possibly win except through the consent of the proprietor of the machine.

A rather striking illustration of the utter lack of good faith which characterizes gamblers in their dealings with one another, and their general moral perversity is furnished in the following narrative, for the truth of which the author vouches. Two itinerantitinerant sharpers, each with a rolling faro outfit were traveling on a Missouri river steamboat. The year was 18—, and the season was autumn, when county fairs were at full blast and men of that ilk were reaping a rich harvest. Both men were destined for the same point, and each had been anxious to secure a monopoly of the “privilege” of running his machine at the fair in question. One of them discovered that his business rival had forestalled him, and that—to use a colloquialismcolloquialism—“his cake was dough.” The gambler who had succeeded in obtaining his license retired early, serenely confident that the following day would witness not only the discomfiture of his rival but also his own success. But he had reckoned without his host. Scarcely had he fallen asleep before the form of his wily antagonist might have been seen prowling among the freight upon the main deck. Stealthily he moved in and out among the piles of stuff until he discovered the wheel of the licensed monopolist. Then followed a dull, grating sound, as of some one drawing a heavy box across a floor; then came a sudden splash, and to this succeeded silence. The gambling machine of the enterprising gamester who had secured the license, had sunk beneath the waters of the Mississippi, to be seen no more by mortal eyes. The next morning there was a brief season of pandemonium. The situation, however, was simple. There was but one fair, one license and one outfit, yet there were two gamblers. One of them had a license, but no paraphernalia; the other had paraphernalia, but no license. There was but one solution; the two found themselves compelled to “pool their issues.” In other words, the man who had thrown his rival’s wheel overboard forced the man who had owned it to divide his profits with him in consideration of being permitted to use the only wheel available.

The author was himself present at the fair where these two men operated the wheel to which reference has been made. On the way back a fearful scene was witnessed. A quarrel over “privileges” had arisen on the grounds and was continued on the boat. A gambler familiarly known as “Curley” the hog driver, a bulldozer, when heated by passion and liquor, was raising a terrible disturbance when another sporting man, Sherman Thirston, interfered to restrain him from mischief. “Curley” drew his revolver and fired three shots at Thirston, one breaking a spittoon which he held in front of him, and one grazing Lone Wolf’s forehead. Thirston advanced upon “Curley” and disarmed him.

This game derives its name from the fact that balls are used instead of cards, and that bets may be “raised” as in poker. In fact, “bluff” is resorted to in both games in about the same ratio. The method of play is exceedingly simple. All that is necessary is a cloth-covered table (usually about six feet long by three and one-half feet broad), a leather bottle, one hundred wooden or ivory balls, numbered from one to one hundred consecutively, and some “chips.” The latter are sold to the players by the proprietor at five or ten cents each. Those wishing to indulge in the game put down their “ante,” as in straight or draw poker. The “ante” is usually one chip. The person conducting the game then takes the bottle, in which the balls have been placed, in his hand, and throws them from its open mouth, one to each player. The latter then examine the little spheres which they have received and either forfeit the chips which they have already laid down or make their bets in the same manner as in playing poker. Precisely the same tactics are employed in both games. When the “call” is made the player holding the ball on which is inscribed the highest number wins the bet, by which is meant all the stakes which have been placed upon the table.

This is a favorite game in many gambling houses, especially those of an inferior class. The “house” always takes a percentage, or “rake-off,” as it is frequently called. This percentage consists of either one or two chips, as may be agreed upon. It follows that the proprietors run no risk, being absolutely certain of winning something each time that the balls are thrown. In “skin” gambling houses, however, the owners are not content with this percentage of profit. A “capper” is called into the game, who usually sits at the end of the table toward the banker’s left hand. The latter finds it necessary to be very cautious in collecting the balls from the players, lest some one who had received a high number might withhold it in order to bet upon it on the next throw. Accordingly, he examines each ball as it is returned to him. This affords him ample opportunity for holding out some high number in his hand, which he throws to his confederate the next time, thereby enabling him to bet with approximate certainty of winning everything in sight. These cappers are commonly known as “pluggers,” and are paid a stated per diem, being looked upon as regular employes.

The game, sometimes called Old Sledge and Seven-Up, is played with a full pack of fifty-two cards, which take rank as at Whist—the Ace being the highest and the Deuce the lowest.

The players cut for deal. The dealer then gives six cards to each player, three at a time, and turns up the thirteenth, if there be two players, and the twenty-fifth if there be four. The turn-up is the trump.

The non-dealer then looks at his hand, and determines whether he will hold it for play, or beg. If he is satisfied with his hand, he says, “I stand;” but if he is not satisfied with his cards, he says, “I beg,” in which case the dealer must either suffer his adversary to score one point, saying, “Take one,” or give each three more cards from the pack, and then turn up the next card, the seventh, for trumps; if however, the trump turned up be of the same suit as the first, the dealer must go on, giving each three cards more, and turning up the seventh, until a change of suit for turn-up takes place.

After these preliminaries have been settled, if two only are playing, the non-dealer leads a card, and the dealer plays a card to it; these two cards constitute a trick.

The player who plays the highest card of the suit led, or trumps, wins the trick, and has the next lead. The play proceeds in this way until all the tricks are played.

Low.—The lowest trump out; the original holder scores one point, even if it be taken by his adversary.

Jack.—The Knave of trumps. The winner of the trick containing it scores one point.

When the Jack is turned up for trump, it counts one point for the dealer, and in that case takes precedence of every other point in the score.

257Game.—The greatest number that in the tricks gained, can be shown by either party; reckoning for

The other cards do not count towards game; thus it may happen that a deal may be played without either party having any score for game, by reason of holding neither face cards nornor tens.

When the players hold equal numbers, the dealer’s hand scores the point for game.

One card may count all “fours;” for example, the oldest hand holds only the jack of the trump suit, and stands his game, the dealer, having neither trump, ten, ace nor court card, it will follow that the jack will be at once high, low, jack and game.

The game consists of seven points, and the player who first scores that number wins the game. If the non-dealer is dissatisfied with his hand, he may “beg,” i. e., ask the dealer to “give” him one point on his score. If the latter refuse, he must “run the cards,” by which is meant, turn down the trump, deal three cards each to his antagonist and himself, and turn another card. If the latter happen to be of the same suit as that previously turned, it is turned over, and the “running for trumps” is continued until some card of a different suit is turned.

In four-handed Seven-up the parties usually decide who shall be partners by cutting the cards, the two highest and the two lowest playing together. The four players divide themselves into two sets, each player sitting opposite his partner, as at whist. The first deal is decided by cutting the cards, the highest cut having the deal, but afterward it is taken by each player in rotation.

The dealer and the player on his left only are permitted to look at their cards, previous to the latter deciding upon his hand, and in case he begs, the other parties must not raise their cards until the dealer announces whether he will “give one” or “run the cards” for another trump.

There can be little question but that the popular game of seven-up had its origin in the United States, although whether in the East or West is a question, the answer to which is shrouded in obscurity.

Half a century ago the wild frontiersman of Indiana and Illinois were accustomed to while away their nights by playing “High, Low, Jack,” with a greasy pack of cards, upon the head of a whiskey barrel, never quitting the game until they had consumed the contents of the barrel.

258Fully as long ago the stalwart lumbermen of Maine sat down upon improvised seats in the pine woods, and devoted Sunday to the same amusement. In these early days the game was, if anything, more popular than at present, for the reason that fewer games of cards were known to the great masses of players.

Occasionally matches, which might nowadays be euphoniously designated as tournaments, were held. In the simple language of those times they were generally referred to as “bouts a keards.” It is probable that even then more or less fraud was practiced by the players, since deception seems to have been a prominent characteristic of the human family since the days of the “fall,” and when cards are played for money the temptation to cheat seems to be, to a certain class of men, irresistible. “Wet groceries” were the favorite stakes of the rough Western farmers and the Eastern lumbermen, yet play was not confined to these. Money earned by long and patient toil of the hardest sort was piled upon barrel heads or laid upon the ground, and it is doubtful whether the losers bore their losses with any more equanimity than do the same class of players to-day. But it has remained for the blackleg of these latter days to introduce into the game those finer arts such as the “half stock” and the “whole stock,” by means of which the unwary are entrapped and the gullible fleeced. To the untutored minds of the early players to whom reference has been made, the idea of reading the cards by the back would have seemed an utter absurdity; but it is true that the farmers and lumbermen have since grown wiser, through no little bitter experience. The result has been that the gamblers do not as easily find victims to-day as they did twenty-five or thirty years ago. This very circumstance shows the benefit effected by the knowledge, and it is the mission of this work to spread broadcast throughout the land such knowledge that he who may be swindled through such artifices as herein described, has only himself to blame for his folly. Infatuation and ignorance have but a poor show of success in a contest with chicanery and skill.

Some of the most common, and at the same time most effective descriptions of fraud practiced in this game will next be concisely described.

In preparing “strippers,” to be used in seven-up, the blacklegs elects either three aces or three jacks, which he leaves in the same condition as that in which they came from the manufacturer. The remainder of the pack he slightly trims down. In using a pack thus prepared the cheat takes advantage of his antagonist’s deal by drawing out these three cards from the pack by their sides, instead of giving the deck a fair, honest cut. Having drawn them out he throws them upon the top, and as a matter of course receives them as his own first three cards. If he has the deal himself 259he “strips” them, that is draws them out of the pack by the sides, places them on top and throws three cards over them. If his adversary has cut the pack, the gambler “shifts” the cut, as described in the chapter relative to poker. Of course his antagonist now receives the three cards which were thrown on top of the pack, while the sharper receives the three aces or jacks.

The same “brief” is employed in seven-up as in poker. It consists of one wide card which is drawn out and placed on top of the three cards,—usually an ace, deuce or jack—which have been previously arranged together. The object in using this card, as in poker, is to enable their sharper to cut the pack in such a way as to uncover the prepared hand. It may be remarked concerning both “stripper” and “briefs” that their employment is usually more easy of detection than “stocking,” when practiced by an expert, and for this reason they are not favorite devices with most of the profession in playing short games, unless their antagonist be particularly verdant.

In this arrangement of the pack the gambler, having first selected a card of any suit, places above it three others of the same suit. It is a common practice to select the high (ace) the low (deuce) and the jack; above these three others are placed. In shuffling the dealer is careful not to disturb the seven cards thus arranged. Having completed his shuffle, he offers them to be cut. After the cut he deals, as he should do, from the remainder of the pack and leaves the cut lying upon the board. The trump is fairly turned, but as he exposes it the sharper throws it to one side; he then picks up the cut with his right hand and places it on top of the remainder of the pack. His antagonist, being engaged in looking at his hand, naturally fails to observe the order in which the two halves of the pack are put together. The advantage of this maneuver is that if his adversary “begs” the dealer runs off to him the three top cards which he had previously placed together and which, of course, lie on top of the cut, which is now uppermost in the deck. He himself receives the three best cards (perhaps the ace, deuce and jack) of the same suit, which, as we have seen, laid beneath the three upper cards; he then turns a new trump, the seventh card, which, it will be remembered, was also of the same suit. He now holds the high, low and jack of the new trump suit and is naturally in a far better position than his antagonist. Of course the half stock is comparatively valueless unless his opponent begs. But in the course of a rubber the latter is reasonably certain to do this often enough to entail a serious loss upon himself.

In a case where the cards have been stocked on the system of the “whole stock,” it makes not the slightestslightest difference to the sharper whether his adversary beg or not.

The blackleg who intends to employ this artifice is careful to attempt it only when there have been but twelve cards dealt from the pack on any particular hand, for example, when he himself has “stood” on his antagonist’s deal. In picking up the twelve cards from the table he selects four cards of some one suit, of course taking care to choose the highest four which have been played during that hand. Over these four cards he places the remaining eight, above these again a thirteenth card of the same suit, which he takes from the pack. Of course, at this moment the faces of the cards are uppermost. By placing the thirteen arranged cards on the bottom and turning the pack over in order to shuffle, the former are brought to the top. In shuffling he takes great care not to disarrange the prepared thirteen. When his antagonist has cut, the sharper “shifts” the cut, as in poker, thus restoring the cards to their original position. The result is, that in dealing, the last three cards of the original twelve will necessarily fall to himself, and they will of course be of the same suit as the trump card turned.

Crimping in all games is practiced on substantially the same principle. In seven-up the dishonest gamester “crimps,” or bends down, one or more—even three high cards. Of course it is an artifice which can prove of advantage to the operator only on his adversary’s deal, in which case he cuts down to the “crimped” cards, the location of which is perceived by the bent card slightly raising those above it, from those below. If only a single ace be crimped, the result is a very heavy percentage of odds in favor of the sharper.

The object of marking the edges of the cards is practically the same as that of crimping; that is, to enable the blackleg to cut down to any desired card. The edges of the ace or jacks, or possibly of both, are very carefully marked with India ink. Cards thus prepared are useful to the cheat only on his opponent’s deal; but in the latter case he is invariably able to cut the pack in such a way that he will himself receive one of the cards thus marked.

There are two “high hands” in Seven-up, one called the “long hand,” the other the “short hand.” To run up a “long hand” requires more time than can usually be obtained by making a seemingly fair deal 261or turning up a jack or ten-spot. However, thousands of dollars have been won on this game, as the major hand seems to a tyro a perfectly sure hand for four points—the fact being that it is a “sure thing” the other way.

The “long hand” is a device to which professional gamblers frequently resort, and which often proves highly successful. It is introduced at a stage of the game where the pack has been “run off” to an extent sufficient to give each player nine cards. Of course, the perpetration of the trick presupposes that the pack has been carefully “stocked.” The player who is to be victimized is given the four court cards, ten-spot and deuce of some suit, e. g., of spades, together with the kings of the three other suits. The gambler has dealt himself six of the remaining spades, and the aces of hearts, diamonds and clubs. He then turns a spade—let us say the nine spot.

The reader who has mastered the explanation of the game already given, will comprehend that the dupe is certain of winning three points—the high, low and jack, and with six trumps and three kings of outside suits his chances of making “game” are apparently excellent. He is, therefore, easily induced, even if he does not himself offer, to bet that he will score four points. Now, mark the issue. The “sucker” inevitably makes his “high, low and jack,” but when the count is made for game he finds his reckoning to be 20 (ace 4, king 3, queen 2, jack 1, and ten-spot 10), to his adversary’s 21 (three aces 12, three kings 9, making 21), the result being the loss of his stake.

The “short hand” at “Seven-up” is a trick to which gamblers resort at the stage of the game when the score stands 6 to 5 in favor of the “sucker” and the “professional” has the deal. Six cards having been dealt to each player, the cheat turns up, let us say, a heart, although the particular suit is altogether immaterial, provided the pack has been properly “stocked.” When the greenhorn picks up his cards, he finds he has the aces of the three other suits. Of course, if he is an average player he “begs,” i. e., asks his adversary to “give” him one point. Inasmuch as such a “gift” would make his score seven, and decide the game in his favor, the gamester refuses. The only course remaining is to “run for a new trump.” The dupe now feels perfectly sure of winning the game. He knows that the ace is necessarily “high,” which point counts first in determining who wins the game; and inasmuch as he is aware that either hearts, diamonds or clubs must next be the trump, and he holds the ace of each of these three suits, he “bets his pile” in serene confidence that he will win. And now comes in the “fine work” of the sharper. He takes the deck and “runs off” six cards; he then turns up the seventh, which is always a jack of the suit originally turned, thus adding one to his own tally, and making the score stand 6 to 6. As the 262rules forbid the same suit being trump, he has to “run” again. Once more the seventh card is turned; another jack (of course of another suit) is exposed: the gambler scores another point for “turning jack,” thus making his account seven and winning the game, leaving the unlucky “sucker” to lament the cruel fate which so effectually prevented him from scoring “high” on either of his three utterly worthless aces.

It is unnecessary to enter into any detailed description of this method of fraud as practiced in seven-up, for the reason that it has been already fully explained in treating of poker. The most common means of practicing this cheat is the employment of the “bug.”

It is, however, for two objects; first to secrete an ace, ten, jack or deuce with a view to their further use, and, secondly as a means by which the sharper may deal to himself seven cards. This latter purpose, and the method by which it is achieved may be worth describing.

On the second run of the deal, the blackleg gives himself four cards instead of three. He then takes out some low card of his strongest suit, places it on top of his cards and his hand on the table. If his adversary stands, he discards some one of his seven cards into the “bug,” thus leaving the proper number in his hand. If on the other hand his antagonist begs, he runs off the desired cards and picking up his own, raises the three last received, on the one which he had previously placed upon the top of his original hand, then exclaims that he has dealt himself four cards instead of three and that the bottom card must be the trump. He thereupon turns over the card of his strongest suit and places it on the top of the deck as the trump, leaving his hand with only the proper number of cards.

Marked cards are often used by professionals in playing seven-up, but the blacklegs do not find them of nearly as great advantage as in many other games. The description of the manner in which they are prepared has already been given in the chapter on poker and need not be here repeated.

This is a very common custom with professional gamblers, who, through long practice, have acquired a manual dexterity which virtually defies detection. The first step of the sharper is to place a jack at the bottom of the pack, leaving it in that position while he deals. If his adversary cuts, the cheat “shifts the cut,” in the same manner as at poker, restoring the cards to their original position. Then, after dealing, 263he places his hands over the deck, in such a way as to conceal it from view. Then, grasping the pack by its outer edge with his right hand, he turns it over on the jack, simultaneously drawing the latter toward the inside, with his left hand, so that it may meet the other cards as they turn over. He all the time imparts a slight upward movement to the pack, which he finally drops upon the table.

Of course, as above explained, by “turning up jack” the dealer scores one. If, now, his opponent begs, the gambler takes occasion surreptitiously to observe the suit of the bottom card. If it happens to be the same as the strongest suit in his own hand, he repeats the trick, turning it for trump, thereby practically placing himself in a position where the chances for winning decidedly preponderate in his favor.

The sharper very commonly selects as the moment for using this stratagem, that period of the game when the score stands six to six, thus scoring the single point necessary to enable him to win.

Whist is too tedious a game for the professional gambler; it is peculiarly a game of skill, and therefore less adapted to cheating purposes, than are many others, the issue of which depends more upon chance. At one time both long and short whist were very popular at evening parties, but neither of them was ever a general game for money in this country, and even as a pastime Euchre has far surpassed it in public favor.

Still, trickery may be employed with telling effect, and the professional blackleg brings his ill-directed skill to bear upon it in a variety of ways.

The chief advantage to be obtained by the deal is with a “second,” and the gambler who is sufficiently dexterous to give the aces, kings and queens to himself and his partner can make the “odd trick” every time he deals.

“Signing up” between partners is also an essential element in fraudulent whist playing. For although each confederate has a general knowledge of the contents of his partner’s hand, yet there are critical periods in the game, especially when one of the two holds uncertain cards, when “signing up” is of great value in determining the event with absolute certainty. This secret telegraphy is arranged beforehand between the pair of swindlers, the signals for “suit” and “size” being mutually agreed upon; and where the understanding is perfect the defeat of any honest players with whom they may be contending, is a moral certainty.

“” ‘’ Another favorite device of card sharpers is to “ring in a cold deck,” by which is meant the substitution of a pack of cards having precisely similar backs as those used in the game, but which have been previously so arranged that while the greenhorns shall receive excellent hands, it is a matter of utter impossibility for them to score the odd trick. The substitution 264having been effected, one of the swindlers contrives some excuse for not looking at his hand until after his antagonists shall have examined theirs. Perhaps he lights a cigar, protesting that it will not “draw.” After the dupes have seen their cards, he proposes a wager—“just to make it interesting”—that he and his partner will win the odd trick. He adds that he will bet on his hand “unsight, unseen.” The honest player usually protests that he has looked at his cards already. “O, well,” says the blackleg; “never mind that. I’m in for a ‘spec,’ and if you want a little ‘go,’ I’m your man for twenty or so.”so.” At this point, the moral (?) companion of the sharper interferes with a protest. He doesn’t believe in betting on a friendly game; money is not so easily made that it can be thrown away, etc., etc. But this is so artfully said as to stimulate rather than to check the greenhorn’s desire to bet. A little more conversation almost invariably results in the making of a wager, the limit of which is determined by the purse and the verdancy of the victim. The stakes having been placed the game proceeds. The inevitable result follows: The “suckers” win the first six tricks and the sharpers the last seven and the money. The original pack had been put out of sight and the dupes rarely discover the manner in which they have been swindled, even if they suspect that any fraud whatever has been practised.

To illustrate the manner in which a pack of cards has been prepared for this purpose, let us suppose a party seated at the whist table. A, a sharper, deals to B, his verdant antagonist, the ace, king, queen, knave, ten and nine of hearts, which we will assume to be trumps; the ace, king, queen and knave of clubs; and the ace, king and queen of spades; the hand being, of course, void of diamonds. Every whist player would recognize this as an exceedingly strong, if not an impregnable, hand. But observe what A gives himself and his partner; the eight, seven, six, five, four, three and deuce of trumps, and of the rest of the pack, it is a matter of indifference. Now, mark the result. B leads off with his trumps, of which he has six; A follows suit every time, having seven; next B leads his ace of spades, which A takes with his remaining trump. The lead being now with the latter, he plays his six diamonds, each one of which, of course, takes a trick, the blackleg thus securing the odd trick. In considering a trick of this kind, the average man is at a loss whether to admire its ingenuity or condemn its rascality.

This is one of the games of cards usually first taught to children and commonly considered too simple to interest matured minds. As a matter of fact, to play it successfully requires an exercise of memory second only to that necessary in playing at Whist.

It is not a favorite with gamblers for the reason that it presents comparatively few opportunities of using the advantages so dear to the heart of the blackleg. At the same time “eminent professionals” have been known to win $1,000 on a single game, and I have myself played for (and won) $50 on the hazard of one hand. It is related of “Canada Bill,” elsewhere referred to as the “king of the monte men,” that he deceived himself into believing that he understood the game. While he was making his headquarters in Kansas City he was wont to make short trips upon the railways centering there, from which he would not infrequently return with $2,000 or $3,000. He was then willing to have a bout at casino (and he would play no other game) for from $100 to $500 with any one who offered. Shrewd rascal as he was, he was the veriest tyro—in fact a “sucker”—at his own favorite pastime, and the blacklegs of the place used to fleece him unmercifully.

The main reliance of the gambler at this game, however, is in the superior skill resulting from careful study and long practice. An expert gamester can always tell the cards remaining in the pack at the commencement of the last deal, even on a perfectly fair game.

Of course “paper,” i.e., marked cards, are invaluable to the cheat at this as at all other games, and this is really the principal scheme of fraud of any importance ever attempted at this game. Occasionally, when a professional is playing with a greenhorn, he will contrive to keep a nine spot on top of his pile of tricks, which he uses in “building” to suit himself. Sometimes also a card of some low denomination (e.g. the three spot of hearts) is substituted for the ace of spades, which the sharper abstracts and conceals, placing it among his tricks and using it in counting his own points for game. This is rather unsafe, however, as the duplicate cards occasionally come together.

Casino is an amusement frequently affected by broken down gamblers, whose depleted resources do not permit them to “sit in” a game of poker, and who seek to rehabilitate their fallen fortunes by playing casino for a stake of five cents on a game of twenty-one points.

Perhaps no game is more universally played in the United States than Euchre. It is pre-eminently a social amusement. While it does not possess the absorbing fascination of whist, it permits free and unrestrained conversation among the players, which circumstance has unquestionably contributed largely to its popularity.

It is probable that it originated in the Western States, but its devotees are to-day confined to no section, and the pastime finds its defenders alike in the saloon, the gaming “hell” and the drawing room.

To be a successful Euchre player calls for the exercise of excellent judgment, considerable finesse and no little boldness. As it is never played with a pack of more than thirty-two cards, this game does not afford so many opportunities for fraud, but the slightest advantage which can be gained, tells with unfailing certainty.

In fleecing victims at euchre, professional gamblers resort to many of the practices which are so successfully employed at “seven-up.” “Marked” or “advantage cards,” are among the most common devices of the sharpers.

“Strippers” are also found extremely useful. These are prepared in the same manner as in all other games, i. e. by removing—either from each side or both ends—a narrow, triangular “strip,” not wider than one-sixteenth of an inch at the widest part. One of the “surest things” is to have the cards cut for two jack “strippers,” which the “professional” can strip on the top of the pack on his opponent’s deal, thus securing two bowers. Sometimes one jack of a red and one of a black suit are selected for this purpose, but it is usually considered better to use two jacks of the same color, for the reason that should a trump of that color be turned, (which is likely to occur at least half the time) the cheat is sure of both bowers. This, as every euchre player knows, gives an immense advantage. Yet this trick is not always certain to win; sometimes “luck” will favor the honest player, and it is recorded that a guileless and unsuspecting neophyte once won sixteen consecutive games from a blackleg who trusted to this expedient. Such instances, however, are almost as rare as ice in the tropics; and any man is utterly devoid of sense who imagines that he is safe in trusting to chance, as against skill combined with chicanery.

“Briefs” may also be advantageouslyadvantageously used at euchre. The gambler places a “brief” above two bowers, or a bower and an ace, and the cut is made down to it on his adversary’s deal, thus insuring at least two high cards.

“Stocking” is far more easily accomplished at this game than at either poker or “seven-up,” and the gamester who is proficient in arranging 267the cards for either of the other two games finds it an easy matter to “put up” a deck for euchre, although it is absolutely essential to his success that he should be an expert at “shifting the cut.”

“Crimping” is practiced precisely as in “seven-up,” the most common device being to “crimp” a jack and then cut to it. The sharper also not infrequently marks the edges of the bowers with India ink, whereby he is always able so to cut the pack as to be certain of securing one of these desirable cards, with the chance of another one should two happen to lie together.

As in poker, the “bug” is sometimes used for “holding out” a valuable card—e. g., a bower or ace, and sometimes two. A card “held out” is occasionally “palmed;” by which is meant that it is concealed by the black-leg in the palm of his hand when the pack is handed him to cut. He then adroitly drops it on top, lightly taps the deck and allows the cards to run. If the gambler wishes to palm a card on his own deal, he places it on top of the pack as described and either makes a false cut or shuffles the pack through once without disturbing the one palmed.

However, although these nefarious artifices are constantly practiced by black-legs upon the unsophisticated player, it is only right to say that the “profession” does not regard euchre with favor as a game at which quick and large returns may be realized. It is mainly employed to fleece victims through a device technically called the “high hand,” which, as thus used, has very generally supplanted “three card monte” on railroad trains and steamboats. These conveyances are most commonly selected by this class of card sharps as the theater of their exploits. In the operation of this scheme of fraud, two confederates act in concert. Usually the game is commenced by “roping in” two greenhorns to make up a euchre party, “just for amusement,” or possibly for stakes, which are merely nominal. As soon as a fairly good hand has been obtained by one of the pair and the next deal is to fall to his confederate, he “plays it alone,” his accomplice gathering in the tricks as they are made. As he does so he can easily arrange the cards so that when dealt they will inevitably fall into “poker hands,” that is, into “single pairs,” “full houses,” “four of a kind,” etc.—for an explanation of which terms the reader is referred to the chapter on “Poker and Poker Players.” One of the sharpers at once offers to bet at poker; his ally accepts the gauntlet thus thrown down, the stakes are put up, and the bet won. As soon as occasion offers these tactics are repeated, until finally one of the “suckers,” who has been given what would be an extraordinarily strong hand at “bluff,” is induced to bet. The stakes are at once “raised,” as at poker, and when the hands are shown, the victim always finds that he has lost, for the reason that the sharper always holds a hand “just a little higher.”higher.”

268WhenWhen a “gudgeon” displays an unusual reluctance to “snap at the bait” sometimes he is given four kings—a hand which only four aces or a “royal flush” can beat. If he still hesitates the confederate who sits next to him shows him an ace in his own hand, thereby convincing him that his adversary, at best, cannot have four aces, and inducing him to believe that he has a “sure thing.” When the “show-down” comes the dupe is amazed to be confronted by four aces in his opponent’s hand! The explanation is simple; the pack had five aces.

Cribbage is a quicker game than whist, and therefore better adapted to the requirements of the professional blackleg. It is not so popular in this country as in England, although extensively played and constantly gaining in favor.

As five-spots are most valuable cards at cribbage, various devices are employed by professionals to secure them. One of the most common is “palming.” In accomplishing this the sharper conceals two five-spots and any other two cards in the palm of his right hand, alternating the fives with indifferent cards, and playing them so that the five-spots shall be below the others. Having arranged the cards in this manner in his hand, the sharper—with an air of candor—passes the rest of the pack to his antagonist, with the request that the latter shuffle them while he is lighting his cigar. The cards having been shuffled, the blackleg takes them in the hand in which he has “palmed” the four cards, which are thus placed upon the top of the pack, and, of course are dealt first. Sometimes the professional marks all four fives, so that while dealing he may not only avoid giving them to the dupe, but may, as opportunity offers, appropriate them to himself. Another trick sometimes practiced by less dexterous manipulators is to place the fives at the bottom of the pack, and quietly drop them into the dealer’s hand. Cards are also sometimes secreted between the knee and the table, or in the “bug,” as in poker, or in the coat collar, so that the swindler may exchange bad cards received during a deal for good ones previously abstracted from the pack. The coat collar, and the knee-and-table method have generally fallen into disfavor as being too clumsy and liable to detection.

Cards are sometimes prepared for cribbage as follows. The sixes, sevens, eights and nines are cut slightly shorter than the others, while the fives, court cards and tens are cut a trifle narrower. If a sharper wishes a card of one of the former denominations to turn up, he cuts the pack by lifting the ends, and one of the cards which he needs is certain to be uppermost on the cut, for the reason that they are shorter than the others. 269But if a five, ten or court card be desired, he cuts by taking hold of the cards on the sides, and the card which he needs, being narrower than the rest, will be infallibly discovered.

Crimping is also practiced at cribbage. In the course of two or three deals, the sixes, sevens, eights and nines are bent in the middle lengthwise, the sides inclining downwards. By this means it is possible for the sharper to obtain one of the important cards at the start, should he want it, by cutting the pack where he sees the bent card. Sometimes two or three small cards are surreptitiously taken from the pack. The dupe, not knowing this, plays at a great disadvantage, while the knowledge of the fact is proportionately of benefit to the blackleg.

A common method of cheating at cribbage, euchre, and in fact nearly all card games, is the “telegraph.” A confederate gambler looking over the shoulder of an honest player, under pretense of taking an interest in the game, with, perhaps, the excuse of a trifling bet on his success, reads off his hand to the other gambler, who is thereby thoroughly informed as to its nature and value. This information can be conveyed in a hundred ways, without speaking a word or moving a finger. An almost imperceptible movement of the eyebrows, an expansion of the nostrils, a puff of cigar smoke to the right or the left, an opening of the mouth, a turn of the head, biting the lip, chewing a toothpick—these and a thousand other equally simple devices, previously agreed upon and thoroughly understood, may be employed to abstract money from the pocket of an unsuspecting dupe. Of course, under such circumstances the confederate sharpers pretend to be utter strangers to each other, and not infrequently there occurs a slight wrangle between them, which serves still further to instil into the mind of the victim the belief that the sharper who acts as “stool pigeon” is his friend.

Considered on the whole, however, cribbage is not a favorite game with professional blacklegs, for the reasons stated above. There are, however, many persons who are exceedingly fond of it, and who are easily induced to play for stakes in the belief that cheating at it is practically impossible. To such players as these the foregoing remarks are especially commended. There is no game where innocence and ignorance are a match for chicanery. Nor does the expert card-sharper know either pity or remorse. The man who sits down at a table to play for stakes is supremely foolish, and the man who gambles with a stranger is preternaturally idiotic. The only safety for the unsophisticated youth, the only safe rule for every man, young or old, is to abstain from gambling altogether.

This game of vingt-un, as its name denotes, originated in France, but has achieved wonderful popularity, not only all over the continent of Europe and the kingdom of Great BritainBritain, but also on the shores of the Western Hemisphere.

It is played by any number of persons, seated around a table similar to that used in faro. The banker always deals, and uses one, two, or three packs of cards, according to the number of players.

After the cards are shuffled he draws one from the pack and places it at the bottom, face upward. This is called “burning” a card. The object is to prevent what is known among gamblers as “bottom dealing,” and this practice measurably interferes with one of the favorite practices of card sharpers. First, all bets are made before they deal. Two cards are given to each player, one at a time. When all have been supplied, the players look at their hands. The king, queen, jack and ten spot each count ten; an ace counts one or eleven, at the option of its holder, but he is always guided in his determination by the exigencies of his hand. The remainder of the cards are reckoned according to the number of spots upon their faces. Each player signifies his satisfaction, or dissatisfaction with his hand by “standing” or calling for a card which is dealt to him, face upward. If this does not satisfy him he can call for a second or even a third, as long as it does not count more than twenty-one. If a player, who elects to draw to his hand, finds that the number of spots on the cards drawn, added to the number on those which he first received, exceeds twenty-one, he is said to have “burst,” and throws his hand face downward upon the table, the stake being forfeited to the banker, who is always the dealer.

After all have stood or drawn, the dealer turns his hand face upward on the table, and either stands or draws. If he draws and “bursts,” that is makes his count exceed twenty-one, he pays to each player the stake which he has advanced, provided such player has not already overdrawn. If he stands, or draws so that his hand does not exceed twenty-one, he receives from or pays to each player in rotation; the one whose cards reckon up nearest twenty-one being considered the winner. In the case of a tie between the dealer and any of the players, the former takes the stakes.

Every man who has ever played Vingt-un knows that the foregoing description of the game is palpably incomplete. The author does not aim fully to instruct the ignorant as to the legitimate method of playing all games of cards. Wherever a game, as honestly played, is described in this book, it is his intention to give only such an explanation of the game as may enable the reader thoroughly to comprehend the frauds 271practiced by blacklegs. It is idle folly to say to a man that he is on the edge of a precipice, who does not understand what a precipice is.

There can be no question that the explanation of the tricks of “professionals” in this game will be thoroughly comprehended by those who have ever played it, either for the purposes of amusement or in a gaming “hell.”

In the first place the dealer enjoys an unquestionable advantage, and the sharper always endeavors to obtain the deal if possible. Failing in that, two other resources are open to him. As honestly played, the game is one which calls for the exercise of some little discretion, considerable finesse and extraordinary boldness. If square players possess these qualifications, it is necessary for the “professional” to encounter from some “point of vantage.” The most common agencies employed to effect this result are the use either of marked cards or of the “bug.” If he uses the latter, it is comparatively easy for him to fill in his hand without a draft, standing on two cards and raising from—and at the same time discarding to the “bug.” If he is able to make use of the marked cards, it is, of course, easy for him to tell what he will receive on the draw, and he guides his action accordingly.

The “second” hand, is often found invaluable to gamblers who wish to win at this game. If a sharper has marked cards, or “paper,” he can readily deal from eight, while he draws with absolute certaintycertainty. If, on the other hand, he is using a fair pack, it is not much trouble for him to prick those above the nine. This having been done, on dealing a “second,” it is the simplest thing in the world to pick up twenty-one every time.

It is much easier to deal a “second” at vingt-un than at poker, for the reason that the deal affords far better opportunities for delay and stoppage in the former game than in the latter.

Any reader who is not a preternatural idiot can easily see that a “professional” who uses “paper” has enough percentage to bankrupt a greenhorn with the utmost celerity and dispatch.

Sometimes a partner is found valuable. In such a case, the latter usually sits directly on the right hand of the dealer. A system of signals between the two confederates having been arranged, the “elder” hand is able to tell precisely when it is advisable for him to “draw.” This he does without any regard to his own hand. It is no difficult matter for an accomplice to continue his draft until some card appears on top that will fill the dealer’sdealer’s hand. Marked cards, are of course, an advantage even in the accomplishment of this scheme. When both circumstances are combined—i. e. “paper” and partner—there can be little doubt as to which party will win.

272It is not an uncommon practice among gamblers to “stand” on their first two cards without drawing, even when they have not more than twelve or thirteen. The object is to mislead an unsuspecting player into the belief that they already hold nineteen or twenty.twenty. The result often is that the latter is thus induced to draw until he “bursts.” Just here, is where the advantage of having a partner is most apparent. The dealer either draws according to some previously determined system of signals between himself and his partner, or is guided by the action of his confederate not drawing.

The origin of dice is shrouded in obscurity, but it is certain that their use has come down to modern days from a period of remote antiquity. Dice throwing has always been one of the most popular forms of gaming, and in days gone by immense fortunes have been staked and lost upon the throwing of the cubes. Of late years, however, the popularity of this method of gambling has been rather on the wane, as compared with the past. It is by no means so common a recreation of gentlemen gamesters, who delight in playing a fair game of chance for stakes with their friends. It is now chiefly played in gaming houses, and the dice are among the implements of the professional gambler.

Nevertheless dice are among the most time-honored tools of the “professional.” The honor of their invention is ascribed to the Egyptians, and in some of the bas-reliefs that have been disinterred in the land of the PharoahsPharoahs, figures playing with something closely resembling dice are discernible. The Ethiops of three or four thousand years ago were, it is believed, addicted to gaming of this sort, and in this connection it may be remarked that gambling is quite as much a barbaric as a civilized vice. In fact it may be questioned whether the Troglodytes did not gamble in their caves, and swindle one another out of the spoils of the chase before they had learned to construct huts in which to live.

It is not the intention of this chapter to describe all the games of dice which may be played—some of which are yet a favorite amusement among gentlemen—but to explain those most commonly used by card sharpers as a means of defrauding the ignorant. In fact the practices described in this chapter hardly deserve to be ranked with “games” considered as such. They partake rather of the nature of tricks, and, without exception, are illy concealed games of fraud.

The various devices will be treated seriatumseriatum. And first we will begin with one of the best known and most frequently played.

This is, perhaps, one of the most successful games of dice—considered from the standpoint of the operator—known to the gambling fraternity.

The illustration affords a view of all the paraphernalia employed in conducting it. On a cloth-covered table rests an inverted tambourine, above which stands an implement substantially of the form depicted in the 274cut. The latter may be best described as consisting of two wooden bowls, the smaller ends of which are placed opposite each other and connected by a hollow tube as shown in the diagram. On the cloth which covers the table are painted numbers from one to six. Three dice are used in playing, differing from ordinary dice, only in being larger and in having figures painted on the faces, instead of the small black dots commonly employed.

The mode of playing is as follows: Players select the number or numbers on which they wish to bet, and place their wagers on the corresponding squares on the cloth.cloth. The dice are then placed in the upper bowl and permitted to drop through the tube, and fall upon the tambourine, directly under the inverted bowl. The bowl is then raised, and if the bettor happens to have placed his stake on the number appearing on one of the upper faces of the cubes, he wins the amount of his bet. If the number which he selected appears on two of their faces, the proprietor of the bowl pays him double. If the three dice all show the same number and he has happened to place his wager thereon, the operator pays him three to one.

The “percentage” against the players in this game is so large that the proprietors are ordinarily content to play it “on the square.” It sometimes happens, however, that the operation of the reorganized laws of chance seems to be reversed, and a player wins over and over again. Of course, 275this is not to be tolerated. The proprietor of the game is running it for his own pecuniary profit; the idea of conducting a scheme for the benefit of the general public has never occuredoccured to him. Accordingly he has resort to trickery. Sometimes instead of taking all three dice from the tambourine, he removes only two, thus retaining a knowledge of at least one of the winning numbers. I have also known a device of this kind to be resorted to: When a certain number is winning repeatedly, the operator, having (apparently by accident) knocked the dice off of the table, while stooping to pick them up will substitute another set of three cubes, none of which contains the cubes in question.

But the most contemptible form of swindling consists in replacing the tambourine by a thin board, which may be so agitated, by means of a concealed spring, as to overturn the dice after the manipulator has ascertained the numbers shown by looking through the tube.

Sometimes the operator provides himself with dice having all the faces marked with the same number, by substituting one or more of which he is able to cast whatever throw he pleases.

This is a simple little game of dice, yet one of the most fascinating of all games of chance. It is sometimes designated as “the old army game,”game,” for the reason that soldiers at the front were often wont to beguile the tedium of a bivouac by seeking relief from monotony in its charms.

The outfit requisite to play the game is simple and inexpensive, consisting of three small dice, a dice-box, and a cloth on which are inscribed the numbers one to six, corresponding to the dots, or “pips,” on the six faces of the cubes.

Bets are made by placing the money wagered on the numbers on the cloth. The dice, having been placed in the box, are shaken and thrown upon the table. Bets made upon either of the three numbers which come uppermost are won by the players. Money staked on either of the remaining numbers are won by the bank.

On its face, this game appears to be one of pure chance. As played upon fair and circus-grounds, however, there is very little chance about 276it. The “banker” does not throw the dice fairly. Through long practice, he is able to retain two of them between the fingers of the hand which he holds over the inverted dice-box. The other die he allows to remain in the box, and rattles it against the sides, occasionally knocking the box itself against the button of his coat in order to simulate the sound produced by the shaking of three dice. When he removes his hand from the mouth of the dice cup, he drops upon the table the two dice which he held in his hand and permits the third die to fall by chance. The reader will perceive, that he thus makes himself absolutely certain as to two of the faces which will be exposed when the cup is lifted. When it is remembered, that the box is not agitated until all the bets have been made, it will be readily perceived how great is the unfair advantage thus obtained.

This game is a favorite one with outside sharpers for “ringing in” loaded dice on the manipulators. It is a very simple matter to substitute prepared cubes for those used by the operator, and, after winning his money, to replace those originally employed by him. I have myself successfully practiced this trick many times, very much to the financial loss and mental chagrin of the proprietor of the dice and box.

One of the most artful devices practiced by swindlers in operating this game is that which I will now describe. The proprietor of the game has, as a confederate, a “side partner,” who keeps himself studiously in the back-ground until the opportune moment presents itself for his appearance upon the scene of action. Meanwhile, the chief manipulator of the scheme inveigles a countryman, whose avarice surpasses his sense, to enter into a partnership with him for the purpose of fleecing his own friends and acquaintances. This individual is to develop, later, into the dupe. He is required, before securing an interest in the prospective profits of the game, to advance a sum of money, the amount of which is gauged only by the size of his pocket and credulity. After the proprietor has received the cash, the countryman remains by the table where the game is being operated, serenely confident that he is about to win a large sum through imposing upon the confidence of his towns people. The “side partner” soon makes his appearance, usually in a state apparently bordering on beastly intoxication. The greenhorn regards him in the light of a “soft mark,” and at once approaches him with the suggestion that he “try his luck.” To this the seemingly drunken man assents, substitutes loaded dice or “other ringers” for those previously used by the operator, thus winning the entire amount of his stake. This he continues to do, until he has won a sum sufficient to absorb all the “capital” which the “sucker” had advanced. The result is that the latter’s interest in the concern is speedily wiped out, and the proprietor and his confederate divide the sum thus gained between them.

This is a favorite game among steamboat men, and is particularly popular among colored people. I first became acquainted with it on board the steamboat “City of Chester” on the Mississippi river. I was traveling in partnership with a man named Martin, and we had succeeded in fleecing one man out of some $800, at poker in the cabin. I went out on deck, and my attention was arrested by hearing a negro crying in a stentorian voice, “come 7 or 11,” then another man calling out, “chill’en cryin’ fo’ bread.” This was followed by the sound of something rolling on the floor. My curiosity was aroused, and I went below to learn what was going on. Here I first saw the game of “craps” and my introduction to it cost me precisely $15. I went up-stairs and informed my partner that I had discovered a new game. He was anxious to see it, and together we returned to the main deck where the play was in progress. He dropped $10 to the “crap” roller, expressed himself as satisfied, and we returned to the cabin. I did not at the time understand how I was cheated, although I was perfectly well satisfied that the cheating had been done. Since then, I have discovered all about it.

The game is played with dice about half the size of the cubes ordinarily used in other games. Only two are employed and they are held in the hand and thrown forward upon the table or whatever surface may be convenient. The numbers 7 and 11 are called “craps.” After the dice have ceased rolling the spots on both sides are added together, and if the sum is equal to 7 or 11, the “crap” thrower wins all bets which have been made against him. If the same amount to two, three, or twelve, he loses, and is required to pay each player the amount of his stake. Should the sum of all the spots on the two dice amount to four, five, six, eight, nine or ten, he is entitled to continue throwing, until he has either cast the amount thrown again, or throw a seven. In the former case he wins the player’s bets; if, however, the sum of the spots amount to 7 before the number first thrown turns up again, he loses.

The game commences by one player throwing the dice until he loses, when the next player at his left takes the cubes, and so on in rotation.

The favorite method of cheating at this game is by the substitution of unfair dice. For this purpose, loaded dice are sometimes used, and sometimes dice specially prepared, on the faces of one of which, are painted two aces, two twos and two sixes, while the other dice is inscribedinscribed with two threes, two fours and two fives. If the reader will take pains to figure out the combination of numbers which may be made with two dice so prepared, he will see that it is an utter impossibility for the thrower to make either, two, three or twelve, the numbers which will be a loss to him. In addition to this circumstance it is also apparent that the chances of throwing 7 are very greatly increased by the arrangement of two fours on one dice and two threes on the other, as well as two fives on one and 278two twos on the other. The small size of the dice employed in playing this game and the fact that they are thrown from the hand, renders the substitution of unfair dice a comparatively easy matter.

Although the game, as I have said, is an especial favorite among negroes and deck-hands, nevertheless it is frequently played by “high toned” gamblers and for large stakes.

Of course, the dice are usually made of bone, although in a recently raided game in Chicago, the players anticipating interference on the part of the police, had their little cubes made of cut sugar, and when the officers of the law made their appearance, swallowed the dice, and there being no gaming implements found, the case against them was necessarily dismissed.

This is a favorite game with traveling sporting men, who introduce it at county fairs, and on circus grounds, and at other places where there is a large crowd. The diagram represents the arrangement of the interior of a glass covered case containing prizes. The divisions in the case are numbered from eight to forty-eight, inclusive, to correspond with the numbers which may be possibly thrown in casting eight dice, which the proprietor carries with him, together with a dice box. For a stipulated consideration, he permits any one who may wish, to throw the dice upon the glass cover of the case. The sum of the spots on the upper faces is taken, and the player is given whatever prize the number may call for.

When the game is introduced upon fair-grounds, the directors of which insist that there shall be no blanks, small articles of cheap jewelry are put inside the case as prizes, although gamblers prefer to use money prizes only, for the reason that it gives the outfit a more attractive appearance.

An examination of the diagram will show that the higher prizes are invariably placed in squares corresponding to a number which it is almost impossible for a player to throw. Thus, a $500 prize is placed in the square numbered eight. To win this, it would be necessary to cast eight aces. Another prize of like amount is numbered forty-eight, and cannot be won unless the player throws eight sixes. Those numbers which may be easily thrown are always attached to squares containing small prizes, or which are inscribed with the abbreviation “rep.” These letters, as in all similar games, stand for “represent,” and when a player has thrown a number corresponding to a square so marked, he is required to double the amount already put up or submit to the loss of his stake.

This game affords a rare opportunity for cheating, although the fraud is not perpetrated by means of loaded dice, as many persons suppose. The proprietor counts the spots on the dice thrown to suit himself, and after hastily calling out the number replaces the cubes in the box. 279Strange as it may appear, it is not one man out of fifty who ever insists upon counting the spots on his own throw. If the owner of the device has reason to believe that the player has money and is a “soft mark,” he calls out the number corresponding to one of the “represent” squares. He then tells the victim that he has neither won nor lost and must double the amount previously advanced and “try his luck” again. This practice is continued until the dupe has been induced to stake all of his money, when the proprietor calls out a number corresponding to the square marked “blank,” of which there is always one in every case. Of course, the operator then informs the “sucker” that he has lost all the money which he had paid.

It sometimes happens that a player grows suspicious, and asks how long this doubling his stake is to continue. In such a case, the operator mentally calculates the amount of money which the man probably has, and tells him that he will be required to double only two or three times more, when, if he again throws a “represent” number, the proprietor will return all of his money except five per cent., which is the percentage belonging to the game. The victim does not throw a “represent” number the last time under such circumstances, but is thrown upon the “blank” square, which means that the proprietor has won the entire stake. “Cappers” are as useful in this game as in any other. Their methods of operation are similar to those elsewhere described and need not be more particularly dwelt upon here.

This game is usually played in saloons for drinks or cigars, though sometimes for money, and occasionally even for higher stakes. Five ordinary dice and a dice cup is used. Each player has three throws. The highest score which can possibly be made is five aces, the next, five sixes, then five fives, and so on. Next to five similar spots, the best throw is four of one kind and an odd number, the relative value of such throws being measured by the number of spots upon the top of the four dice, aces ranging highest. The game is called “poker” dice, because of the general resemblance between it and “bluff,” so far as the value of the throws is concerned as compared with that of the hands held at poker.

I have never known but one scheme of fraud to be employed in playing this game, which consisted in so placing the five dice within the box that the thrower was able to turn out whatever number he might see fit. I have known two men, both of whom are at present in Chicago, who can cast any throw which they may wish at their own will. They do not employ loaded dice, but, through long practice have acquired such dexterity in placing the cubes in the box and throwing them upon the table, that they are able to play with absolute certainty.

This game is most frequently played on fair and circus grounds, at public meetings, barbacues, political rallies, and other places where a large crowd is assembled. The outfit requisite to its operation consists of a dice box with two dice and a cloth, about 2½ feet long, on which are outlined three squares, in each of which is painted the figure 7. One of these squares is in the centre of the cloth, the other two at the respective ends. In one of them is painted the word “over,” and in another the word “under.”

The method of play is as follows: Bets may be placed upon either of the three squares. If laid on the centre square, the proprietor pays the winner two for one. After the wagers have all been laid, the dealer throws the dice. If the sum of the spots on the upper face of the two cubes is equal to 7, and no stake has been laid on that number, he wins. If it is more than 7, bets placed upon the squares containing the word “over” are paid to the bettors. If the total is less than 7, the proprietor pays those who have laid their money upon the other square.

The mode of cheating at this game is substantially the same as that already explained in the description of the game of “chuck-a-luck.” The operator retains one of the two dice in the fingers of the hand which he 281places over the mouth of the cup and rattles the dice about, inside. When he lifts the box, he is absolutely certain as to the number of spots upon the die which he has held in his hand, thereby gaining an immense advantage over the bettors, inasmuch as he has it practically within his power to cause the wager of any particular player to be lost.

This game of dice—if it may properly be called a game—is a swindling device, pure and simple. It is, in effect, nothing but a scheme of fraud, for the successful operation of which are required two sharpers, who act as confederates, a dice box, three ordinary dice, a “ringer” and a “sucker.” The place commonly selected for working it is a saloon, and the method in which it is operated is as follows:

The victim having been selected and located in a saloon, the first sharper scrapes an acquaintance with him and induces him to throw dice for the drinks or cigars. While the dice are being handled, the gambler calls the attention of the dupe to the fact that the number of spots on the faces of the three dice added to the number on the three reverse sides is always equal to twenty-one. This fact necessarily follows from the construction of all fair dice; on the reverse face from the ace is a 6; opposite to 3 is 4; and directly opposite to 5 is 2. There are, however, many persons, who not having had their attention directed to this circumstance, are ignorant of the fact. The “sucker” usually satisfies himself of the correctness of the statement made by his newly formed acquaintance through throwing the dice several times in succession, until he becomes convinced that the sum of the six numbers is always equal to twenty-one. At this point sharper number two makes his appearance. He strolls up to the pair and offers to join in throwing dice for refreshments. The first swindler proposes that they guess as to the number of spots on the upper and under sides of the three dice. To this sharper number two assents, and guesses, say, 25. As a matter of course, the greenhorn guesses 21 and wins. The second confederate thereupon remarks that he is a “pretty good guesser.” To this the first swindler replies that “the gentlemen can tell the number every time.” The confederate demurs to this statement, saying that it is impossible. He offers to bet the price of a box of cigars that the dupe cannot do it. His accomplice retorts that he would be willing to bet $1,000 that he can, and offers to lend the dupe money to add to whatever sum the latter may wish to bet for the purpose of laying a stake against his confederate. The bet having been made, the attention of the victim is momentarily diverted and the 282“ringer”—either a loaded dice or one prepared after the manner described in the paragraph upon the game of “crap”—is substituted for one of the fair dice. The throw is cast, and when the spots are added together their sum is inevitably found to be either greater or less than 21. Sharper number two thereupon demands and takes the stakes.

Ordinarily the dupe is too bewildered at the moment to understand the precise nature of the game which has been played upon him until after the two confederates have left the house. Should he, however, remonstrate and undertake to raise a disturbance, it is usually found an easy matter to quiet him by summoning the town marshal or some other police officer. In fact, I have known an officer actually summoned, who insisted upon the dupe keeping quiet, for which service he received a bonus from the pair of swindlers.

These little implements are used chiefly for winning drinks or cigars, or small sums of money. They are eight-sided spinning tops made of ivory, the respective sides being numbered one to eight. Sometimes they are made fairly, but dice tops of the latter description are not in favor with the professional gambler, who uses a top having a moveable iron peg which the sharper may so arrange as to cause the high or low numbers to fall uppermost when the top comes to rest, after being spun. If the peg be turned one way a high number will come uppermost; if the other, a low number. Of course the greenhorn, not being aware of this little peculiarity of the top, it is comparatively an easy matter for the confidence man or other cheat to arrange the peg in such a way that when he spins for himself he turns up a high number, and when his opponent takes the same article in hand, however, he invariably turns up a low one. It may be seen that the former has it in his power to win as often as he chooses, but in order that his luck may not appearappear to be positively miraculous, he sometimes permits his dupe to win.

Three dice are used in this game. Sometimes they contain spots, as do ordinary dice, sometimes on the faces are painted representations of birds, animals, or reptiles, such as an elephant, an eagle, a rattlesnake, etc. On the table upon which the dice are thrown is spread a cloth on which are depicted numbers or figures corresponding to those upon the faces of the cubes. Bets are made by playing the stakes upon whatever square or squares the player may select. The dice are dropped through a funnel-shaped cup, somewhat similar in form to that used in “hieronymus,” and the gains or losses of the bettors are determined by inspecting the face of the dice which lie uppermost after they have fallen upon the 283table. If any player has wagered his money, for instance, upon the number six, and one of the dice show a six-spot on its upper face, the bettor is paid the amount which he has ventured. In case the three dice should all show the same number or figure when they fall, the proprietor pays to the bettor, who has placed his stake upon the corresponding square on the cloth, 180 for 1.

In this, as in all other fraudulent games with dice, gamblers resort to the substitution of “ringers” for fair dice, and have the poor fools, who risk their money on such schemes, practically at their mercy.

This game is substantially identical with “grand hazard,” the only variations being, that differently inscribed dice are employed. The same sort of cloth on which are depicted squares containing the prizes is used, and the dice are dropped through a similar metal funnel. The dice, however, are usually of either one of the two sorts. In those of the first description, the faces of the cubes are painted, respectively, with a club, a heart, a spade, a diamond, an anchor and a star. The faces of the other description of dice employed, are respectively marked with a snake, an elephant, an eagle, a baby and a turtle.

Almost every one has heard of loaded dice, but there are comparatively few among the guild of professional gamblers who are experts in their use. The sharper who does not travel, preferring to wait, at home, such victims as the antipodes of Providence may send him, is satisfied with employing occasionally, a set of high dice. But the peripatetic scoundrel who, like Satan, “wanders to and fro upon the earth,” seeking for victims, usually provides himself with three sets—one “high,” one “low,” and one “square.” The fraudulent dice are loaded with quicksilver, the interior of each dice being hollowed out in such a manner as to cause the weight to fall upon the opposite side to that intended to come up, the weighted side being, of course, always undermost.

The professional, in using these dice against a single adversary, usually works very rapidly, distracting the dupe’s attention, as far as possible, from his operations by story telling or some other interesting conversation. He changes the cubes swiftly and often, “ringing in” the “high” one for himself, and the “square” ones for his opponent; or the latter for himself and the “low” ones for his victim, occasionally, however, using the fair dice for both, in order to disarm suspicion.

There is scarcely a person who has visited a county fair, or patronized a circus, whose attention has not been attracted by the presence upon the grounds of an immense numbernumber of “fakirs,” as peripatetic tricksters are often called. Probably many excellent people have wondered how it happened that men of this class were allowed to introduce gambling devices upon grounds which were supposed to be used for purposes of rational entertainment, even if not of instruction. No gambling device can be operated upon any fair-ground without the consent of the directors of the Fair Association having been first had and obtained. The members of this august body are usually selected on account of their social prominence and their supposedly high moral character. It would be, therefore, charitable to suppose that they are not aware of the precise nature of the schemes the manipulation of which they tolerate.

A county fair, however, is essentially a money making scheme, and the license fees derived from this source constitute no unimportant feature of the managers’ revenue. Sometimes the “fakirs” gain permission to work their various schemes through the ignorance of the directors. More frequently they are well aware of their nature, and exact high fees in consequence of this very knowledge. To illustrate: I myself once made application for a license to operate a hap-hazard upon the grounds of one of these associations. The secretary was a bank cashier, and the moment that he saw my machine, exclaimed: “Why, I know all about that thing. You can stop that whenever want to. Pay me $50, and you can go on the grounds and ‘skin’ all you want to.” Naturally I paid the sum demanded, and I happened to know that some fifteen or twenty other contrivances of a like character were admitted to the same grounds upon the same terms. This is but one instance of many that I could cite, in which the director was equally well convinced that my contrivance was a “fake,” pure and simple.

Such a transaction is a high-handed outrage upon the community. The men who license schemes such as are described in this chapter are licensing scoundrels, in comparison with whom pickpockets are respectable, to prey upon their own towns-people, pocketing the money which they well know has been made by fraud.

Sometimes it is thought necessary to preserve at least the semblance of innocence on the part of the managers. When the application for a 285license of one of these machines is received by the directors, some one of the latter, whose conscience (?) will not permit him to sanction schemes of fraud asks if the device in question is to be operated as a “gift enterprise?” By this, he means, are there to be any blanks? If so, his high moral sense will not permit him to tolerate its introduction upon the grounds over which the Board has control. This objection is easily removed, by introducing into the scheme a number of articles of valueless jewelry, the presence of which among the prizes usually removes all conscientious scruples of the objector. Occasionally, when the moment for taking a vote arrives, “Squire Brown” is conveniently absent, and the majority of the board acts without him. Sometimes the gamblers are told that it will be necessary for them to submit to an arrest and pay a small fine in order that the scruples and prejudices of the public may be appeased. I have myself known this to happen more than once.

After the license has been granted and the various games are in operation, it is not an uncommon occurrence for the town marshal or sheriff to put in an appearance, and extort from $5.00 to $10.00 per day in consideration of there being no molestation offered. This payment is what the “fakirs” call “sugaring,” and I have never known one of these officials for whom the dose could be made too sweet. I have submitted to this extortion of blackmail (for it is nothing else) several times when I was convinced, to a moral certainty, that the directors were receiving a percentage of the money which I paid over to the officers.

Sometimes a different policy is adopted by the managers. The prosecuting attorney and sheriff find it necessary to leave town on urgent business, and are therefore totally unaware of what is going on. In such a case, a purse is usually made up for these officials by contributions from the proprietors of the various “fakes,” which is always understood by the gamblers to be intended for the sheriff and prosecutor. It may be that a portion of the money raised sticks to the fingers of the man to whom its payment is entrusted, but my own impression is that in a majority of cases the greater proportion of it, reaches the parties for whom it was intended.

It is the hope of the author that what is here said may serve to open the eyes of reflecting citizens to the grave character of the evil which is pointed out. Too much cannot be said in reprehension of such conduct on the part of men to whom the community entrusts interests of such a character. And if any member of any Board of Directors of any county fair will carefully read the pages which follow, he will, at least, find it forever impossible hereafter to plead ignorance, by way of extenuation of a vote to tolerate the introduction of any of these devices among his own acquaintances.

This is an exceedingly ingenious and very delicately constructed piece of mechanism. The accompanying cut affords a view of its appearance, but cannot be understood without some explanation. It consists of three parts. The outer rim, which is stationary, contains thirty-two metal grooves, or pockets, numbered, apparently without special arrangement, from one to thirty-two. Inside this rim, is a circular piece of wood, resembling a wheel, but without spokes, which is covered with cloth. Above this, and of about equal size with it, is a saucer-shaped piece of wood, in which are bored three holes. On the table on which the wheel is placed stands a wooden box, containing thirty-two compartments, numbered consecutively from one to thirty-two. In these compartments are placed sixteen money prizes, which the players believe they have a chance to win. Apparently, the chances are exactly even, the number of prizes and of blanks being equal.

When the game is played upon fair-grounds, and the directors of the fair insist that it shall be operated as a gift enterprise in which there shall be no blanks, articles of cheap jewelry are placed in the compartments, which under other circumstances are left blank.

The mode of playing is as follows: One wishing to win a prize pays fifty cents or $1.00 (in proportion to the size of the crowd) for the privilege of making the attempt. He then places a marble in the upper wheel or saucer, which is given a twirl, either by himself or the proprietor, the lower wheel being usually set in motion at the same time, but in an opposite direction. As the upper wheel revolves, the marble flies around and finally falls through one of the holes on to the lower wheel. The latter slopes gently from centre to circumference and the marble naturally rolls down to one of the compartments in the outer rim, where it stops. If it has fallen into a winning number, the player receives the prize placed in the compartment of the box or case, having the corresponding number. If, on the other hand, it has fallen into a blank number, he receives nothing.

To the uninitiated, this appears very fair. The “fake” element consists of the apparatus which is concealed beneath the table, the existence of which is not even suspected by the players. Running up through the middle of both wheels is a rod ornamented with a knob on the top. This 287knob actually operates a thumb-screw which sets in motion a system of sixteen wire levers, lettered “b, b, b,” on the diagram, which force up through the cloth covering a like number of fine needle points, “c, c, c.” One of these points (none of which are larger than the point of a fine cambric needle and cannot be detected by the eye) rises in front of each winning number, and when the marble is in danger of entering a lucky compartment it strikes against one of these points, its course being thus deflected into one of the adjacent pockets, resulting in the players inevitably drawing a blank.

Naturally, after a greenhorn has lost several times consecutively, he grows suspicious, and in order to induce him to venture still farther, it is necessary that some one should appear to win. Just here comes in the “capper,” whose assistance in all games of this description is indispensable. When he makes his appearance, he is at once recognized by the manipulator of the machine through giving a pre-arranged signal. As soon as he buys a chance, the proprietor relaxes the tension of the thumb-screw; the wire levers fall; the needle points sink below the surface of the table; and the marble is allowed to go where chance dictates. If the confederate fails to win the first time, he perseveres until he succeeds. The result is that the waning confidence of the crowd is restored, and the poor, deluded fools once more press eagerly forward to “try their luck,” in a game where “luck” is an utter impossibility.

This is a favorite game for playing “doubles or quits,” or, as gamblers sometimes say, “representing.” By this is meant doubling a stake once lost; thus, if a man loses $1.00, he risks $2.00 a second time; if he loses again, he stakes $4.00, then $8.00, $16.00, $32.00, and so on. The author has himself won $1,300 under this system of betting by means of this device from one man at a single county fair.

The services of the “capper” are of great value in inducing players to adopt this system of betting. When he makes his appearance, he ordinarily asks some bystander to twirl the wheel and drop the marble for him. When he has won, he usually buys another chance for the benefit of the “sucker” who has kindly performed this office for him. The victim is, of course, quite willing to play at some one else’s expense, and is not infrequently induced, after losing the $1.00 which was put up for him, to continue playing, with his own money, on the system of “doubles or quits,” as explained above.above.

This game is of recent date as compared with the needle wheel and squeeze spindle, of which it is, in effect, but a modification. I first saw it in the autumn of 1884, while I was traveling with “Mexican Cortenas’ Wild West Show.”

To operate the machine two men are necessary, in addition to a number of “cappers.” The apparatus consists of a circular piece of wood, usually some 2½ feet in diameter, at the outer rim of which are painted numbers from 1 to 60. Inside this is placed a round plate of heavy glass, on which is painted either an arrow or a small pointer. This inner plate revolves upon a central pivot. Prizes of money or jewelry are placed upon the numbers. Those who wish to win any of them buy tickets, on each of which is inscribed a number, the purchaser selecting his ticket at random, from a large number which are placed in a box. At the right of the ostensible proprietor sits his confederate, who poses as “book-keeper.” In order that no “sucker” may, by any chance, win a prize of any value, a lever, similar to that used in the squeeze spindle is sunk into the table and concealed by the cloth cover. The “book-keeper,” by pressing on the end of the wire rod, which is directly underneath his book, can apply friction to the pivot and cause the wheel to stop at any number which he may choose. It is hardly necessary to say that the box from which the purchaser takes his ticket contains none bearing the number which would call for a valuable prize. In order, however, to keep up the interest of the dupes and stimulate their spirit of gaming, the “book-keeper”“book-keeper” occasionally brings the glass to a stand still at a point where the arrow indicates a money prize. Instantly a “capper” steps forward from among the crowd, presents a ticket and claims the prize. The ticket is carelessly thrown on one side and the money handed over to the confederate, who takes his departure. The unsuspecting fools who are not in the secret pursue the play with fresh zest, each one fancying that he has some chance of winning a large stake “next time,” but unfortunately for the victim the moment for his winning never comes.

In case any of the players should become suspicious, and demand a sight of the tickets remaining in the box, in order to satisfy himself that the numbers corresponding to the money prizes are actually there, the proprietor cheerfully assents, readily producing the box, into which he has surreptitiously transferred the necessary cards from his pocket.

This is the name given to a gambling device which has been a favorite with the “fraternity” for many years, and which has never failed to prove a sure bait to trap the unwary and an unfailing source of rich income to its manipulators.

It is made with or without a “fake” attachment, its general appearance in either case being the same. The nature of the “fake” and its mode of operation will be explained below; the construction of the wheel will be first described.

It is a handsome apparatus, standing about seven feet high. The wheel itself is usually about four feet in diameter, and rests upon a tripod three feet in height. Inside the rim of the wheel is a twelve-pointed star, between each two points of which are inscribed either five or six numbers, the figures being painted on the rim and running from one to sixty or seventy-two, consecutively. The wheel and star revolve simultaneously around a common axis. At the top of the wheel is an arrow, pointing downward, which serves as an indicator.

Around the wheel is a wooden frame which is covered with cloths on which, when the seventy-two number wheel is used, are painted the numbers one to six, or on which are arranged paddles, each one of which is marked with either one or six numbers, the uses of which will be described later.

The wheel is used either as an adjunct to a scheme for the distribution of cheap prizes or as a means of making bets. The former plan is 290the one generally adopted at small fairs, when a “lay-out” of inexpensive queen’s or glass ware is spread upon the table, each article, or lot, bearing its own number. In this case, the manipulation of the wheel is sometimes conducted fairly, the legitimate odds in favor of the proprietor being sufficient to justify him in giving the dupes some sort of a chance.

Where the game is played for prizes, the common practice is to use the paddles above referred to, each inscribed with six numbers, the twelve paddles embracing the range from one to seventy-two. Each person wishing to take a chance pays for a paddle (usually twenty-five cents), and when all possible have been sold, the wheel is set in motion. When it comes to rest, the indicator at the top points to a number, and the holder of the paddle bearing the corresponding number has it at his option either to take the prize or $1.50 in money.

The most profitable form of the wheel, however, is that which is sometimes designated the “six number wheel,” so called because the spaces between the points of the star are each numbered from one to six. When this device is operated, the frame is sometimes covered with oil-cloths, each containing six squares, numbered from one to six. Sometimes six paddles, each bearing a separate number (running from one to six) are employed besides the cloths; and not infrequently a double set of paddles, similarly numbered.

In the latter case, the players place their stakes on some one or more numbers upon the cloth. The paddles are used when the crowd is too great to be accommodated at the cloths. When the wagers have all been placed, the wheel is set in motion. Breathlessly the players await the result. When it ceases to revolve, the indicator at the top points to some number. The player who has placed his stake upon that number has it returned to him, increased by four.

As a matter of fact, however, when the wheel comes to rest it is usually discovered that no heavy player has been fortunate enough to make just that bet. The reason is simple. The reader who will carefully examine the accompanying diagram will perceive the representation of a rod running through the upright support of the wheel and one of the legs of the tripod, thence turning to the right and terminating under a plank in the floor, directly below the operator’s foot. By simply pressing on this mechanicismmechanicism, the latter checks the motion of the wheel by application of friction at the pivot, and brings it to a standstill at any point which he may desire.

Not always, however, is the proprietor of the wheel the only sharper on the ground. Sometimes he discovers, when it is too late, that he has been playing a game of “diamond cut diamond.” His apparatus fails to work as he had expected, and when he has “gone broke,” as gamblers term financial ruin, he carefully examines his wheel, and learns that some 291more astute scoundrel than himself has plugged some point on the circumference with lead, bringing it to rest by the simple but sure operation of the law of gravitation.

Sometimes, instead of the numbers above referred to, there are used certain printed inscriptions, representing speculative articles dealt in on the floors of the stock and produce exchanges, such as pork, lard, wheat, corn, oats, rye, barley, seeds, and various kinds of corporation stocks. This form of the device is ordinarily known as the “Board of Trade Wheel,” and is sometimes found to be very popular in rural districts.

This device has been successfully employed in defrauding the unwary for nearly two score years, and is still to be found on every fair ground in the United States where the directors are men of sufficiently easy morality to permit unprincipled sharpers to fleece their townspeople for a consideration. I have myself won thousands through this very means.

It is usually made of wood, with a metal arrow, weighing about seven pounds, swinging on a pivot in the centre (I). About this pivot are arranged numbers—generally either from 1 to 16 or from 1 to 32, in the form of an ellipse. At three points, equidistant from each other, are depicted three horses and the numbers are arranged in alternate blocks, usually of red, white and black. Outside the ellipse are little metal pegs, one being placed opposite each number.

The mode of playing is simple in the extreme. As many persons can engage in the game as can stand around the table. Each player places the amount which he wishes to bet on the color or horse which he 292selects. The proprietor gives odds of ten to one on the horses and even bets are made on the colors. That is to say: if a player wagers a dollar on the red and wins, the proprietor pays him a dollar and returns his stake. If he bets a dollar on a horse and wins, he receives $10 in addition to his original wager.

The bets being all made, some one—it is immaterial who—sets the arrow in motion. When it ceases revolving, the slender point, to which is usually attached a small piece of leather, comes to rest between some two of the pegs, and the player whose money has been placed on the number indicated wins the amount of his stake.

As a matter of fact, however, it is impossible for any one to win without the proprietor’s consent. At the point four, as shown in the diagram, is placed a metal disc, resembling a button, which is attached to a stout wire rod, which in turn is sunk into the wooden top of the table and entirely concealed from view by the cloth covering of the latter. When this metal button is pressed, it operates the rod, the other end of which, by creating friction at the central pivot, gradually stops the movement of the arrow, and the operator is enabled to bring the latter to a standstill at whatever point in the ellipse he may see fit. It would seem that this contrivance gave the proprietor of the machine sufficient advantage over the unsuspecting players, but he is not content with this. To operate the wire it is necessary that he should put his hand upon the table. Sometimes a “sucker” objects to this movement, and demands that he remove his hand. In order to be prepared for such an emergency, another contrivance is attached, the location of which is indicated on the diagram by figure three. In its essential features, the latter contrivance closely resembles the one operated by the button, but it is worked by pressure from some part of the body, usually the hip.

To show how easily and successfully a machine of this sort may be used for purposes of swindling, I will relate an incident in my own experience which happened while I was at a county fair, at Olney, Ill., in the autumn of 1882. In connection with a partner, I was operating one of these spindles of the sort which I have described. At the fair was a young man from the country, who had disposed of a horse for $140. He had seen me working the machine, and was anxious to quit the dull monotony of country life and travel with me, as a gambler and a man of leisure. I had an interview with him at the hotel the same evening, and disposed of one-half interest in the business for $60, which he promptly paid in cash. Thereupon I instructed him in the operation of the machine, but concealed from him the existence of the wire which was operated by pressure from the hip. The following day we repaired to the fairgrounds, and I left him in charge of the apparatus. His bank roll consisted of $160, of which we had each advanced $80. The young man 293was not aware that I already had a partner in the business, the latter having been acting as “capper” and keeping himself in the background. When the country boy began to run the machine, my partner sauntered up to the table and began to play. I was on one side, at a safe distance, watching the entire game. My new partner undertook to work the wire which was to be operated by the hand; my former partner forestalled all his efforts by working the rod which was pressed by the body. The result was that the bank was speedily broken, my original partner walking off with the assets and leaving my new acquaintance in a condition of decided financial embarrassment. He still, however, owned a nominal one-half interest in the machine, which I soon learned was for sale, and that being known we directed our efforts to winning this back. Accordingly, I bought him out for $20. He next entered into an agreement with the man who had succeeded so admirably in beating him, and they agreed that if I would stand back from the table and permit them to twirl the spindle, they would risk their joint funds. Once more my former partner operated the wire with his hip, and the result was that in a short time we had again in our possession the $20 which I had paid to repurchase his half interest to me. When he went home, he was undoubtedly a sadder, though I doubt whether, to this day, he is a very much wiser man.

In the latest construction of these fraudulent spindles, the cheats have invoked the aid of science, and the result has been a machine which, for simplicity and perfection of operation, cannot be surpassed. It is known among sporting men as the “magnetic spindle,” because of the sinking of magnets into the table directly below the losing numbers. The cloth which covers them, while it conceals them from view, does not interfere with their operation. The needle, being of brass, necessarily comes to rest directly above some one of them, thus indicating a number which inevitably brings loss to the player. This contrivance is of comparatively recent invention and is highly prized by men of the class who use devices of this description.

Of course, with such a machine, it is impossible that the arrow should ever point to a winning number. This would seem to render the employment of confederates as fictitious winners of prizes an impossibility. To obviate the difficulty which thus presents itself, the proprietor simply changes the location of some prize in the “lay-out” from a winning to a losing number, to correspond with that which the “capper” has made.

Yet another form of the “squeeze spindle”—which made its appearance some years after the centennial of ’76, and which soon found favor among professional “brace” gamblers and confidence men, is known to the profession as the “three spindle” machine. It differs from the “squeeze spindle” already described, only in that it contains three arrows or “pointers,” instead of one, two of which are under control of the 294operator through the employment of friction at the pivot by means of precisely similar contrivances. There is a slightly better chance given players, for the reason that one of the revolving needles is allowed to come to rest by chance. It is not difficult, however, to perceive the very large preponderance of chances in favor of the sharper, who has it always in his power to determine who shall win the large wagers.

Gamblers who work a contrivance of this character always offer to pay the bettor three to one, on the contingency of all three arrows stopping on the same number. It would be comparatively safe for them to offer considerably heavier odds, inasmuch as such an event constitutes one of the remote possibilities of a century.

In the “three spindle” machines, the numbers are commonly arranged in blocks of from one to six, but the “horses” are sometimes represented. “Suckers” are more easily attracted by this arrangement, inasmuch as they suppose that they have four “chances” (?) to win, instead of one.

In connection with the explanation of the operation of the squeeze spindle it may not be out of place to relate a little narrative of what the author once personally witnessed upon the fair-grounds at a Missouri town. A sharper, who had “interviewed” the directors, “convinced” them that his machine was entirely honest, and “arranged” matters satisfactorily all around, felt serenely secure in the operation of his “privilege.” [And right here I again condemn the granting of such “privileges.” A “privilege” to do what? To prey upon the ignorant; to dupe the unwary; to victimize the unsuspecting; to debauch the young; and to scatter broadcast the seeds of corruption, whose fruit will be misery in every home.] But this is by the way, let us return to the narrative. The “privileged” gambler had set up his wheel, and to use a slang phrase, “was doing a land-office business.” A verdant countryman approached the machine. Over and over he tried his “luck,” which every time—as a matter of course—rested with the “privileged” monopolist. This went on for some time, and I, as a disinterested spectator, watched the game. The agriculturalist quit a loser to the extent of some $50. The blackleg’s face was impassable. The countryman thrust his hand into his pocket; when he withdrew it, it clasped a long-bladed knife, the blade reflecting the light. “Stranger,” said he, “I want my money back. I don’t know how you did it, but you’ve cheated me, and I’m going to get even. Give me back that money!” Only the unnatural pallor on the old man’s face indicated the extreme tension of his feelings. The swindler looked at him. At least seventy-five or a hundred persons were standing around; something had to be done, and promptly. “Why, old man,” said the proprietor, “there’s no use in your cutting up rough. Of course you can have your money. I was only joking.” And with these words he returned the dishonest winnings.

This game is at once one of the most seductive and the most deceptive in the outfit of the peripatetic gambler. In some minor respects it resembles the children’s game of the same name, inasmuch as both are played upon a board containing a number of pins and having numbered compartments at the lower end. At this point, however, the resemblance ceases.

The gambling device known by this name is shown in the accompanying illustrations, figures 1 and 2. Figure 1 represents the table and figure 2 the cloth which always hangs behind it, and forms an indispensable feature of the game. In explaining the diagrams, the construction of the table will be first described. It is made of wood usually about 3½ to 4 feet in length and 2 feet broad, and when in use the upper end rests upon a wooden framework, giving the board an inclination of some 30 degrees. Running lengthwise through the centre of the table is a wooden partition, dividing it into two equal parts. At the lower end of each division are ten compartments, open at the top, each set being numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0. At the upper end of each division is a gate, lettered on the diagram c.c. Between the gates and the numbered compartments are placed metal pins or pegs, arranged substantially as shown by the dots on the diagram. Directly below the lower row of pins and extending over the upper ends of the compartments is a board, which runs entirely across the table, but only one-half of which is shown in the illustration. Before describing the mode of play, an explanation of the cloth (as shown in fig. 2fig. 2) is necessary. This cloth is generally three feet in length by two in breadth, and is divided into 100 squares, arranged and divided as shown in the cut. The figures—$1.00, $5.00, etc.—in the 297squares indicate the prizes which may be won by the players. The abbreviation “bl’k.” stands for “blank,” and indicates the losing numbers, on which no prize is paid. The letters “rep.” are an abbreviation for “represent,” and show that the player who happens to make the number in that square must, if he does not wish to lose his stake, double it and play again.

Those who wish to play, pay the proprietor a certain sum for the privilege of dropping two marbles down the board, one rolling through each of the gates C.C. The little spheres (d.d.) roll down the inclined plane, their course being deflected from point to point, by the metal pins until they finally come to rest in the compartments at the lower end, one on each side of the centre board. The operator then looks to see the numbers into which they have fallen. If the left hand marble has rolled into “0,” the number of the right hand one only is taken. If the latter rolls into “0,” and the left hand one, into some compartment bearing a significant number, the entire amount is read as 10, 20, 30, 40, etc. If both numbers roll into the numbered compartments, both figures are read, as e. g. 56, 79, 84, etc.

The number made by the player having been thus learned, the cloth is inspected with a view to ascertaining the result of his play. If the number which he has made calls for a prize, the same is handed to him. If he has “drawn a blank,” he has to content himself with his loss. If his number corresponds to a square containing the abbreviation “rep.,” he may either lose the sum paid or double his stake and try again.

To show how utterly impossible it is for a chance player to win, it is only necessary to explain the very simple secret mechanism which enables the operator to send the marble into a losing compartment at his own will. If the reader will look at the diagram, I, he will see a slender line running from the right hand set of numbered compartments along the entire length of the board, on its right hand side, and terminating near the gate (c.), its course being indicated by the line (b.b.). This line represents a stiff wire lever, placed below the board and entirely under the control of the manipulator. By working this lever he can raise a row of ten triangular metal points, marked a,a,a, all of which are covered by the board at the lower end of the table, and which are so arranged that one shall stand in front of each alternate compartment. When the marble strikes one of these points, as a matter of course, it inevitably glances off into one of the adjacent divisions. The peculiar beauty of the contrivance, as viewed from a gambler’s standpoint, is the fact that the compartments in front of which the points are placed are inscribed with the winning numbers. The divisions into which the marbles are forced to roll invariably correspond to those numbers on the cloth which contain those words (so ominous to the greenhorn) “blank” or “represent.”

298In this, as in all similar games, the assistance of “cappers” is indispensable. The dupes who stake their money in good faith are never permitted to win, but unless somebody occasionally draws a prize, interest is certain to be supplanted by a sense of discouragement. It follows that confederates must be at hand. One of these will approach the table and after being recognized by the operator will buy a chance. At once the metal points are so placed that he has an even chance of winning and he perseveres until he draws a handsome prize. Ordinarily, however, the “capper” resorts to stratagem. Approaching a countryman, he offers to “divide risks” with him; i. e., to advance half the money and share equally in the gains or losses. As long as the “capper” and the “sucker” play together, they invariably lose. Should the dupe become disgusted with his “run of hard luck,” the “capper” continues to play alone. The operator works the lever and his confederate soon wins a prize; the greenhorn (who always stands near, to await the issue) at once feels encouraged, and it usually requires little persuasion on the “capper’s” part to induce him to make another venture.

This device is most commonly used by the “small fry” gamblers, and I have never known any large sum to be either won or lost through its manipulation. It is a “fake,” pure and simple, and the apparatus for cheating is so simple in construction that it could be easily detected should a victim ask for the privilege of examining it. Should such an inconvenient request be made, however, the manipulator can readily pick up the whole apparatus and deposit it in his overcoat pocket.

It is some 6 or 8 inches in diameter, and is made of wood. In its general principle it closely resembles the “needle wheel,” although far less ingenious and by no means so complicated. It consists of a disc of wood, on the rim of which are painted numbers 1 to 32, in consecutive order. Between each two numbers is placed a thin brass plate, about a quarter of an inch in height. Every alternate piece runs a little farther in toward the centre than does the one next to it. The disc slopes a little outward from the centre all around toward the circumference. Above the disc is placed a somewhat smaller saucer-shaped piece of wood, similar to that used in the “needle wheel,” and likewise perforated with three holes near the centre. This upper saucer-like plate revolves. In it is placed a marble, and the saucer is set in motion. The marble falls through one of the holes, and rolls down the incline into one of the little numbered compartments which, as I have said, are separated by thin brass plates.

A small case containing articles of cheap jewelry stands near the wheel, each one bearing a number. The player pays a stipulated sum—usually twenty five cents—for the privilege of twirling the saucer containing the marble and taking his chances of winning a prize. If the marble falls into a compartment numbered to correspond with the number attached to any one of the prizes exposed in the case, the article so numbered is given to him. If, unfortunately, he draws a blank, he receives nothing.

The “fake” element in the device consists in the prolongation of each alternative brass division between the numbers on the wheel. Of course, the saucer is always set in motion in the same direction, usually from left to right. The marble necessarily rolls in the same direction, and when it strikes one of the protruding brass plates it inevitably rolls into the compartment just next to the prolonged division. In numbering the prizes the proprietor is careful so to arrange the blanks that the latter may always correspond with the numbers of the compartments into which the marble is sure to roll. The saucer plate into which the marble is first placed, sets 300down so close upon the lower disc, that the ends of the dividing plates cannot be seen by the players, who naturally suppose that they are all of equal length.

As I have said, this apparatus is not well adapted to winning large sums, yet where a fair is being held, as much as $50 or $60 may be won in one day. This, however, is considered a comparatively poor return for the risk, expense and trouble which the operator incurs.

Like the other swindling devices which have been described, the mechanism of this contrivance is easily operated, and, when explained, readily comprehended. It is, however, what is called, in the slang of the street, a “sure winner”“sure winner” for the manipulator. Thousands of dollars have been won through its operation in a single day, without the possibility of the dupes discovering how they have been defrauded.

In order to work it successfully, it is indispensable that the top of the machine be raised high enough above the heads of the surrounding crowd to prevent the bystanders from seeing the interior, inasmuch as such a view would disclose the apparatus by means of which they are robbed of their money. With this end in view, the gambler always operates it from a buggy, the upper part of the machine standing about three feet above the floor of the conveyance.

As will be seen in the cut, the device consists of a hoop-wheel (D B), a supporting rod and a box platform, 301supporting the rod and wheel. The apparatus maybe taken apart and neatly packed in this box. On the box is placed a valise containing money. The wheel, or “belt,” is made of brass, and is about sixteen inches in diameter and four inches broad. It contains thirty-two compartments or pockets, each one containing a card, which is held in position by a small fold of metal on each of three sides. These cards may be perfectly blank, though usually they contain pictures of famous beauties, or other celebrities. The valise, which is shown in the illustration at the foot of the upright rod, contains money. Inside the metal hoop is a leather belt, on which, at equal distances, are painted numbers representing sums of money, so arranged that one will fall behind each alternate compartment. When the cards are raised, the belt is seen through a rectangular opening at the back.

The driver of the buggy carries a number of whips. As soon as a crowd has gathered around him (which is certain to happen in a very few moments), he informs the spectators that any one or more may, for $1.00, purchase a chance to win a money prize, varying in amount from $1.00 to $20.00. Some one having expressed an inclination to buy, the proprietor takes his money and hands him a whip, with which to point to any one of the thirty-two sections of the “hoop” which he may select. The purchaser having rested the whip on a compartment, the operator removes the card which he has touched. Underneath is shown either a blank space on the “belt” or one inscribed with a certain sum. If it happen to be the latter, the buyer is given the amount indicated; if the former, he receives nothing.

Of course, as in all similar gambling machines, it is optional with the manipulator whether the player win or lose. In the apparatus in question, the “fake” is worked as follows: The inside of the “belt” contains very small numbers, corresponding precisely in location to those seen when the cards are raised. The operator, standing in the buggy, is, of course, able to see these inner numbers. As soon as a “sucker” has touched a card, the proprietor knows whatwhat number, if any, lies beneath it. If below it there is a blank space, he at once raises the card and shows the dupe that he has lost. If, on the other hand, he perceives that the victim has won a prize, he stoops down toward the valise, ostensibly to take out money, but really to touch a secret knob or button, (lettered F in the cut) which works a wire (c) concealed beneath the cover of the box and running up through the hollow rod until it terminates in a hook (A B), which, by pressure, may be attached to the inner leather belt. By operating this wire, he is able to shift the position of the latter and thus so transfer the positions of the numbers thereon painted that a blank may be substituted for a prize at his own will. Thus, when a player has in fact won a prize, the gambler, through a dextrous manipulation 302of the inner belt, by means of his secret apparatus, shifts a blank to the aperture, removes the card which the player has touched, and, presto! shows him that he has lost.

Before commencing operations, the proprietor usually removes the inner belt, which he exhibits to the crowd, in order to show them that there is nothing concealed. The curved hook (A B), of course remains, hidden from view behind the metal hoop.

Many and ingenious are the devices of the operator to induce greenhorns to purchase chances. A favorite method is to offer to buy the player’s chance as soon as he touches a card with his whip, offering him $2.00 or $3.00 therefor. If he accepts, the manipulator, by moving the inner belt before he withdraws the card, can show him a large prize painted thereon and thus easily convince him that had he declined the offer he might have won five, ten, or even twenty dollars.

Of course, the aid of “cappers” is a sine qua non, since, if no one wins, the crowd will soon grow suspicious. When a confederate buys a chance and touches a card with the whip, the manipulator looks at the inside of the belt to ascertain whether he has won a prize. If he has, the sum called for is given him; if not, the “belt” is shifted by means of the hook until a prize is brought behind the aperture, when the card is raised and the crowd is speedily informed of his “good luck.”

As many persons can buy chances at one time at this game as the proprietor has whips, usually six or seven players taking one each. No two players, however, are allowed to touch adjacent sections, inasmuch as in such a case one of them would inevitably win. When several purchase chances at one time, the operator raises but one card at a time, and thus finds abundant leisure in which to move the belt to meet the exigencies of each case as it presents itself.

It may be easily seen that this device is better adapted for use upon fair grounds, or other open places, than in the public streets. Its successful operation depends upon the proprietor’s being so far above the heads of the crowd that his manipulation of the inner belt cannot be seen. When the fraud is practiced in a crowded thoroughfare, great care must be taken by the sharper that his movements are not watched by prying eyes from some over-looking window. Another danger which threatens detection is the disposition of the crowd to climb upon the buggy. This, however, may be overcome by the use of a slight degree of force, and by refusing to proceed until such inquisitive interlopers have resumed their places on the ground. But the man whom the proprietor most dreads is the individual on horse-back, who forces his way up to the buggy, and from his point of vantage obtains a full view of the modus operandi. I once saw an amusing incident of this description at a fair in a small Missouri town. The rider would insist upon taking a position near the 303buggy in which the apparatus stood, and it was evident that he was giving telegraphic signals to a friend in the crowd. The operator rose equal to the occasion. Persuasion was idle; force impossible. He took the only course open to him and bribed the horseman to ride away, paying him handsomely for the concession.

Notwithstanding all these draw-backs, the contrivance is a prime favorite with itinerant gamblers, in consequence of the ease with which it is manipulated and the general confidence with which it is regarded until the idea that it is a “fake” dawns upon the mind of the crowd.

The name of the device is supposed to have been the same as that of its inventor. A well-known confidence operator by the name of O’Leary flourished some years ago, who was recognized among his companions as an expert manipulator of this apparatus, and it is generally believed among the guild of peripatetic gamesters that the idea of its construction was conceived in his fertile brain, through the direct inspiration of the antipodes of Providence.

The accompanying illustration gives an excellent idea of the general appearance of this device, which is one of the most successfully contrived schemes for swindling which has ever fallen under my observation. It is known indiscriminately as “hap-hazard” or “bee-hive.” The former name was probably given because of its being, to all appearance, exclusively a game of chance; it has been called “bee hive” because of its shape, but it is safe to say that the “suckers” get none of the honey.

It consists of two cones, an inner and outer, lettered “B” and “D” on the diagram, placed upon a heavy, circular piece of wood, around the rim of which are thirty-two compartments, numbered from one to thirty-two, and separated by thin metal plates. Driven into the surface of the inner cone are small nails or metal pegs, the arrangement of which is a matter of comparative indifference, although they are usually rather close together and approximately equi-distant. The outer cone serves as a cap or case. Formerly this was made of tin, but of late years glass has been substituted, with the exception of the lower inch, which is still made of metal, silver-plated, for reasons which will be presently explained.

Fair and circus grounds are the localities usually selected for working this scheme, the operation of which is very simple. A case containing numbered prizes forms part of the paraphernalia of the proprietor, and always occupies a conspicuous place near the machine.

The manner of using the apparatus for gambling purposes is as follows: Any one wishing to “try his luck” (?) pays a fixed sum (usually 50 cents to $1.00, according to the size of the crowd) for the 304privilege. The outer cap (D) having been placed over the cone (B), a marble is dropped through an opening (C) in the top of the former. Striking upon the surface of the inner cone, it pursues a “hap-hazard” course, striking against the nails, or pegs, as it falls to the bottom. Should it roll into a compartment numbered to correspond with one of the prizes in the case the fortunate player is given the particular prize called for.

The “fake” element may be very easily explained. If the reader will look at the accompanying diagram, he will perceive at the base of the inner cone (B), three small dots, lettered A, A, A. These dots represent pegs driven at precisely equal distances from each other, a row of which runs all around the base of the inner cone. The arrangement of these pegs is such that each of them may be made to stand exactly above the alternate compartment in the lower plate. When the cap is placed over the apparatus, by an ingenious device at the bottom, the manipulator is able, by slightly turning the outer cone, to arrange this lower row of pegs so that each of them may stand directly over a winning number. The result of this arrangement is that when the marble, in its descent, strikes against one of these lower pegs its course is necessarily deflected into one of the compartments on either side, the division into which it inevitably falls always being a blank.

305An unsophisticated player can, consequently, never win except through the consent of the operator. In order to encourage the crowd in playing, “cappers” have to be employed, who are always on hand to draw prizes. As soon as one of these individuals makes his appearance and is recognized by the proprietor, the latter gives a slight turn to the outer case, in such a way as to bring the lower row of pegs directly above the blanks. The consequence is that when the “capper” drops the marble through the aperture above referred to, it must necessarily fall into a compartment numbered to correspond with a prize.

The devices of the “capper” are sometimes very ingenious. In order to disarm suspicion he will occasionally approach a verdant looking countryman with the statement that he sees that the game is perfectly fair and would like to take a chance, but is restrained by the presence of his wife and son. He therefore asks the countryman to take his money, buy him a chance and drop the marble for him. The old farmer is naturally pleased with the suggestion, inasmuch as it gives him all the excitement of gaming without any of the risk. He very readily complies with the “capper’s” request, and the latter standing behind him gives a prearranged signal to the operator that the player is acting for him. The countryman draws the prize, which he honestly turns over to the “capper.” The latter, thereupon, usually gives the farmer a dollar with which to make a venture on his own account. As a matter of course he loses, and it is usually not very difficult to induce him to make another trial, on the principle of “double or quits,” or “representing,” as has been before explained in the remarks under the “needle wheel.”

Some idea of gambler’s profits from this machine may be formed when I say that the man operating such a device, who fails to take away from a fair ground at least $500 a week in clear profits, considers that he is doing a small business, and I have myself nearly doubled that sum within that time.

It sometimes happens, however, that the verdant looking countryman, after receiving the dollar from the “capper” and winning a prize for the latter, forthwith “makes tracks” for parts unknown, leaving the proprietor and his astute confederate to mourn the loss of their money and to bewail their own misplaced confidence in human nature.

This is a device by no means common, there being very few of the “fraternity” who can operate it successfully. Yet there are two sharpers in the country, who have won fortunes through its manipulation, either of whom would promptly resent any imputation upon his character as an 306insult. In the accompanying diagram, Figure “1” shows the exterior of the box, which is of wood, about ten inches long, four and one-half inches broad and two and one-half inches deep. Inside this box “B,” are placed thirty ivory balls or marbles, each of which are numbered. Near the operator stands a table on which is a show case containing twelve prizes, part of which are articles of jewelry and the remainder sums of money. The players, of whom there may be seven or eight, pay from fifty cents to a dollar each for the chance of winning a prize. When a sufficient number of chances have been sold the operator shakes the box, causing the balls to roll from one end to the other. Letter “A” on figure 1, represents a slide at one end of the box. This slide is raised by the manipulator and allows one ball to escape at a time. The number of the marble is examined, and if it be found to correspond with that attached to a prize in the show-case, the fortunate player is given the article or money which he has won. The diagram of the case is shown in figure 3.

The fraud consists of two elements, one relating to the marbles, and the other to the box. In the first place, the ivory spheres are not all of equal size, the twelve whose numbers correspond to the valuable prizes being the merest trifle larger than the eighteen which call for articles of no value. So slight, however, is the variation in size that it is absolutely impossible to detect it by the eye. The “fake” in the box is in the slide, “A,” and is shown in figure 1, which gives an enlarged view of this part of the apparatus. In this figure the line “B” represents a shoulder, whose height above the bottom of the slide (which is shaved almost as 307thin as paper,) is so delicately adjusted that it stops the larger balls, and allows the smaller ones to strike against the thin wood. The sensitive finger of the manipulator readily discerns the striking of a ball against this part of the slide. If he feels it he knows that he must raise the slide and allow one of the smaller marbles to escape, inasmuch as the latter calls for no article of value.

The “cappers” are useful in this as in all similar games. They serve to stimulate the interest of the players and revive their confidence when it begins to fail. Of course, when a “capper” is playing, the operator shakes the box until he knows from the absence of pressure upon the thin edge of the slide that one of the larger marbles will escape by raising the same. He takes out the ball, and hands his confederate the valuable prize for which the number calls.

This is a favorite game for playing “doubles or quits,” or “represent.” In fact, sometimes more money is made in this way than by the regular sale of chances.

I was using this device on one occasion in company with a partner. The game is a difficult one to work, and I was not an expert. The result was that the wrong ball escaped, and a sucker won a twenty dollar prize. I was much chagrined, and endeavored to shift the responsibility of the loss upon my partner, by telling him that he had signaled that the player was a “capper.” My partner followed the stranger and requested him to divide; on the ground that he had been the means of his winning. The countryman, however, smilingly retained the money, leaving my confederate to mourn.

The miniature race track is a game which resembles the “needle wheel” and other similar contrivances which have been already described. It consists of a wooden disc, about four feet in diameter, the outer rim of which is stationary, and within which revolves an inner wheel of the same material. The outer periphery of the disc contains a representation of the “judges’ stand” on a race track, from the center of which extends a line running toward the middle of the circle. On the inner revolving wheel are painted representations of, say, half dozen horses, each picture being accompanied by the name of some famous racer.

Players make their bets as follows: A set of paddles equal in number to that of the horses depicted on the inner wheel, and containing corresponding descriptions, are sold the bettors at a stipulated price each—usually from twenty-five cents to five or even ten dollars. The paddles having been sold, the inner wheel is set in motion, and when it comes to rest the player who has placed his wager upon the horse which is nearest 308the inner side of the line extending from the “judges’ stand” wins the pool, the percentage which the proprietor claims upon the operation of the apparatus having been first deducted.

It is easily seen that the owner of the machine incurs no risk, inasmuch as he always receives a percentage of the stakes, no matter which one of the bettors may prove to be the winner. This should be enough to satisfy the money-making instinct of any ordinary man, but the parties who run an apparatus of this kind are not ordinary men. They seek for still further advantage, and they obtain it through the manipulation of a concealed lever, which brings friction to bear at the centre pivot, in the same manner as has been already described in a number of similar contrivances. The result is, that if possible the proprietor allows no one to win. If, however, bets have been placed upon each of the half dozen horses, the manipulator has it in his power always to bring the inner wheel to a stand-still when the horse upon which the lowest bet has been placed is nearest the magic line.

The advantages arising from the employment of a “capper” in a scheme of this sort are too apparent to call for special elucidation. A confederate may bet upon a certain horse, and the proprietor always has it within his power to allow his accomplice to win.

This is a very simple contrivance, and used by small “fakirs,” who are content with very paltry winnings. It is an apparatus by which to measure the force of a blow. A dial, in the center of which is placed an arrow-shaped pointer, registers the number of pounds representing the strength of the striker’s arm. The “fakir” usually allows two blows to be struck for the small sum of five cents. At the back of the dial is a concealed spring, by means of which, through applying friction at the pivot on which the pointer revolves, the operator is able so to check the movement of the latter that it is impossible for the striker to record upon the dial any large number of pounds.

It is a common practice, too, for a “capper” to be standing around, who offers to strike, in connection with the stranger, to see who shall pay the five cents for the two blows. When his confederate strikes the machine the proprietor, by diminishing the friction at the pivot, suffers the pointer to make almost a complete revolution. When the “sucker” takes his turn, the friction is increased, and of course he is compelled to pay the stipulated nickel.

This contrivance is of so insignificant a character as hardly to merit description. It is worthy of mention only as showing the natural bent of the mind of men of this character, and of illustrating the contemptible schemes to which they will resort.

This is another confidence game, the success of which appeals not only to the avarice but also to the dishonest impulses of the dupe. The latter is induced to believe that he can gain a decided advantage over a sharper through the carelessness of the confidence man and the superior astuteness which he flatters himself that he possesses. Its operation calls for three small paper boxes, each of which has a false bottom, from which circumstance the trick has been given the name which appears at the head of this paragraph.

The man who intends to victimize any “sucker” whom he may be able to find, first exposes a bill of some large denomination, which he places in one of the boxes. He raises one of the covers and places the greenback inside, shutting down the top in such a way that a corner of the bill is left exposed apparently by accident. He then changes the relative position of the boxes and asks which one of the three contains the bank note, the guess to be made simply “for fun.” Of course, the greenhorn, who has seen the corner of the bill protruding from beneath the cover has no difficulty in locating its position. This may be done, perhaps, more than once. The next step on the part of the sharper is to produce a time piece, (e. g. a watch), which he assures his dupe is one of rare value, but which he is willing to dispose of at a comparatively nominal price, say, $50. He then takes a bill of a large amount—possibly $100—from his pocket and places it inside one of the boxes. He next shuffles the boxes about, apparently with the intention of confusing the dupe as to the precise position of the one containing the bill. The latter, however, feels fully satisfied that he can locate the box in question, for the reason that he feels sure that he sees the corner of the note protruding from beneath the cover.

The sharper then tells the “sucker” that he will sell him the “chronometer” for the agreed price, which, he says, is ridiculously low, and will also give him a gratuitousgratuitous chance to guess which box contains the bill. The dupe thinking that he knows precisely the box in question, pays no attention whatever to the watch, his attention being centered on the money. He assents to the proposal and a transaction which, on its face appears to be a legitimate sale is concluded. The money is paid and the utterly worthless watch is handed over. Then the eager dupe guesses which of the three boxes contains the bill. The cover is removed and nothing is seen. The reason is that just outside the false covers the confidence man has pasted the corner of a fictitious greenback, the appearance of which misleads the dupe, while the actual treasury note is safely in the sharper’s pocket, or in one of the other two boxes.

This is a simple little contrivance, usually operated by small “fakirs,” yet I have known from sixty to seventy dollars a day to be made therefrom on circus and fair-grounds. Its construction may be readily understood on an examination of the diagram. The lower line represents the support on which rests a frame, composed of two uprights, and connected at the top by a cross-piece. From the centre of the latter hangs a string, at the end of which is a wooden ball, lettered “C.” In the centre of the lower support there is placed a triangular pin, lettered “D” on the diagram.

Those who wish to try their luck pay twenty-five cents for the privilege of swinging the ball. The player stands in front of the frame and throws the ball from him. If, as it swings back it overturns the peg, he receives back his twenty-five cents, together with a dollar. If, unfortunately, he overturns the peg as the ball moves from him, he loses.

In order to guard against the happening of the former catastrophe, the ball is usually slightly deflected toward either the right or left as it leaves the hands of the player. If the uprights remain perfectly perpendicular, the chances are that the ball, on its return, will strike the peg through the operation of the law of gravitation. Just here is where the operator does a little “fine work.” The uprights are always made a little loose, so that by a very slight pressure from the shoulder on the part of the manipulator, at the point “A,” they may be bent from a perpendicular position to that indicated by the dotted line B. The inevitable result is that when the ball swings back, the force of gravity draws it on one side of the peg, and the unfortunate speculator sees that he has lost the money which he paid for the privilege of throwing it.

This game, at first blush, appears to be so perfectly “square,” that the assistance of the “capper” is rarely needed, although sometimes they may be employed to advantage.

Of all the devices which the fertile brain of the confidence operator has originated, it may be questioned whether any is more ingenious in conception or has reaped a richer harvest for the scoundrels who have operated it than has the “gold brick swindle.” Notwithstanding the fact that the secular press throughout the country has, for years past, repeatedly directed public attention to the general nature of this method of fraud, yet even in the present year of grace the newspapers are month after month called upon to chronicle new exploits of the same character, and to record the names of fresh victims.

These journals, however, have never thoroughly ventilated the scheme in all its details, and in their description of the tactics employed by the operators they not infrequently draw largely upon their imagination, substituting fiction for fact. The victim himself is often restrained, by a sense of shame, from unfolding the full depth of his credulity, not more than fifteen per cent. of the dupes ever making their losses public. The author believes that the present exposure is the first authentic recital of the methods of this class of sharpers ever given to the public from a reliable standpoint.

To perpetrate the fraud successfully, the co-operation of at least three confederates is essential, of whom two must be gifted with some dramatic power. Some little cash is also required, it being necessary to procure a sample of filings of refined gold, one or two nuggets, and a “brick,” or bar, of some thirty pounds in weight, composed of brass and copper, costing about twenty-five cents per pound.

312The first objective point is the selection of a victim. He must be a man whose resources are of such a sort as to enable him to produce, at short notice, a considerable amount in ready cash. It is not considered wise to deal with a man who may find it necessary to ask for accommodation at his bank, inasmuch as such action on his part might result in the institution and prosecution of numberless inconvenient inquiries by the bank officials. Incredible as it may appear, it is the literal truth that in choosing a “mark,” the confidence operators frequently have recourse to a reputable business man in the community, who furnishes the swindlers with what is known, in slang phrase, as a “pointer” concerning the resources and personal characteristics of the prominent men in the neighborhood. In such a case, the party furnishing the information is always fully informed as to the purpose for which it is desired, and is promised a stipulated percentage of the dishonest gains, should the fraud be successfully consummated. The inherent villanyvillany of such a transaction is well calculated to make the reader recoil in disgust, if not in horror. The author, however, has been told by men who have successfully perpetrated the fraud, that men of unblemished reputation, occupying high positions in social, professional, or commercial circles, some of them even filling posts of responsible trust in public life, have been personally paid in the presence of his informants, the notes which constituted their agreed proportion of the money obtained from the wretched dupe whom they had assisted in defrauding.

The victim having been thus carefully selected and located, the next step is to excite his cupidity. The ordinary modus operandi is substantially as describeddescribed below.

One of the confederates, attired as a miner from Mexico or the far West, calls upon the party chosen at the latter’s residence. Every detail of his appearance is attended to with the utmost care, from the seemingly sun-browned face, the apparent result of years of honest toil in the open air, to the well-worn, patched trousers carelessly tucked in the large, coarse, dusty boots. A battered cowboy’s sombrero is negligently perched upon the head, and around his waist is drawn a buckskin money belt. Having gained the presence of his prospective dupe, the pretended miner from the rude camps of “the Rockies” presents a paper on which is written, in sprawling characters, the victim’s name. For the purpose of illustration any name will answer; let us suppose that it is Thomas Jones. After he has handed this paper to the individual in question, the confidence man (who feigns illiteracy and pretends to be entirely destitute of worldly wisdom) simulates acute disappointment at discovering that he is not the Tom Jones for whom he had been looking. He draws out an old red cotton handkerchief and wipes his eyes, as he sinks, apparently 313exhausted, into a chair. Naturally the sight of so quaint-looking an individual awakens the interest of Mr. Jones, and his simulated fatigue and grief arouse his curiosity, if not his sympathy, and he asks the cause of his distress. “No, no,” the sharper answers, “You’se not the Tom Jones I knows; and we’s come so far, and the Indian’s so sick he can’t tote the gold no furder. And Tom Jones he was to give us the paper money.” And here the pretended miner permits his feelings wholly to get the mastery of him, and he bows his head in deepest sorrow. Mr. Jones would be either more or less than human if, after this, he did not seek for further information. “What Indian? What gold? What paper money?” are among the questions which rise to his lips. The confidence man hesitates for a moment, and if there are any other persons in the room requests that the latter withdraw. Then he says to Mr. Jones, with the air of one imparting a great secret: “You looks honest, and I’ll tell you. We’se got a heap o’ gold, me and the Indian; and we’s looking for Tom Jones, cause he’s got lots o’ paper money, piles o’ paper money, locked up in an iron box. And now I can’t find him. I could make him and all his chillen rich.” “Where did you get the gold?” asks the now deeply interested Mr. Jones. “We’se tooken it out o’ the mine, way down in Mexico.” “Where is it?” pursues Jones. “The Indian, he’s got it,” replies the miner. “And where is the Indian?” “Oh,” answers the sharper, “he’s down to the big camp, back over there (pointing), with the house built over the water (a bridge). He’s sick, and couldn’t come no furder.”

It usually occurs to Mr. Jones at this stage of the conversation that he has been strangely unmindful of the duties of hospitality, and he directs that some refreshment be prepared and set before his guest. While this is being done, the host, who has by this time become very urbane, tells the stranger that he (Jones) is a wealthy man; that he owns lands and stock and property of various descriptions, and that he has “paper money, lots of it;” that it is therefore unnecessary for the miner to seek for the other Mr. Jones, as he can do business with him. To this proposal, however, the unsophisticated miner refuses to assent. He wants to see “his” Mr. Jones, and he expresses his intention of going on to the next town, where he professes to believe that he can find tidings of the whereabouts of that mysterious individual. Before he takes his departure he promises, in compliance with the oft-repeated request of his host, that in case he fails to find the man of whom he is in quest he will return.

It is a very common practice, in working this scheme, for the swindler, shortly before leaving his victim, to take from his belt a small nugget, which he hands to the intended dupe, with the request that he take it to the nearest “medicine shop” (drug store), and after he has had some “smoke water” (acid) poured on it to carry it to the watchmaker’s (jeweler’s) 314and sell it for what it is worth, bringing back the proceeds. This shrewd move of the confidence man serves a double purpose: it convinces the victim that he actually has gold, and at the same time leads him to suppose that he is dealing with a man wholly inexperienced in the ways of the world.

After a day or two the swindler returns, attired as before. He has failed to find the Thomas Jones whom he was seeking, but has learned where he is. Will the Mr. Jones whose acquaintance he has so recently formed kindly write a letter to his old friend at his dictation? Of course Mr. Jones assents, and the epistle is indited to the mythical personage, something after the following manner:

“Dear Friend, Mr. Tom Jones:—Me and the Indian has come on with the first lot of gold.”

Here the pretended miner pauses, and asks his amanuensis if he will keep his secret. Jones, who is anxious to hear what is to follow, readily promises. The sharper, however, insists upon his taking an oath of secrecy, which is duly administered, the affiant sometimes, in his eagerness, raising both hands. This ceremony having been performed, the writing of the letter is resumed, its tenor running something after this fashion:

“We’s got all the rest hid away, and there’s ten millions worth of it. Now you come right off with the paper money, ’cause the Indian he’s sick, and me and him wants to go back to Mexico. Come right now. We’s got enough to make us all rich.”

The thought of $10,000,000 in the hands of an ignorant old miner and an untutored child of the forest excites the cupidity of Mr. Jones to a high degree. He chafes under the reflection that his chance of securing a considerable proportion of this vast sum is drifting away from him. He believes that his superior knowledge of the world and his familiarity with business customs and forms would render it a comparatively easy matter for him to make himself the owner of the lion’s share of an immense fortune, and he mentally curses the other Jones, from the bottom of his heart.

The letter having been completed, the miner is asked to give the address. He promptly answers, “Mississippi.” “Mississippi,” repeats Mr. Jones. “Why, man“Why, man, Mississippi is a big State, like this. Your letter will never reach him directed to Mississippi. What city?”city?” The sharper does not know any other address, and begins again to bemoan his hard lot at having come so far to no purpose, and “the Indian so sick.”

The “sucker” believes that this is his opportunity. He again assures his new friend that he himself will buy the gold from him, and after much persuasion prevails upon the confidence man to reveal the 315whereabouts of the “Indian” who has in his custody so much of the precious metal.

The result of this interchange of confidence is that the swindler and the “sucker” start together for the town where the “Indian” is supposed to be. Usually some point at a distance of perhaps 100 or 200 miles is chosen in which to locate this mysterious personage. Sometimes the confidence man buys the railroad tickets, sometimes the dupe; at all events, the fares are paid and the pair start for their point of destination.

On arriving at the place named, the two confederates (who have usually been apprised of the hour of their arrival) are there at the railway station, and carefully note the signal given by the “miner.” If the latter raises his hat, they know that everything is proceeding satisfactorily. If he shakes the lapel of his coat, they understand that “the jig is up,” and that they had better “take quick steps and long ones.” Sometimes the information is conveyed by means of an umbrella or stick. If the same is carried across the shoulder, “all is well”; if as a walking cane, there is “danger ahead.”

It is needless to say, that of these two confederates one is the mysterious “Indian.” The other is what is technically known as a “trailer,” whose duty it is to follow the “sucker” wherever he goes, keeping him continually in sight and noting his every movement.

Immediately upon receiving the pre-arranged signal at the station, the first confidence man and his victim now repair to the spot in the woods whither the “Indian” has gone. On reaching the locality the bar is exhumed from the hiding place in which it had been previously buried. The “redskin,” whose “make-up” has been as carefully arranged as that of the “miner,” corroborates the statement that the gold is there, and Mr. Jones is given a glimpse of the glittering but spurious metal.

If the latter should go to a drug store and purchase a bottle of acid, with which the supposed gold may be tested, the services of the third confidence man are called into requisition, but he himself is kept carefully in the background. When the dupe procures the necessary acid, the “trailer” buys a precise duplicate of the bottle. The contents of this latter bottle, however, are poured out and replaced by water.

When the victim returns to the spot on which he has left the “Indian” and the supposed “miner,” the latter has already received from his confederate the bottle of water, identical in size, appearance and label with that which the dupe has in his pocket. “Mr. Jones” is informed that the “Indian” has no objection to the pouring of “smoke water” (acid) upon the “brick,” but that he is fearful of being put to sleep through the administration of “sleepy water” (chloroform). This ingenious story satisfactorily accounts for the request which the sharper 316makes that “Mr. Jones” shall hand the bottle to him, in order that the “Indian” may receive the acid from the hands of his friend.friend. This suggestion appears reasonable, and the eager dupe promptly turns over his bottle to the “miner,” who easily substitutes therefor his own previously prepared bottle of water, which is poured upon the composition, and of course without effect. The dupe now feels tolerably certain that the bar shown him is of genuine gold. In order to satisfy him completely, however, the confidence man produces an augur and brace, which he hands to the dupe with a request that the latter bore into the “brick” and carry off the filings in order to have them assayed. As soon as a sufficient quantity of filings has been obtained, the sharper places them in a piece of paper torn off from that which the “brick” has been wrapped, and ostensibly hands them to Jones. As a matter of fact, the latter does not receive the borings which he believes that he does, the swindler dexterously substituting at the critical moment, a package similar in appearance, but containing filings of refined gold with which the scoundrelsscoundrels have taken the precaution to provide themselves.

The assay naturally shows gold of from 18 to 20 karat fineness, and Mr. Jones is now quite ready to make the purchase. He goes to his bank, draws his money, and returns to the “Indian” and the “miner.” The bar is weighed and its value is computed. Mr. Jones then asks how the money is to be divided. “Why,” replies sharper number one, “into three piles; one for you, one for me and one for the Indian.” This arrangement is eminently satisfactory to the “sucker,” who has probably already attempted to defraud his companions by means of a false computation, and who now thinks that he sees his way clear to make a purchase of pure gold at about two-thirds of its value.

The money having been paid over, the brace of confederates at once take their departure for parts unknown and Mr. Jones returns to his home laden down with a ponderous mass of metal worth about $9, but for which he has paid many thousands.

Another favorite method of perpetrating the swindle is as follows: Two confederates repair to the farm of some wealthy man and at a chosen spot bury one of the bars of spurious gold. A chart showing a “lay of the land,” is then carefully prepared and so treated as to give it the appearance of antiquity. All preparations having been carefully made, the confidence men drive up to the residence of the intended dupe, and after some conversation in the course of which they are at pains to satisfy themselves that he is the individual for whom they are looking, they inform him that they have learned that there lies buried upon his farm a mass of gold of great value. Some plausible story is invented to account for their having come into possession of this information. The chart is now produced, and the farmer is surprised to see so correct a diagram of his property. 317The spot where the “brick” has been buried is carefully and accurately located upon the plat.

This appeal to the avarice of the intended victim rarely fails to accomplish the end desired. He is anxious to commence digging for the precious metal without delay. The swindlers allow him to conduct the boring himself. Operations having been begun, in due time the spade or pick of the digger strikes the bar, whose glittering appearance arouses every instinct of cupidity in the breast of the countryman. The sharpers at once offer to sell out their interest to him for comparatively one half of the value of the supposed gold. The same tactics, substantially, with regard to testing and assaying the metal are resorted to which have been already described. The value of the “find” is computed, the “sucker” pays over his money, and the confidence man leaves him to repent of his folly at his leisure.

The “second bell” had rung and yet I had not responded to the clamoring call to breakfast. An impatient rap at my door.

“Papa, papa,” from my oldest daughter. “There’s a gentleman waiting to see you.”

Who could it be? The early morning hour is sacred to beggars having elaborate and well-worn letters of introduction, some of which have seen service so long that the paper upon which they are written holds together as poorly as the clumsy tales of their bearers. Sometimes calls for funeral services come in the dewy morning, and oftener bashful young gentlemen stop in buggies and say with nervous energy, but trembling lips, “Dr. Snyder, I would like—we would like to have you do a little job for me—I mean for us. We’re going to get married to-morrow night and we’d like to have you tie the knot. We often come to hear you preach on Sunday evenings.” And then I recognize the sterner half of a handsome young couple who come rather late to church and sit on the back seat and keep up a religious conversation during the whole service.

All this time I am hurrying into my morning gown. It is a little torn in the sleeve, by the way, and when I am in haste I always strike the wrong side of the sleeve-lining. Down stairs I go, and in the hall sits a man who has none of the blushing uneasiness of the prospective bridegroom. My hand is cordially grasped in a palm that seems to bear enthusiastic honesty and simple affection in its very grip.

“So people call me who don’t know the facts of the case,” I answer with a smile.

I never saw a deeper melancholy shadow a man’s face or sadden his voice. He seemed broken-hearted, bewildered with some unspeakable sorrow.

“I’ve come 2,500 miles to see you, and now you ain’t the man I’m looking for,” he said at last.

319I drew him into the parlor, and in the bright light got a better look at his face and form. He was one of Bret Harte’s portraits stepped out of the frame. Of medium height, slightly but strongly built, his form had about it that untaught and indefinable grace of movement which it is popularly supposed is imparted only by the untrammeled freedom of forest life. His long brown hair slightly curled, fell about his neck, and his handsome beard evidently was as innocent of steel as that of a Nazarite’s. He was roughly dressed, having a pair of alligator boots, to which doubtless the newsboy’s “shine” was an untried novelty. But it was his face that chiefly charmed me. His nose was straight and clearly cut and his eye was as frank and innocent as a baby’s. When he spoke his speech was flavored with that Southern twang which no man not to the “manner born” can ever imitate.

“Yes,” he repeated, with increasing sorrow in his soft voice, “I have come 2,500 miles to see you, and you ain’t the man.”

“Yes, sir. You see I’ve been livin’ for about twelve or thirteen years down on the borders of old Mexico, among the Indians and half-breeds. An’ there was a man come down there several years ago by the name o’ Snyder, John Snyder, that’s your name, ain’t it? Yes. Well, he’d been a Methodis’ preacher and he come from my own State, North Carliny. He used to work in the mines an’ he used to preach, too. An’ I tell you he was a mighty good man. ’Fore he come things was awful rough in that camp. Why, they use ter kill a man almost every week. I’ve seen a fellow shot right dead on a bar-room floor and nobody’d take any notice of him, and one of them rough women would go up to the bar to take a drink of whisky and her clothes would jest brush over the dead man’s face! But I tell ye when that preacher come things began to be different. All that killing business begun to stop. The boys jest thought everything of him. They’d trust him with everything they had in the world. And he come to St. Louis about five or six months ago and I want to find him the worst way.”

Thinking that as my heroic namesake had come from North Carolina, he would naturally belong to the M. E. Church, South, I directed my disconsolate visitor to the book concern of that branch of the church militant. As he turned to leave the door he said, “If I didn’t find that preacher, could you let me come back and get you to write me a letter, for I can’t write?” I was touched by the sense of desolation and pitiable ignorance in which this lonely creature seemed to dwell, and said cordially:

In the early morning of the next day my backwoods hero presented himself. He had searched the city through, but the saintly miner-preacher 320was nowhere to be found. And yet there was a gleam of dimmest hope in his eye and a sweet and quiet smile upon his lips, for he seemed to transfer all his loving, clinging confidence to me.

“Well, I couldn’t find him,” he said. “Now, I’ll just tell you in what kind of a fix I’m in. I’ve been out of the mines fur nigh onto thirteen years, and sometimes I’ve got together as much as $12,000 or $13,000 at a time, and then it would jest kinder melt away from me. Now I see a chance to make some money. Fur about twelve years I’ve hed a chum who’s a half-breed Indian, a fellow by the name of Zamora. Well, about six months ago he was out hunting with some full-blooded Indians, and they chased a small deer up the side of a hill; when all of a sudden the deer went out of sight. My chum went up to the place where he missed him, and looking down a hole, saw him jest about four or five feet down. So he went down after him. When he got down there he forgot all about the deer, I tell ye. He was jest in a hole o’ gold! He got the Indians to help him, and right there and then he got out some chunks, and buildin’ a fire where they was campin’, they made what them fellers call a dobie mold and jest run some of the gold into that. After he had filled them Indians full o’ whiskey he knew they’d never think of the place again, and so when he got rid o’ them he went back alone and got what stuff was on the surface. Then he come and told me about it; but mind ye, he didn’t show me the place. Them half-breeds are mighty suspicious. But he brought out three of the chunks. I showed a piece of the stuff to a fellow named Bailey—Capt. Bailey they called him, and he stole it. He said, ‘An Indian ain’t got any rights anyhow.’anyhow.’ Well, if I’d tried to get it back none of the boys would ’er backed me up, ’cause they’re all down on Indians, and Zamora wouldn’t let me trust another feller in the camp. He says to me, says he, ‘Let’s go look for that preacher; we can trust him; these fellers ’ill not only rob us, but put lead into us, too.’ So we come to Kansas City and I buried two of the chunks of stuff in a hole about three feet deep, and then we brought the other chunks here. Now, you see what we want to do is this: First of all, we want to find some man we can trust. That half-breed won’t hardly let me speak to a white man. He is always sayin’: You’ve been cheated once trustin’ a white man, now jest do my way. Let’s find that preacher, we know we can trust him. Well, we’ve lost the trail of that preacher and I want you to help us out. I’ll pay you well fur your trouble.”

“Jest this. We want to go back to that country and fetch out the rest of that stuff. We’ve got to get a lot o’ burros and some wagons, and some full-blooded Indians and some good ponies and rifles. There’s 321a town, a little place, about ten miles from where this half-breed has hid the stuff. My plan is to take the Indians to this place and then Zamora and me to start off in the night with two or three burros. We’ll go at night so’s no feller’ll foller us. We’ll get the stuff, pile it on the burros, and bring it all away at the same time. If we give them Indians $10 apiece and a new rifle and plenty of whiskey they’d be drunker’n owls before night. Then we can ship the stuff on a railroad and bring it here. Now, we’ve got to get about $2,500 or $3,000 to get the things we want; and we want to raise it on the price of the stuff we’ve got along with us. Now, will you help us? I believe we can trust you, ’cause you look square and straight.”

“On Olive street. Why don’t you take the gold and sell it outright?outright?”

“Now, that’s jest where the stubbornness of that half-breed comes in. He’s sick in bed. Got the worst kind of a cold, on his lungs, I guess, and he won’t let that chunk go out of his sight. He’s afraid that if we take that stuff to find out how fine it is somebody’ll foller us, and we’ll never get out of this town alive. You know them fellers is awful suspicious. What I want you to do if you’re willin’ to help us, is to jest come down and take a bit of this stuff and see how fine it is, and mebbe you can find some way to help us out.”

Curiosity mingled with benevolence. I was anxious to see this mass of gold and talk with this suspicious half-breed. While going to Fourteenth and Olive streets, where the treasure rested under the sleepless eye of the non-confiding son of the forest, my innocent miner would turn his soft and girlish eyes upon my face and speak with wonder and awe of the height of the houseshouses and the crowded condition of the streets. I was ushered into a darkened room with much mystery, where a human figure was lying in bed, with his face muffled up in the bed clothes. Like Claude Melnotte, he had not found the raw atmosphere of St. Louis like “the soft air of his native South.” Between his half-suppressed groans he uttered a few words in Spanish and my guide answered in the same musical tongue. After locking the door and looking cautiously about, my friend drew from under the mattress at the foot of the bed something wrapped in the fragment of an old bed-comforter. In a moment a mass of metal weighing about thirty pounds and shaped like a bar of washing soap was revealed. Evidently a pure gold brick.

322“Now,” said David, my innocent-faced friend, “I’ll tell you what we’ll do. I’ll jest bore some holes in this brick, and I’ll get you to take the shavings and get ’em melted into a button. Then nobody’ll suspect. Don’t you see? Then take it to some place down town and have ’t tested. A feller told me out in the mines that he couldn’t tell how fine it was, but he knew it was over 18 karats.”

So he bored a dozen holes into this mass of treasure, and collected the golden shavings into a fragment of the Globe-Democrat. As he came out of the darkened chamber Davis grasped my hand with deep emotion, and said: “This is the only chance I’ve had in nigh thirteen years; if this don’t go through, it jest seems as if I’ll lose my grip.”

I tried to cheer him with a word of sympathy, and hurried to my friend Witt, of the Eugene Jaccard Company, and giving him a portion of the metal, begged him to have it tested. We went together to the workroom of the establishment, where the foreman of the melting department tested the specimen and declared it to be as fine as coin. It nearly took my breath away! The long and weary pilgrimage of my humble and sad-faced friend of the wild woods was about to come to a golden end. He stood on the threshold of a splendid future! In one of his bursts of generous trust he had confided to me the secret that the half-breed owned and had secreted seventy-three other lumps of the virgin metal not counting the one upon which my eyes had feasted and the two safely hidden in the hillside at Kansas City. Seventy-six golden bricks, each weighing over thirty pounds! Let anybody make the calculation and see what prospects the confiding Davis and the untutored half-breed had in store.

Then I sought out my friend, the United States Assayer, and told him the brilliant story. I told him of the sweet and Raphael-like countenance of my friend, of the melancholy sickness and sad distrusts of the lonely half-breed, who was longing for the sight of his native woods. I showed him the coin-fine precious metal I held in my hand, and consulted him about the readiest means of helping the two “babes in the wood,” who, in their ignorance, were the custodians of this uncounted wealth. He listened with unflecked courtesy, and then responded in a voice not musical with tearful sympathy:

I told him that financially, the pole—so to speak—would have to be considerably more than “ten foot” to enable me to touch it, even if I was so disposed. In other words, I was not momentarily fixed to engage in such enterprises, even if they were endorsed by the angel-faced backwoodsman, and re-inforced by my own sympathy.

“It looks,” he said, “like a gold brick. It seems to me that I recognize the not unfamiliar features of an auriferous brick. Why doesn’t he bring the priceless treasure here? I will pay him the highest price for 323it. If he doesn’t want to sell I will advance the money they require for burros, wagons and Indians.”

I meekly presented the picture of the half-breed, whose lungs were evidently affected and who could not endure the rigors of the St. Louis climate. He was still obdurate, and refused to invest even intellectually in this hidden treasure. I said that all the symptoms were undoubtedly gold-bricky. That there were unquestionably parts of the story that would not “hold water,” to use the vernacular. That the suspiciousness of the half-breed was certainly over-strained and phenomenal in its excess. That the confidence that my friend of the infantile face was willing to repose in myself, a perfect stranger, was not marked by those periods of slow evolution by which confidence is proverbially brought to fruition. Still, I said, that gentle, guileless, St. John-like face haunted the chamber of my soul’s sympathy. I would as soon expect to see the wondrous Madonna leave its frame in the Sistine Chapel and try to cheat me with a dozen semi-decayed peaches at the street corner as to look for deceit lurking behind the bland and child-like smile of John Davis, the miner. My friend, the assayer, suggested that the sad smile and Madonna face of John were part of his stock in trade. “At any rate, Doctor,” said he, “let him bring the brick here. When I melt it and run it over I will believe it is solid gold; not till then.”

I sought out Davis and told him that Zamora’s confidence would have to bear an additional strain; that if it was a necessity he could be carried on a stretcher to the assay office, bearing the precious nugget in his bosom if he chose, but that nobody would advance money on a gold brick of which they had seen nothing but shavings. A mist of tears seemed to spring into his handsome eyes, and he replied broken-heartedly:

“I’m afraid that I can’t bring him to it. He had to get the doctor to see him this morning ’cause he was spitting blood, and he’s sure he’ll die if he don’t get out of this big town. I can’t help him any longer than to-night, I know. He don’t know the difference, ye know, between a hundred dollar bill and a one dollar bill, an’ if I could only get some money jest to show him and let him see that the parties meant fair, ye see, he’d let the stuff go out of his sight. Then we could sell it or raise the rest of the money on it, and inside o’ two months I could have the rest o’ that pile here in St. Louis. I tell ye, it jest breaks me up to think o’ losing this chance”—and his words were broken with a heavy sigh.

That sad face haunted me. My wife of course saw that something was troubling my dreams and waking hours, and gave me no rest until I had confided the whole melancholy story to her. With that wifely anxiety 324respecting the family income and expenses characteristic of the worthy ones of her sex, she exclaimed at once: “You are quite sure that this sympathy didn’t reach your pocket-book?”

“No,” I said, “I am not out of pocket one cent, but if I had been rich, I am pretty certain I should have invested in that face, even though there are thin places in the story.”

Strange as it may seem, my word-photograph of that manly woodman’s countenance did not move her sympathies a whit. A half-dozen times a day she would inquire, with a mischievous twinkle in her eye: “Any news yet from Kansas City?” I tried to show her that, on account of that subtle influence which will always reveal its presence in the face, it is impossible for a rogue to bear such a face as Davis owned. The very spiritual laws of the universe were involved in the denial of such a monstrous supposition. Her only reply was in the expression of a hope that my pocket-book should not get entangled in any of these psychological theories.

Four days passed, and still no news of the weary-hearted Davis. On the fifth day I came into the house bearing a letter in my hand, and said: “My love, I think I’ve got news of that gold brick.”

“My Dear Doctor:—I wish you would call at the office some time to-morrow, if you are down town. I have an interesting specimen to show you.”

I went. On a shelf in the inner vault of the assay office laid that gold brick. There was no mistaking that treasure. It lay like Cæsar in the Capitol, its dozen wounds looking dumbly up and pleading to me for recognition. Thirty pounds of solid coin-fine gold, a fraction of the stately fortune of that mysterious half-breed who

Only the day before a stranger had entered the assay office bearing a gold button, the quality of which he wished determined. He said his brother had taken stock in a mine and he wished from this specimen to know the value of the product. It was as fine as a $20 gold piece. Very probably it was part of a $20 gold piece.

Some hours later he came again, bearing the precious brick in his arms. Wonderful to relate! He had seen the borings from this massive bit of wealth tested and tried, and found to be pure gold, and some envious fairy, with a magic wand that was able to neutralize the alchemist’s potent secret, had changed it into a baser metal. He bore in his arms but thirty pounds of solid brass. He also bore a letter to this effect:

325“Sir:—You have been a —— fool to buy thirty pounds of brass. If you can find another man who will be —— fool to give you $2,000 for this brass, I will come and do the talking for you and take half the profits.

My dream was shattered. My Bret Harte hero, with his saintly face and with the flavor of the forest about him, was a vulgar fraud! And yet he was not all bad. Observe the delicate touch of thoughtful benevolence with which he generously offered to come back and help his victim regain a part of what he had lost! There must have been something essentially noble about him to write like that!

Of course I saw what a clumsy trick it all was. The borings were made from the lump of brass, but were simply changed after being wrapped in the bit of newspaper. I have no doubt the gentleman who purchased the brick sees it clearly enough also.

Since that time I have thought it was not a universal experience which is expressed in Whittier’s celebrated lines:

It is doubtful whether there is a man, woman or child in the United States, who has been in the habit of reading the daily press, who has not heard of “Bunko,” and does not have a vague sort of idea that it is a gigantic scheme for swindling. Yet so hazy is the general information of the public as to the details of its operation, that even those who may have read the published accounts of the mode in which the thousands of unfortunates have been victimized through this scheme, are liable themselves to be defrauded in a precisely similar manner because of their own ignorance. I believe that I speak within bounds when I say that millions have been lost and won through this game. It is my intention to so thoroughly expose the methods of its manipulators, that hereafter those who may be fleeced through their operations can attach the blame primarily only to themselves.

The essential requisites of a “Bunko” outfit are—9 small dice with a dice-box, a “Bunko” chart, and—last, but by no means least—a skillful and in every way competent “capper.” It is the peculiar province of the latter to seek out victims and “steer” them to their ruin. The devices resorted to in order to lure the unsophisticated into the den of “Bunko” sharps are too numerous to admit of any detailed description. There is, however, one fundamental principle underlying them all,—to gain the confidence of the man whom it is proposed to rob, and then, by specious representation, to draw him on, step by step, until the unprincipled gang of scoundrels shall have bled him of the last cent which they can obtain. Of all descriptions of gamblers, “Bunko” men are, if not the most astute, certainly the most unscrupulous and the most pitiless. No chicanery is too contemptible, no treachery too base for them to employ; and not infrequently they consummate their schemes of fraud by the perpetration of deeds of actual violence.

The prospective victim having been enticed into the “den of thieves,” the modus operandi by which he is fleeced will now be described as briefly as a necessarily full explanation will permit. The first object that meets his eye is a table upon which is spread an oil-cloth, on which are painted forty-six squares, numbered from 9 to 54, inclusive. The arrangement of the numbers is shown in the accompanying diagram, which also shows the fortune which awaits the players. The game is played by means of throwing the above mentioned dice. The nine little ivory cubes are placed in a box and either the “sucker” or the “capper” (who, as a pretended friend, always plays in concert with the dupe) throws them 327upon the table. The spots on the top of all the dice are added together, and the sum total is taken as the number which has been thrown. Reference is now had to the chart, and the legend painted upon the square containing the number thrown by the players is read off.

In order to follow the game through, the chart itself must now be explained. If the reader will look at the diagram, he will see that some of the squares contain, in addition to the numbers which are painted upon all of them, figures representing certain sums of money, while others are marked “0,” yet others “00,” while upon some of them is depicted the abbreviation “rep.” He will also observe that some of the squares contain figures representing sums of money which are inscribed with the abbreviation “cond.” The letters “rep” stand for representing; “cond” is the abbreviation for conditional. The mode of play may be best explained by an illustration. If the player, for instance, throws 18, (which number may be found in the upper left hand corner of the chart), it will be seen that the square bears the abbreviation “rep.” This indicates that the player may double (i. e., either pay for another chance and throw again), or withdraw from the game, forfeiting the 50 cents or $1.00 (usually the latter sum) which he has already paid. Suppose that he throw 15, which number may be found in the fourth square from the left in the upper row of the chart, he wins $1.00. If he throws 54—the second number to the right in the fourth horizontal row of squares—he wins $500. If he throws a number painted upon a square inscribed with “0,” “00,” or the abbreviation “chic’y” (which is a contraction for chancery), he neither wins nor loses, and the proprietors magnanimously permit him to try his “luck” (God save the mark) again.

But it is when he throws a number corresponding to that in a square inscribed with a sum of money and the abbreviation “cond” (conditional) that his bad fortune commences.

And just here it is proper to say, that as a matter of fact it makes comparatively little difference what number he actually throws, inasmuch as the man behind the cloth usually counts the spots on the dice to suit himself. As a rule, the man who is fool enough to risk his money at such a scheme is too great a fool to see that his number is correctly read. But if he should insist upon examining the dice for himself, his pseudo-partner, the “capper,” who sits at his elbow, is always at hand to overturn one of the cubes, thereby defeating his last, laudable attempt at self preservation.

Before describing further the misfortunes of the victim, it will be well to give a synopsis of the inscription upon the squares, and to point out the exceedingly ingenious manner in which they are arranged.

The lowest number is nine, for the reason that nine dice are thrown, and as none of the cubes contain a blank side nine aces is the smallest 329throw that can be made. The diagram gives a fair idea of the arrangement of the numbers on the average chart. The squares contain:

Of the twenty-one prizes, eight are marked “conditional,” the signification of which word in this connection will be presently explained. Of the remaining thirteen, the majority are painted upon squares containing numbers which it is a moral impossibility to throw. Thus a $500 prize is inscribed over 54, a number which cannot be won by the player unless all the nine dice thrown turn up sixes, which has never been known to happen; a $1,000 prize is numbered 9, and cannot be won unless all the dice turn up aces, which they never do; another $1,000 prize requires a throw of 53 to win it, which would involve casting eight sixes and one five, the probability of which is too remote to be worth considering. It is, however, quite within the range of possibility that a “sucker” may throw a number calling for one of the smaller prizes, which serves to encourage him to persevere in his folly.

When a dupe, throwing in concert with a “capper,” has cast a number calling for a “conditional” prize, the proprietor informs them that they have each won the sum inscribed upon that square, but only “conditionally,” the condition being that before payment they shall show that they have that amount of cash. He exhibits his money to pay the prize, and professes his willingness to pay it over as soon as he is convinced that he has not been risking his money against “wind.” Of course, this claim is preposterous. When the victim was induced to play, he was invited to buy a chance in a prize distribution scheme, and not a word was said to him about putting up any stakes or incurring any risk whatever, other than the loss of his dollar.

However, this reflection does not present itself to the dupe, and under the exhilarating and stimulating influence of the “capper,” to which 330is added the apparent prospect of winning a large sum of money for nothing, he leaves the room in order to obtain the necessary amount, with which he and the “capper” invariably return. At the same moment, departs a third confederate, technically known as a “trailer.” The business of the latter individual is to follow the “sucker” and observe his every movement. Of course he is expected to return to the “office” of the gang before the victim and the confederate shall have arrived. No movement of the dupe escapes him. If he goes to a bank, in order to draw money, the “trailer” stands close at his heels, with a bill of some large denomination in his hand, for which he is prepared to request change in the most courteous manner. No action on the part of the greenhorn is left unobserved, and when the latter returns to the room, in company with the “capper,” the proprietor of the scheme has been thoroughly informed as to every movement which he has made since his departure. As soon as he shows the money, the man behind the cloth takes possession of it, and informs the players that they are entitled to another throw. The “capper” appears to be much excited under the influence of the extraordinary good fortune which has fallen to their lot, and the victim is easily induced again to take the box and throw the dice. If he manifests any hesitation, however, the “capper,” (who, it must be remembered, always acts as his partner), seizes the box and hurriedly throws for both, before the “sucker” has time to remonstrate. Of course, this time he loses. Even should the spots on the cubes as thrown, when added together, amount to a total sum calling for a prize upon the chart, either the operator will read the total erroneously, or the “capper” will overturn one of the dice, thus changing the number actually thrown. The proprietor at once announces that the two players have lost the amount of money, which they brought with them and placed in the banker’s hands. It is idle for the “sucker” to protest that he was not laying a wager, and that this interpretation of the contract is altogether wrong and unfair. The “bunko” sharpers have his money and they intend to keep it, despite all remonstrances. If he offers to make any disturbance, or manifests any disposition to recover his loss by force, he is at once either knocked down or thrown out of the room, or sometimes both together. When he succeeds in summoning the officers of the law to his aid, and in company with the police revisits the room in which he was fleeced, he finds that his tenants have departed, carrying with them the paraphernalia of their trade.

A favorite device under such circumstances, after the greenhorn has returned with his money and has been induced to throw again, is so to read the number thrown by him as to call upon him to “represent,” which is accomplished by calling off a number corresponding to one of the squares upon the chart which is inscribed with the abbreviation “rep.” In this 331case, he is told that he must double the amount placed in the banker’s hands and throw once more, or lose his “stake.” If he is particularly gullible, and the “capper” has succeeded in persuading him to bring with him to the den a larger sum of money than that called for by the proprietor, he will frequently consent to double his money and try again. As long as he can be induced to keep this up, the sharpers will continue to play with him. As soon as they discover either that he has no more money or that he is unwilling to risk any additional sum, he is informed that he has lost whatever money he may have already advanced.

From the circumstance of sending a dupe after more money, this game has, of late years, been sometimes designated by members of the fraternity as “send”.“send”.

It sometimes happens, however, that the “sucker” when he returns with this money, insists upon being paid the amount of the prize which he has won and flatly refuses to put up any more money in the game. When the sharpers perceive that they cannot induce him to play further the proprietor takes his money, and makes an entry in a large book, with a view to giving the transaction a business like appearance. He then counts out a sum, smaller by some $200 than the amount of the prize, and places this amount together with the victim’s money in an envelope and seals it up. He counts the money in the presence of the dupe and informs him that he has not got the full amount at hand in currency, but that his agent will call upon him in the morning and pay him the balance. Meanwhile, he is at liberty to take with him the envelope, containing his own money and that portion of the prize which the bank is able to pay at the moment. The banker further states that in order that the agent shall pay the money it is essential that the seals of the envelope should not be broken, adding that if they are, no further money will be paid. To this the victim assents, and he is at once handed an envelope, identical in size and appearance with that in which he saw the money placed, and sealed in a precisely similar manner. As a matter of fact, however, the proprietor has substituted for the envelope containing the money one so closely resembling it in appearance that the difference cannot be discovered, but which, instead of currency, contains nothing more valuable than blank paper.

The manner in which the substitution is effected before the very eyes of the “sucker” without his knowledge is as follows: The operator opens the ledger and places between two of the leaves the envelope containing the bank bills. He then presses down upon the cover of the ledger, apparently with a view of sealing the package more tightly. When he opens the ledger, he opens it at another page and takes out the previously prepared envelope. He then marks a cross in pencil over the 332seal and asks the dupe to write his name across the flap, in order that there may be no possible mischance in the identification of the package when the agent shall call in the morning.

In the description of this game which has been given above, reference has been made only to the casting of dice as a means of determining the number made by any player. Sometimes, however, when an attempt is made to operate the game in resorts of a “higher tone,” cards inscribed with numbers and abbreviations corresponding to those shown in the diagram are used. The number of cards is, of course, the same as the number of squares on the cloth—46. When cards are employed they are dealt from a box similar to that employed in dealing faro, for a description of which the reader is referred to the chapter on “Faro.”

In 1882, Floyd Creek, Pete Lelin, and George Curtis, while traveling in disguise as fugitives from justice—their crime having been the fleecing of one Wilson, at Eureka Springs in 1881, his disastrous losses causing instant death—received a “pointer” from a school teacher concerning a man who had deposited a large sum of money in the bank, and who was supposed to be a “soft mark.” They watched him carefully and eventually succeeded in selling him bricks to the value (?) of $22,000. They received this large sum in gold, and at once took boat for Pensacola. They did not gain anything by their outrageous swindle. While they escaped the justice of man, the vengeance of God overtook them speedily, for their boat sunk and all were drowned, their ill-gotten gains going to the bottom with them.

The devices of confidence operators for fleecing their victims are more numerous and ingenious than the minds of unsophisticated, honest men can readily conceive. These gentry know neither honor, pity nor remorse. Among their ranks, however, may be found men of brilliant intellect and high education, who, had they devoted to some honest pursuit the time and thought which they have expended upon the conception and execution of schemes of fraud, might have acquired a comfortable competence and occupied an enviable position in the professional or commercial world. Their moral nature, however, has become so warped, that fraud has become instinctive with them and the very name of virtue a by-word and a mockery.

At the same time, it is but right to say that their success, in the vast majority of cases, would be impossible were it not for the fact that they appeal not only to the cupidity of their dupes, but also to a latent element of dishonesty which requires only temptation and opportunity to call it into active exercise. The reader who will carefully scan the pages which follow cannot fail to perceive that the “suckers”—as the confidence men denominate their victims—are, at heart, no more honest than are the sharpers themselves. The trap is spread for them and baited with the prospect of winning “something” for “nothing,” and of deriving advantage through a resort to deception and trickery. If the dupe did not believe that he is about to defraud some one else, he would never become a victim of scoundrels more astute, but little more dishonest than himself. The man who, when a scheme of fraud is proposed to him, indignantly repudiates the implied suspicion that he is willing to sacrifice his honor and integrity for money is not likely to become the dupe of scoundrels who resort to such practices as are explained in this chapter. It has always seemed to me that there is a great waste of sympathy upon men thus victimized. While too much cannot be said in condemnation of men who make a living through systematic fraud, what is to be said of those who are eager to avail themselves of dishonest devices which they themselves have not been sufficiently cunning to invent, but which commend themselves at once to their avarice and lax morality?

This is an ancient device of sharpers, with the modus operandi of which a majority of persons have some acquaintance. It is commonly resorted to by all gamblers and confidence men, who find their most successful field of operation upon railway trains; although fairs, circus grounds, and even camp meetings afford them opportunities of plying their vocation. The game is played with three cards, which are held by the operator, who is known in gamblers’ slang as the “spieler,” in his right hand, between the thumb and first two fingers, the backs towards the palm, and the cards themselves slightly bending inward. To work the trick successfully, some sleight of hand is necessary, to acquire which considerable practice is necessary. The cards are thrown by the “spieler” upon some flat surface, faces downward. Before throwing them, he shows the bystanders the cards which he holds in his hand, and after they have been thrown he invites bets as to the location of some particular card.

To illustrate: he may hold in his hand two aces and a queen; these he shows; he then places them in his right hand, in the position above described, and throws them upon the flat surface, faces downward; he then asks some one to bet which is the queen. The queen may have been the middle of the three cards as they were held in his hand, but it by no means follows that it will be the middle of the three cards as they lie upon the table.table.

To work the game successfully, at least one and generally two confederates are necessary. It has already been said that the favorite place of operation is the railroad train, and perhaps the reader will gain the best idea of how the trick is done by describing the manner in which these sharpers secure and fleece their victims under these circumstances. The “spieler” is usually attired after the manner of a well-to-do country farmer or stock-raiser. On his head he wears a battered slouch hat, his neck is ornamented with a loosely tied red cotton handkerchief; and his worn trousers are stuffed carelessly into the legs of his cow skin boots. His confederates, who are technically called “cappers,” are dressed after the manner of respectable business men of easy circumstances. It should be remarked, however, that when the precious trio board the train the “spieler” presents a far more fashionable appearance than when dressed for business. He usually carries with him a false shirt bosom, an old overcoat and the slouch hat mentioned above. After he has entered the cars he takes his seat in the rear end of the coach, and the two “cappers” pass through the car looking for some one who promises to be an easy 335prey, and who is commonly known to the fraternity as a “mark” or a “sucker.” If none is found upon the first car entered, the gang repairs to the next one, the “spieler” taking up his position in the rear as before. As soon as a “mark” is selected, one of the “cappers” takes his seat beside him and raises his hat. At this signal the “spieler” arranges his cotton handkerchief, puts on his disreputable hat, dons his well worn overcoat, and tucks his trousers in his boot legs. The effecting of this transformation scene is known among gamblers as “ringing up.”

The “spieler” goes forward and takes the seat either just before or directly behind his confederate and intended victim. He engages the former in conversation, representing himself as a heavy stock-raiser from the Southwest. He goes on to explain how he has been swindled or “slicked” out of $500 by a “card sharp.” He adds, however, that they failed to get all that he had, and thereupon displays or “flashes” a large roll of money, and slapping his hand upon his side, remarks in a loud tone, that he has $10,000 more in his belt. At this point the confederate, with the air of a man of kindly disposition and one who is familiar with the wickedness of the world, remarks to him that he perceives that he (the “spieler”) has traveled very little, and advises him to avoid displaying money in the presence of strangers. The “spieler” laughs, and says that “he reckons he is able to look after himself.” He adds that he bought the “paste boards” with which he had been cheated from the man who had swindled him, and that he intends to take them home and get his money back by betting with his friends, mentioning, perhaps, by way of illustration, that he means to “win Bill Jones’s mule, and make him walk home the very next night that he comes to see his sister.” His accomplice thereupon asks to see the cards, and they are promptly produced. The “spieler” begins to exhibit his skill and urges the partner to bet. The latter says that he can distinguish the cards readily enough, but does not wish to win the man’s money. After much urging, the “capper” consents to bet and usually wins two wagers as a matter of course. The “spieler” thereupon remarks that he does not care to bet with him any longer, as he is too lucky, and asks the stranger to make a bet. If the latter shows any hesitation, or if, perchance, he expresses some scruples on moral grounds, the “capper” whispers to him that he has a dead certainty of winning and that he had better bet and win, and “teach the fool a lesson,” after which he can return the amount won if he chooses. The “spieler” next throws the cards, and while he turns his head the confederate raises the card and shows the stranger which it is, slightly bending the corner in order that it may be readily recognized.

The victim is now satisfied that he can bet with certainty, and when the “spieler” again picks up the cards to throw them he stakes his wager. The operator, however, with his little finger dexterously flattens out the 336corner which his accomplice had bent up and bends up the corner of an entirely different card. When the cards are next thrown, the victim selects the one with the bent corner, and is deeply chagrined to discover that it is not the one which he believed it to be.

Sometimes, instead of bending the corner of one of the cards, resort is had to another and equally effective device. While the three cards are lying faces downward, the confederate, with a pencil, makes a mark upon the corner of the winning card. When the “spieler” again turns his head toward the cards, he picks them up and thrusts them into his pocket with the remark, “oh, you fellows wont bet anyway.” In his pocket he has three other cards, duplicates in all respects of those which he has before shown, and on the corner of one of which is a pencil mark precisely similar to the one made by the “capper,” but it is not on the winning card. As he is about to leave, his confederate urges him to remain, saying, “yes we will bet, come back.” The stranger thinks that he recognizes the pencil mark, stakes his money, selects the marked card, finds it is not the winner, and of course loses.

The principal object in having a second confederateconfederate is to keep off disinterested persons who might endeavor to put the proposed victim on his guard.

Formerly, monte men refused to play for anything except cash; now-a-days, they are willing to accept bank checks, and the third man is found extremely serviceable as an innocent purchaser. If the “sucker” raises a row, and threatens to stop payment of the check, it is a common practice to produce a piece of paper, perhaps a blank check, folded, which is torn up in the victim’s presence. The latter, believing that he has seen his check destroyed, takes no further steps in the matter. It sometimes happens, however, that a victim will say nothing, but at the same time secretly intends to stop the payment of the check. To guard against this, the third man appears upon the scene and with a great show of righteous indignation, or possibly representing himself to be an officer of the law, demands that the “spieler” return the check to the victim. Hot words then pass, and the latter says that if there is going to be such an everlasting fuss made about so small a matter he will tear up the check and have done with it. Thereupon, he produces his paper, which he tears up, as already described, throwing the pieces out of the car window. Of course in either case, the check remains safe in the sharpers’ possession. The second confederate, by his apparently magnanimous and disinterested interference in the victim’s behalf, naturally wins his confidence. He thereupon makes it his business to remain with him until the “spieler” and his remaining accomplice shall have had time to present the check for certification at the bank upon which it was drawn.

It is said, and universally believed by the sporting fraternity, whose belief is based upon actual experience, that the conductor of the train upon 337which a game such as has been described is successfully practiced always expects and receives a percentage of the winnings. If the trick is perpetrated on a sleeping car, the porter is always given a handsome bonus. The author has himself been told by one of the latter sort of gentry that his fees from this source considerably exceeded his pay from the sleeping car company.

Probably, the king of the monte men was a man known in sporting circles as “Canada Bill.” He was recognized as a general “all around confidence operator,” and so distrustful were those who knew him of appearances which he put forth that on the occasion of his funeral, as the coffin was being lowered into the grave, one of his friends offered to bet $1,000 to $500 that “Bill was not in the box.” The offer found no takers, for the reason, as one of his acquaintances said, “that he had known Bill to squeeze through tighter holes than that.” It was reported some years before his death that he had offered one of the Trunk Lines of Railroad a premium of $25,000 per annum to be allowed to practice confidence games upon its trains without molestation; a condition of the offer being that he would not attempt to victimize any class of passengers except preachers.

One of the most successful schemes for perpetrating this fraud is known as the “send,” so-called because in some of its essential features it is closely allied to the game of “bunko.” In both cases the victim is sent after more money, in order that the harvest of the rascally manipulators may be increased. One of the favorite modes of winning the confidence and money of an intended dupe is as follows: The victim having been selected,—usually a farmer of some wealth,—two of the sharpers drive up to his residence in a buggy, ostensibly with a view to purchasing his farm. They are always well dressed and present the appearance of men of large means. To gain the confidence of the unsuspecting agriculturalist is a comparatively easy matter. He shows them over his place, they express their entire satisfaction, and offer him a sum in cash which is not only far beyond his expectations but also considerably in excess of the actual value of the property. To complete a bargain under such circumstances is an easy matter. The trade is made, and the sharpers invite the farmer to accompany them to the nearest town, where they propose to draw from the bank the cash necessary to complete the transaction. On the way to town, they encounter another man, also riding in a buggy, who engages them in conversation. The stranger represents himself to be the agent of a new scheme of gift distribution, and at once enlists the interest of the “capper,” who is riding with the farmer. The party alight from their buggies and the new-comer introduces the old game of “three card monte.” He invites them, at first, to “try their luck for fun,” and by showing them what large sums they might have won had they been 338playing for actual stakes, he soon induces them to take a venture. In working this scheme, however, playing cards are seldom used, for the reason that the average country farmer always cherishes a suspicion of the paste boards. Accordingly, some other description of cards is employed.

It is usually found to be an easy matter to interest the countryman, who sees the “capper” apparently “playing in great luck.” He is soon induced to risk a small amount, and the operator tells him that he and “his friend” have each won a large sum—perhaps $1,000 or $5,000. The sharper has now resorted to the devices of the “bunko banker,” and informs his victim that it will be necessary for him to show the amount of money which he has won in order to prove that he would have been actually able to pay the stake had he lost. The countryman, thoroughly convinced that he is on the eve of winning a large sum, expresses his willingness to go to town and raise the money. Of course, the “agent”“agent” of the gift distribution scheme, obligingly offers to await his return. The farmer goes to town, obtains the money, and comes back, like the moth to the candle.

When he returns, the same trickery is resorted to as in the operation of the game of “bunko,” for a full explanation of which the reader is referred to that heading. Of course he loses all that he can be persuaded to venture, and inasmuch as the only two vehicles on the ground are in the possession of the two sharpers, while the victim is, perforce, compelled to go afoot, it is a very easy matter for the former to place such a distance between themselves and the “sucker,” that by the time the latter has reached some point where he may summon assistance, the precious pair are far advanced upon their road to safety.

The use of fraudulent checks as a means of winning money from the unwary is a device of confidence men which, although venerable in its antiquity, is still practiced to a very considerable extent in all parts of the country. Notwithstanding the fact that it has been repeatedly exposed, there are probably hundreds of men in the United States who derive a comfortable income every year through following it up.

The method of operation may be very briefly described. To perpetrate it successfully sharpers ordinarily act in concert. A favorite field of operation is found in depots and railroad trains, although hotels and even public thoroughfares are not despised. The first thing to be done is to learn the name of the proposed victim, after he has been selected. This selection is usually easily made, the experienced confidence man having 339little difficulty in choosing a man whose appearance indicates that he is not only in good financial circumstances, but also of a nature which renders him peculiarly liable to be defrauded by this sort of trick. His name is usually learned by accosting him by some name which the sharper knows to be incorrect. Naturally, the stranger corrects him by stating who he is and where he resides. This much learned, reference is had to a bank directory of the United States (a copy of which these men always carry with them), and the name of the banks and bankers and prominent business men at his place of residence, ascertained. Having thus posted himself, the swindler informs the “sucker” that he hails from the same locality and is well acquainted with Mr. So-and-So, naming some prominent citizen of the town or city in which the victim resides. If the game is to be played at a depot, the sharper enters the train with the dupe and takes a seat near him. He has previously been at great pains to make himself as entertaining and confidential as possible. All at once, sharper number two appears upon the scene and presents a bill to his confederate, saying that he has made it out in compliance with his request and upon his promise that it should be paid. The swindler expresses himself as entirely satisfied with the account, but says that he has not sufficient currency to make a full payment. He thereupon produces a check for a considerably larger sum, which he asks his confederate to cash, discharge the debt, and return him the balance in money. This, of course, the second sharper says that he cannot do. Sharper number one now turns to the “sucker,” and asks him if he will be kind enough to loan him the amount of his confederate’s pretended claim, taking the check as security. In seven cases out of ten, the swindlers have so carefully selected their victim and so artfully won his confidence, that the dupe readily consents to make the loan desired. If, however, he has not the full amount of money with him, his new acquaintance is quite ready to accept what he has, with which he makes a payment on “account” to his friend. The “sucker” takes the check and puts it away in his pocket-book as security. The two confederates then walk down the aisle of the car, chatting pleasantly and exchanging words of farewell. When they reach the platform they both jump off the car and the victim sees neither of them again. When he attempts to realize upon his supposed “security,” he finds that the draft is not worth the paper on which it was written.

Among sharpers this trick is commonly known as the “con game,” or “check racket.”

Sometimes an appeal is made to the sympathy of the proposed victim. At the city of Louisville, Kentucky, one of these gentry appealed to a stranger to cash a check for him on the score that he was entirely unacquainted in the city and was carrying home the body of his deceased brother for burial. He led his dupe to the baggage car and showed him 340a box containing a coffin. It is needless to say that the corpse contained therein was that of a person entirely unknown to him. Producing a draft for $1,700, he so artfully worked upon the sympathy of the man to whom he had appealed, that the latter handed him the sum of $520—all that he had with him—and took the worthless paper as security, the sharper representing that he was journeying to the same point of destination as was the dupe, and that on their arrival there he would experience no difficulty in obtaining currency for the draft. On the same day the same individual victimized another stranger out of $225 by the same device, pointing out the identical corpse which he had shown to his first victim. Of course this particular form of this phase of swindling cannot be perpetrated successfully unless the swindlers are, by chance, favored by finding a coffin on some departing train.

This is a comparatively modern variation of the old “saw-dust” swindling scheme. It is frequently found to be very easy to work, and the returns are sometimes large. Usually two sharpers act in concert, although sometimes one plays the game alone.

The victim selected is usually a man greedy for gain, rather “tight-fisted,” and one who is supposed not to be over scrupulous. Considerable care is exercised in selecting the person on whom it is to be played. He is approached by one of the confidence men, who informs him that he has on hand a large money-making scheme, the probable profit of which will run up to at least $100,000. The sharper displays plenty of money and soon succeeds in convincing the prospective dupe that he is a man of large wealth. The interest of the victim having been awakened, it not infrequently happens that he invites the confidence operator to be a guest at his house. Should this occur, the invitation is invariably declined, the swindler saying that he is paying some $4 or $5 per day for his board, but that that outlay is entirely immaterial to him, inasmuch as he has an abundance of cash. After several business conversations have taken place between the two, and the cupidity of the victim has been thoroughly aroused, the sharper hands him a bill of some large denomination, with a request that he go and purchase some cigars. When he returns with the change, the operator asks him if the bill was good. Receiving an affirmative reply, he nods his head sagely, and says, “I thought so.” His next move is to take from his pocket a large roll of bills, from which he desires the dupe to select one, which he is to take to the bank in order to get change. On his return, the confidence man, after pledging him to inviolable 341secrecy, informs him that he will make his fortune in a year. He tells him that he has an uncle in the treasury department at Washington that at the time of the last printing of treasury notes, there was surreptitiously secured an over-issue of $5,000,000; that he (the sharper) is thethe agent for his uncle for the disposition of $1,000,000 of the sum. He adds that he cannot allow any single purchaser to take more than $10,000 or less than $3,000, but that within these limits he will dispose of these bills, printed from genuine plates and on government fibre paper, at the rate of 50 cents on the $1.00.

The greenhorn thus sees the way clear to a speedy, even if dishonestly acquired fortune. When he has bitten at the bait and expresses himself ready to go on with the transaction, the confidence man takes him to another town, where the money is to be paid over to him. A common device then is to go to some hotel, where the money is counted out in the presence of the sucker and placed in an express envelope, which is securely sealed. The package is addressed to the victim at the town in which he resides, and the pair leave for the express office. Of course, the package which is delivered to the express company is not the one which the dupe saw sealed up. Another one, precisely similar in size and appearance, has been substituted without his knowledge. The dupe pays over his money and the sharper disappears from the scene of action.

When the victim reaches home and obtains his package from the local agent of the company, he finds upon opening it that it is filled with blank paper.

I have never known but one instance in which a man thus duped undertook to make any fuss. Usually, the sharper sends his dupe a letter, calling his attention to the fact that to attempt to stir up any difficulty will be simply to expose his own stupidity and dishonesty. This view of the matter is so eminently logical that the victim submits to his loss without a murmermurmer.

This device of confidence operators is sometimes known as the “pocket book game.”

One of the ways in which the trick is played may be thus described. A piece of pasteboard, cut in the form of a Greek cross, is folded over in such a way that the arms shall cross at the centre. A slit is neatly cut in the middle square and a small silver coin, perhaps a three or five cent piece, placed therein. Another coin of the same denomination is placed on the square itself, underneath the folded arms. The whole is then tied 342up with a piece of blue ribbon. When a “mark” has been selected, one of the two confederates who are to operate the game drops it on the road or on the sidewalk, as the case may be. The second confederate, who has managed to scrape an acquaintance with the proposed victim, comes along, walking in his company. His eye at once rests upon the peculiar looking package, which he stoops and raises from the ground. Opening it, the sharper and the dupe examine it together. The former calls the attention of the latter to the exposed silver coin. Raising his eyes, he sees his confederate approaching and looking at the ground as if for something he had lost. He directs the eyes of the “sucker” toward him and remarks that they will now “have a little fun.” Taking the coin, he hands it to the dupe, telling him to put it in his pocket. As soon as his confederate comes near enough, sharper number one asks him if he has lost anything. The accomplice replies in the affirmative, saying that it was a keepsake from his mother, which he valued highly. He describes the package, and says that it contained a coin of a certain denomination. The first confidence man thereupon produces the package, but tells him there is no coin inside of it. The pretended owner professes great surprise, and offers to bet any sum that a coin of the denomination named is within the bundle. The “sucker,” thinking that he sees an opportunity to make some money without incurring any risk, accepts the wager. The money having been put in the hands of the first confidence man, the confederate opens the package, raises the concealed slip in the pasteboard, and reveals the hidden coin. Of course he is at once declared to have won the bet.

Sometimes, instead of a piece of pasteboard prepared as described, a pocket-book with a secret compartment is employed.

Another form of the “pocket-book game” is to drop a wallet containing a considerable sum in counterfeit money. This is found by the confidence man and the “sucker.” The former, having picked it up, exhibits its contents to the dupe, whose cupidity is at once aroused. His companion offers to allow him to take the pocket-book and advertise for a reward, provided that he (the “sucker”) will give him $25. The greenhorn thinks that this is a very easy way of making money, and having no intention of advertising the finding of the wallet and being chiefly anxious to get rid of the only witness of his intended fraud, readily assents. If he offers to pay the $25 from the bills in the pocket-book, the confidence man refuses to accept them, alleging as a reason that the man who lost the money may possibly have made a memorandum of the numbers of the bills or have some other means of identifying them.

In such cases as these, the victim rarely makes complaint, for the reason that to do so would be to expose his own avarice, greenness, and dishonesty.

This scheme of fraud is sometimes successfully worked; although to operate it, it is necessary to secure a peculiarly gullible victim. Two confederates act in unison.

After a dupe has been selected, sharper number one approaches him and engages him in conversation. He soon produces a wooden tobacco box, the cover of which swings upon a pivot placed at one end. This he opens and takes out a chew, at the same time offering the box to the “sucker.” He then asks the latter if he does not admire his box, which he says was a present to him from a friend. He then closes the cover and hands it to the dupe for examination. Inside the box, is a slender wire, which, when the box is inverted, falls upon a groove in the top and effectually prevents its being opened. The greenhorn attempts to slide the cover around, but finds it impossible. The sharper laughs, and tells him that there is a little trick about the box by means of which he has won money, drinks and cigars. He then takes it in his hand, secretly unlocks it, and holding it out toward the dupe, presses on the end and tells him to try again to open it. Of course, the box being unlocked, the slide swings easily. The victim believes that the secret of opening lies in pressing on the end, and is confirmed in this belief by making repeated trials. At this juncture, upon receiving a preconcerted signal, the confederate approaches and asks for a chew of tobacco. The first confidence man hands the box to his partner, who professes to be unable to open it. “Why,” exclaims sharper number one, “this gentleman can open it easily enough.” The confederate offers to bet that he cannot. The money is produced and the stakes placed in the dupe’s hands. The latter is given the box, and, it being unlocked, opens it without difficulty. The money is then handed to the owner, and the second sharper remarks that if the gentleman can open it he can. The box is then locked by its owner, before he hands it over to his confederate. The latter makes an attempt to swing the lid, and pretending that he is unable to turn it (although he well knows the secret of its mechanism), offers to bet $100, or any sum which it is thought that the dupe may be induced to wager, that the stranger cannot open it either. The “sucker,” feeling confident that he has “a sure thing,” accepts the bet, stakes his money, placing it in the hands of sharper number one, and is given the box, which has been securely locked. When he attempts to turn the cover by pressing on the end as before, he finds it absolutely impossible to move it. Of course, the second confidence man claims the stakes, which are promptly paid him by his confederate.

This device for swindling is similar, as regards the method of its operation, to the game of the “tobacco box.”

The fraud is perpetrated in substantially the same way, and the trick consists of the use of a secret mechanism in each which so effectually prevents the opening of either of them that the dupe is put at the mercy of the sharpers.

One of the modes of fleecing a “sucker” by this means (and the same method is sometimes employed with the “tobacco box”) is to instruct him in the mode of opening the device in question under any and all circumstances. After he has thoroughly learned the whole secret of the contrivance, a confederate opportunely happens along, and after some conversation, in the course of which the particular device is produced and discussed, offers to bet that he can open it, at the first trial. The greenhorn accepts the wager and puts up his money. The second sharper, who has been posing as an entirely unsophisticated individual, takes the contrivance in his hands and, knowing the secret through which it may be worked, opens it without any difficulty, whereupon he claims and receives the stakes.

In some of its features these devices resemble the “tobacco box” and “knife.” The mode of working the cheat, however is somewhat different. Both the “padlock” and “safe” open with a lock, the operation of which is explained to the proposed dupe. After the latter believes that he thoroughly understands the entire scheme, and is willing to lend himself to the perpetration of a fraud upon someone else, a confederate conveniently appears. A bet is soon arranged between the sharper and the “sucker,” and the money placed in the hands of the man who has produced the device and explained its construction to the victim. The greenhorn, after putting up his money, proceeds to demonstrate how easily he can open the lock. The fraud consists in the substitution (or ringing in, as gamblers term it), to a different lock or safe, which is handed to the dupe instead of the one first shown him, and which he finds himself utterly unable to open for the exceedingly satisfactory reason that although the keyhole is there, the contrivance contains no lock whatever. Having failed to perform what he undertook to do, he is promptly declared to have lost his wager, and the stakes are handed over to the confidence man who has laid the wager against him.

I was once engaged in fleecing the unwary by means of one of these padlocks at Little Rock, Arkansas. Another gambler was using the same 345trick at the same place. He had in tow, as an intended victim, a “manufactured sucker,” a man I had previously instructed in the trick, and to whom I had given a padlock precisely similar to the one which was being used by the other confidence man. At the proper moment, the supposed “sucker” substituted the latter for the one handed him by the other sharper. As a matter of course, when he undertook to unlock the one which I had given him, he was able to do so without any difficulty. My rival in business was undoubtedly immensely surprised, but paid the greenhorn the amount of his winnings without question. I do not pretend to say that I was actuated on this occasion by any philanthropic motives. My act was influenced only by a desire to get the better of a man who prided himself on being so astute at working confidence games that no one could impose upon him.

This swindling trick can rarely be played except for small sums. It is usually practiced at saloons, and requires the co-operation of a confederate. One of them first enters the resort, and, after patronizing the bar, stands around after the manner of ordinary customers. At the proper moment, the accomplice enters, feigning drunkenness. He accosts his confederate—the one who first entered the drinking place—and offers to throw dice with him to see which of the two shall pay for the liquid refreshments for all present. Some conversation ensues, in the course of which the second sharper, after drawing some money from his pocket, contrives to drop a quarter on the floor. Assuming an air of drunken braggadocio, he offers to bet that no one in the room can take the quarter from under his foot, which he places directly upon the coin. Sharper number one begins to “chaff” him, and the apparently intoxicated individual, staggering to and fro, moves his foot off of the coin. As he momentarily turns his head, the confederate lifts the money from the floor and places it in his own pocket. When his accomplice again turns around, he tells him that he is exceedingly drunk, but that he will bet them there is no quarter under his foot at all. The “sucker” meanwhile stands by, an interested spectator, and an appeal to his greed for money usually induces him to make a bet with the man whom he believes to be drunk, on an issue which he considers to be a certainty in his favor. The money having been placed, the second sharper at once drops the appearance of intoxication, and drawing off his boot shows a quarter between his stocking and the inner sole. The terms of the wager having been 346that there was no coin “under his foot,” he has technically won, and the stakes—which are always held by the confederate—are handed over to him and the pair of scoundrels leave the premises at the earliest convenient moment.

This is a trick which can be played only upon individuals who are pretty nearly destitute of all sense. All that is necessary for its accomplishment, after such a “mark” has been found, is the co-operation of two confederates and a single barrel shot-gun. Inside the latter are placed two separate charges of shot, so arranged that one may be drawn from the gun without disturbing the load underneath. One of the two confidence men contrives to form the acquaintance of the proposed dupe, and after pointing out to him his confederate suggests that they withdraw the charge from the weapon and then offer to bet the individual whom he has pointed out that he (the confederate) cannot hit the victim’s hat at the first fire. The countryman usually falls in with the suggestion and the wager is soon arranged, the upper charge having been withdrawn by the confidence man in the presence of his dupe. The latter hangs up his hat and the confederate takes the gun. Of course, the under charge still remaining in the barrel, the hat is riddled with shot at the first fire and the “sucker” discovers that he has been gulled when it is too late for him to recover his money.

This is not always a safe game to attempt. I myself once came near being lynched by a crowd who were excited by the vociferous remonstrances of my dupe. I compromised the affair by returning him his money and buying him a new hat, after which I was only too happy to depart from the locality with a whole skin.

This is a confidence game, the origin of the name of which may be readily understood by any one who will take the trouble to read the following explanation of the way in which the trick is operated. It is always worked by a man driving a horse and buggy, who ordinarily selects a street corner, where two crowded thoroughfares cross, and who depends for success upon the co-operation of “cappers,” or confederates. The operator represents himself as the agent of some fictitious jewelry manufacturing concern—perhaps the “Milton” Gold Co. He informs his auditors 347that it is his intention to present each and all of them with a gift, his object being to introduce to public notice the wares of the company whose agent he is. He requests those who wish to receive presents to take their stand, in line, near the buggy, and not leave the spot until the gifts shall have been distributed. His first move is to scatter a handful of small coin—nickles or dimes—among the crowd, which are, of course, eagerly gathered up and the attention of the spectators is riveted upon a man who appears to be crazy. He then asks if there is any one in the crowd who will give him ninety cents for a dollar. Of course, a confederate promptly offers him that sum, and he thereupon at once proposes to sell it to any one who will pay him seventy-five cents; the seventy-five cents he offers to sell for a half a dollar; the fifty cents for a quarter, and so on. He next produces a quantity of collar-buttons, which he says are made of “Milton” gold, and worth a dollar each, but which he is willing to dispose of at twenty-five cents apiece, in order to introduce his wares. He also wishes customers to remain in line and hold up their hands with the collar-button exposed, in order that they may receive the twenty-five cents which he intends to give each and all of them. When he has a line of sufficient length before him, he hands to each one, in rotation, as he exhibits his purchase, a silver quarter, to which he not infrequently adds a dime, with the request that they will spend the latter sum in drinking his health.

He next produces jewelry to which he attaches a higher value, such as chains, rings or lockets. His next move is to offer for sale watches at, say, $15, $20, or $25 each. By this time he has aroused the enthusiasm of the crowd to a high pitch. They are wondering what is going to be his next move, and it is by no means difficult to find buyers for all the watches which the confidence man dares to offer. Each purchaser is informed that he will receive a liberal rebate, and the money pours in upon the man in the buggy in a continuous stream. As soon as he has obtained all that he thinks possible to be gathered in from the crowd before him, he puts the money in his pocket, whips up his horse, and drives away, leaving the bewildered spectators to mourn the credulity which induced them to part with their ready cash.

Sometimes the playing of this game is attended with more or less personal risk, and I have myself known operators of this description narrowly to escape lynching.

This is a device of confidence men, which is often successfully worked, but never for large stakes. Two confederates are necessary to its successful operation. Five business cards, the character of which is immaterial, 348are taken by one of the sharpers, who exhibits them to his intended victim. The swindler informs his dupe that it is his intention to “beat” a man whom he points out for the drinks or cigars. The individual designated is, of course, a confederate of the sharper. The latter shows the “sucker” the five cards—which always bear different inscriptions—and making a mark with a pencil on one of them, tells him that the trick consists in inducing the supposed greenhorn to bet with the “sucker” that the latter cannot select a certain card, naming the marked one, from the five cards when shuffled and exposed, backs upward. The dupe assents to the proposal, and the “capper,” after making this trifling bet, draws the wrong card, whereupon he liquidates the bills for refreshments for the crowd. The confederate then offers to wager a sum of money that the “sucker” cannot again pick out the card in question. The dupe, not perceiving the snare set for him, accepts the proffered wager, and the cards are again shuffled. This time, however, his pretended friend reverses the ends of the cards, exposing a mark precisely similar to the one which the victim has seen before, but placed upon another card. The poor fool, influenced by a desire to obtain an unfair advantage over a man whom he regards as an easy prey, eagerly points out the card which bears the private mark similar to that shown him before. Of course he loses, and the stakes are handed over to the confederate of the original swindler.

I have said that this trick is usually played only for small stakes, but I have myself won $125 thereby from a single victim at one venture.

In some of its salient features this game resembles “three card monte,” which has been already described. It is essentially a confidence game, and although very old and already frequently exposed, scores of confidence men annually reap a rich harvest from the credulity and cupidity of dupes.

The only implements necessary are three hollow shells and a small rubber ball, about the size of a buckshot. Halves of English walnut shells are the ones commonly employed, although any hollow hemispheres will answer; sometimes operators use halves of potatoes scooped out. The simplicity of the apparatus enables the “shell” man to carry his outfit with him in his vest pocket wherever he may go, and he is accordingly able to ply his vocation at any spot where he may be able to gather a crowd.

349A “capper” is an indispensable accessory. As soon as the operator has taken up his position and is ready to commence operations, the confederate mingles with the crowd. The man with the shells places them upon some flat surface and produces the ball, which he places first under one and then another of the three hemispheres. He does this rapidly, and by alternating the position of the ball is able to confuse the spectators as to its precise location. The “capper,” after watching him for a few moments, offers to bet that he can tell under which shell the ball lies. Of course the wager is accepted, and frequently several bets are made, the confederate winning and losing indifferently.

The confidence men are well aware that after they shall have victimized a “sucker,” the fraudulent nature of their maneuvers will be so apparent that it will be imperatively necessary for them to “move on;” therefore, the first object which they have in view is to ascertain the individual in the crowd, who is sufficiently gullible to serve as a dupe, who may have the largest amount of money in his pocket. To acquire this knowledge, the operator, after rolling the ball, places one of the shells over it in such a way that the edge of the latter shall be slightly raised, thus affording a plain view of the ball underneath. He then offers to bet any man in the crowd $100 that he cannot tell under which of the three cups the ball lies. The spectators, each and all, being able to see precisely where it is, those who have money reach for their pockets, believing that they will be able to secure an unfair advantage and bet with certainty. Of course, the “shell” man and the “capper” are now thoroughly informed as to which of the crowd have money, which they are willing to wager.

The confederate next approaches the individual whose location is thus rendered easy and begins to converse with him, at the same time feigning to be much excited. It is not, however, the intention of either of the two confederates that any such bet shall be made. Accordingly, the “capper” calls out to his accomplice that he does not wish to win his money unfairly, and that one of the shells is propped upon the ball. Confidence man number one looks down, as though he were glad to have his attention called to the fact, and taking the ball between his fingers begins rolling it again. After he has placed it under one of the shells, he renews his proposition to bet. At this point he makes some excuse for turning away his head. The “capper” thereupon raises the shell under which the ball is lying, and shows the latter to the dupe. As the operator again turns around and faces the crowd, his confederate offers to bet five or ten dollars that he can designate the location of the ball. “No,” says the accomplice, “I will not accept so small a bet. I want to wager fifty or one hundred dollars.” Sometimes even a larger sum is named, the amount depending upon the estimated size of the victim’s pocket book and the extent of his credulity. The “capper,” who appears to be in a 350state of great excitement, urges the dupe to accept the offer, and bet on the shell under which he has shown him the ball. At the same time, he hands him five or ten dollars, with which to complete the amount of his wager. The “sucker” usually assents, and the money is placed in the hands of the operator. The dupe then raises the shell under which he has seen the ball, when lo, it is not there. The reason is simple. The “capper,” when he raised the shell in question, removed the ball, which, owing to its small size and to its being hollow and of soft rubber, he is able easily to conceal between his fingers. Of course, the victim loses the amount of his stake.

The “capper” then professes great indignation at his stupidity, and tells him that he raised the wrong shell. To prove the truth of his words, he raises the one next to it, and exposes a ball, which he (the confederate) at the same moment dropped from between his fingers. It not infrequently happens, that the victim is satisfied that he himself made a mistake, and can be induced to make another venture. I have myself known the same individual to be so utterly devoid of sense as to lose money through this device four or five times in succession.

Another method of inducing “suckers” to wager their money at this game is known among confidence men as the “blow-off.” In this case, the confederate lifts the shell and removes the ball, at the moment when the operator averts his eyes. The confederate then offers to bet that the ball is not under any of the shells, and the greenhorn is induced to lay a wager by means of the same tactics which have been already described. Of course, the “shell” man shows a ball underneath one of the hemispheres and the dupe is declared to have lost. The ball which is shown, however, is one which either he himself or his confederate placed there at the moment of raising the cup.

One of the best known “shell men” in the country for many years, was “Jim” Miner, better known as “Umbrella Jim,” who was fond of introducing his games by singing the following doggerel:

This is an old game, but none the less successful because of its antiquity. Wherever cupidity and ignorance are found together, there this ancient device takes root and flourishes.

The outfit required is a wooden case, holding one hundred or more envelopes. Most of them contain blank cards, though inside a few are placed tickets bearing numbers. Near this case stands a show case containing a glittering array of prizes, including watches, chains, jewelry, silverware and money. The verdant speculator who is allured by this dazzling display pays a dollar for an opportunity of acquiring title to a portion of it.

Having paid his money, he is permitted to draw an envelope from the case, which he proceeds to examine. If it contains a blank card, of course he has lost. If it contains a card bearing a number, the proprietor of the case compares the number with the list and informs the purchaser whether or not he has drawn a prize. As a matter of course, there are a few comparatively valueless prizes, the winning of which is left to mere chance, although a majority of the numbered tickets do not call for any prize whatever.

The most money making feature of the scheme is worked by the aid of a “capper,” or confederate. One of these individuals saunters up to the case at a moment when he sees there a person whom he considers likely to prove a “soft mark.” The confederate and the intended victim look over the envelopes together listlessly, and the proprietor invites them each to draw one “just for fun.” The “capper” opens his envelope, and finding that he has drawn a blank remarks, “that is just my luck; I never drew a prize yet, and don’t believe that you have one in your whole outfit.” The proprietor professes much righteous indignation that his integrity should be thus assailed, and, to prove his good faith, he says: “I’ll tell you what I’ll do; I’ll make a special prize of one thousand dollars out of one of those numbers which you two gentlemen have just drawn and give you a chance to win it for five hundred dollars.” The “capper” laughs, and hands him the card which he has drawn, which is usually numbered “eleven.” The operator replaces it in the envelope and lets down the back of the show-case, in order to enter a special prize on his list. As he does so, he slips the envelope containing the ticket marked “eleven” into a little secret pocket, from which at the same time he draws another envelope holding a ticket marked “forty-four.” He then places this envelope, together with the one held by the “sucker,” in the box, in such a way that the edge of one of them rises a little above the rest. Both the “capper” and the greenhorn perceive this circumstance 352and the latter supposes it to have been the result of accident. The “capper” then draws the envelope whose corner is raised and the dupe takes the one next to it. The proprietor asks his confederate to advance his money. The latter replies that he has not more than fifteen or twenty dollars with him. “Well,” answers the operator, “put up that amount, and if you have drawn number eleven, I will pay you an amount equal to your stake.” The “capper” hands over his money, and on looking in his envelope finds that he has drawn a blank. Simulating deep chagrin, he curses his “luck.” The proprietor at this moment conveniently turns his head, and his confederate, snatching the envelope from the hand of the dupe, hastily raises the flap, pulls out a small portion of the ticket within, thus showing the tops of figure forty-four, which leads the greenhorn to believe that he has drawn the lucky eleven. This, in gamblers’ parlance, is called “giving a flash.” In ninety-nine cases out of every hundred, the cupidity of the “sucker” is aroused, and in the firm confidence that he has a “sure thing,” he pays over all the money which he has, in the hope of winning a like amount. Until the money has been paid, he is not permitted to examine his ticket. When, having paid his cash, with trembling hands he opens the envelope, he discovers that instead of the magic “eleven” he has drawn “forty-four,” having been misled by the resemblance between the upper ends of the figures “four” and “one,” shown him in the momentary glance which the “capper” gave him of the card. Of course, he is utterly without redress, and has to bear his loss with such degree of equanimity as he may be able to command.

Strange as it may appear, it is a fact that persons are found who are fools enough to be caught by this trick three times in succession. It is from the majority of such “suckers” as these that the proprietors reap a golden harvest. A man at Council Bluffs stood at the case and bought ticket after ticket until he had dropped six thousand dollars into the coffers of the scoundrels who were manipulating the device.

This game is most successfully worked by the aid of “ropers,”—by which term is meant confederates who allure, or “steer,” victims into the booth or room in which the trick is being operated. The devices resorted to by these “steerers” are numerous and ingenious. Sometimes the dupe is induced to visit the place by means of an offer to sell him a piece of cloth worth two dollars per yard for forty cents; sometimes he is shown a sample of choice tea, which he is told he can purchase at a ridiculously low price. When the greenhorn has been brought in front of the ticket case with the adjacent array of prizes, it is usually an easy matter to induce him to speculate. The “ropers” are paid a commission of forty-five per cent. on all winnings which are made from the men whom they bring in, and I have myself received commissions for this sort of work amounting to more than three hundred dollars in a single day.

Among the petty schemes to which professional sharpers have resort is one known as “betting on weight.” A single illustration, drawn from my own experience, may serve to show to the unsuspecting reader precisely the way in which this petty scheme is carried out.

The incident which I am about to relate happened at Hot Springs, Arkansas, where I had been playing poker—of course on the principles of the “skin” gamblers—in connection with a partner. We had succeeded in fleecing a “sucker” out of a considerable sum of money. He was moody over the loss of his cash, and we believed that he was disposed to be slightly suspicious. In order to disabuse his mind of any such idea, my partner accompanied him down the street, condoling with him as to his losses. My accomplice suggested to him that he might possibly “get even” with me by venturing a wager on some chance subject. “That man, Quinn,” he said, “is ready to bet on anything; he would even bet on spitting at a mark or the weight of a stone,” pointing to a rock which lay in the street. As though struck by a sudden inspiration, he suggested, “Suppose we weigh that rock and bet on a certainty.certainty. That is the only chance which we will ever have to get our money back.” The greenhorn assented, and the weight of the stone was carefully and accurately ascertained. The next morning, having been fully posted by my confederate, I walked down the street and met my partner and the dupe in company. After cordially greeting them, I asked if either of them wished to bet upon any chance whatever. After some little badinage, the “sucker” offered to bet as to the weight of the stone which he and my partner had caused to be carefully weighed the day previous. Of course I assented and the bet was made. Very much to our surprise the prospective victim had only $87 in his pocket, but this he cheerfully staked. The stone was weighed and my guess proved to be the exact weight of the rock. The reason was, that between the moment when my partner suggested the scheme to the dupe and the time the stone was weighed, we had caused to be chipped off a section, whose weight we knew exactly. The greenhorn, on this occasion, “kicked” violently and insisted upon having the stone reweighed. We found it convenient to have recourse to the scales of a Junk dealer who had been previously “fixed” for the occasion and who had officiated as “weigher” the night before. “Oh,” said the descendent of Abraham, “I din’d know vat you shentlemen’s means, I had as many as doo scales; von vat I buy mit and de odder as I sells py. I vays dit mid by separate times on each scale. Vat were you shentlemen’s want nohow?”nohow?” This argument proved conclusive and the “sucker” submitted to the loss of his $87 without further protest.

This is a very simple trick to play, after the operator has acquired the necessary degree of manual dexterity. Its success depends primarily upon sleight of hand, and secondarily upon the assistance of a confederate. In fact, the trick itself is so simple that gamblers who enjoy any standing in the “profession” rarely resort to it until they find themselves in a position where money is absolutely indispensable. Under such circumstances, blacklegs,—even those of a better class—never hesitate to resort to the grossest and most contemptible species of fraud. When one of these gentry sees that he has but one “sawbuck” remaining in his pocket, there is no device too contemptible for him to employ with a view of replenishing his pocket book.

The method of playing this trick is as follows: Two aces are selected and shown to the prospective victim. They are then placed together, the pack cut, and the two cards selected are placed upon the top of one of the piles. At this moment the confidence man—apparently by chance—turns his head. It is easy to invent a pretext. A coughing fit, a sneeze, a slight noise made by a confederate—any one of these, or a score of other excuses will afford the “capper,” (whose assistance is indispensable) an opportunity to perform his part of the scheme which will be explained below. Before the manipulator averts his eyes he says that “if they go in together they must come out together,” which is a self-evident proposition. At the moment when he turns his head the confederate raises one of the aces, and removing a number of cards from the other, turning, places them upon the remaining ace, puts the ace which he has withdrawn in the place of those which he has taken from the second pile. The “sucker” is now thoroughly satisfied that the two aces shown him cannot possibly “come in” to the pack “together.” The operator again turns around and picks up the two piles, leaving the one containing the removed ace upon the top. This latter card he conceals in his hand and commences to draw from the bottom of the pack, turning each card drawn face upward. Of course he knows the card lying directly next to the ace, which is in the middle of the pack. As soon as he sees this he is aware that the next card exposed will be that particular ace. He then repeats the remark, “if they go in together they must come out together,” and offers to bet that the card following this ace, which he shows, is its companion. Naturally, the greenhorn is firmly persuaded that this is impossible, and bets are made as to the happening of this contingency. Usually, the “capper” is exceedingly anxious to bet some trifling wager, perhaps the drinks or cigars. The sharper permits him to win and the same process is again repeated. This time the victim is induced to bet, the stakes being made considerably larger. When 355the bottom of the pack from which the confidence man has dealt is exposed, it is seen that the lower card is the other ace, the sharper having adroitly passed it from his hand to the bottom of the pack.

While this game is not well adapted to winning large sums, it is a very common thing for men operating it to take $10 or $20 from a dupe, and I have even known as much as $50 to be won through its manipulation.

A brace of blacklegs in San Francisco once swindled an innocent player out of what was to him a considerable sum of money through this means. The victim caused the arrest of the pair, and it is said that when they were brought before the magistrate for trial the court asked them to explain the manner in which the trick had been done, the sharpers having already pleaded guilty. One of them performed the trick for the edification of the court, after which the judge, turning to one of the swindlers, said: “Well, sir, I will give you one year;” and then, turning to the other, added: “I will give you six months. You may go in together, but I’ll show you that you won’t come out together.”

This is a trick of confidence operators which often proves exceedingly successful in extracting money from the pockets of men who consider themselves fairly well versed in the knowledge of the world. The outfit is very simple, and by no means expensive. A number of small cakes of soap of no particular value are procured, or sometimes soap is bought in bars, which are cut into pieces of the desired size. A quantity of cheap pasteboard boxes, each having a drawer somewhat larger than is the piece of soap which it is to contain, are procured and soap placed inside of them. In order to work the game, a room—usually one opening off the street—is rented. The “soap man” takestakes his position on a raised platform, and when a crowd has gathered to see what is going on he takes out a cake of cleansing soap, i.e., a preparation for removing grease and similar substances from cloth. He proceeds to expatiate upon its merits, illustrating his remarks by experimental demonstration. If he is a good talker, and intersperses his remarks with a few interesting anecdotes, he succeeds in attracting and keeping the interest of his audience. When he has proceeded far enough in his remarks he informs his listeners that the manufacturers of this wonderful preparation are seeking to introduce it in a somewhat novel way; that they propose to place a given amount of currency in a certain number of boxes together with a cake of soap in each. These boxes, he says, will be thoroughly mixed and every purchaser will be allowed to select any three boxes (the price of which 356will be $1.00) from the entire number offered. To prove his sincerity and truthfulness he draws from his pocket several bills, of denominations ranging from $1.00 to $20.00, and announces that he will place them inside the boxes in the presence of the crowd. He takes the bills in his hand, one at a time, folds them up carefully, and apparently inserts them in the boxes. Each box, after the bank note has been placed in it, is dropped into a large leather sachel. When he has disposed of all the bills, he takes the sachel in both hands and shakes it, with a view to thoroughly mixing the boxes. He then opens it and offers to allow anyone present to select three boxes on the payment of one dollar. It is the easiest thing in the world to sell the soap, but no legitimate purchaser ever succeeds in obtaining more than a single dollar bill. The reason is that the vendor adroitly “palms” off the bills of larger denominations, substituting therefor dollar bills which he has previously rolled up and which he holds in his hand at the time that he apparently inserts the large bills into the boxes in the presence of the spectators. In other words, when the boxes have been dropped into the sachel and mixed none of them contain a note of a larger denomination than one dollar, the confidence man having still in his possession all of the large bills. When it is remembered that not more than one box in ten contains any money whatever, the chances of drawing a prize are readily seen to be exceedingly small. The buyers, however, believe that they have seen the large bills placed in the boxes before their eyes, and part with their money very readily. It may be easily seen that “cappers” are almost indispensable in this as in so many other confidence games. It is not necessary that any signal should pass between the confederates. The “capper” usually places his three boxes in his pocket as soon as he has purchased them. Some one in the crowd is always certain to ask him to open them. At first he objects, but finally yields to persuasion. He takes out three boxes from his pocket and one of them is always found to contain a large bill. The explanation of his apparent good luck is very simple. When he puts the three boxes in his pocket he had there another one, precisely similar in size and appearance, containing the bank note which he exhibits to the crowd. When he drew three boxes from his pocket, he took the one which he previously placed there together with two of those which he had taken from the bag.

This is a confidence game which is one of the most direct outrages ever perpetrated upon an unsuspecting dupe. And yet, like most similar tricks, it can be successfully worked only when the proposed victim is ready to sacrifice his own integrity to his avarice.

Two foot racers act in concert with a third man, who personates the “backer” of one of them. The first racer gains the confidence of the man to be swindled, who must necessarily possess some means. He convinces him by actual ocular demonstration that he is a speedy runner, and one on whom it is safe to lay a wager. This done, confidence man number two makes his appearance, attired very much after the fashion of a tramp. He says that he is anxious to find some one with whom to run a race for money. Naturally, his appearance not being such as to inspire any faith in his ability as a pedestrian, a match is soon arranged with the fleet-footedfleet-footed runner. The newcomer puts up all the money which he has—perhaps some $30 or $40—together with his watch, and the race is run. The tramp is beaten “out of sight.” The latter, apparently considerably chagrined, says that he is glad that his “uncle”“uncle” (or some other friend, whom he named), was not there, inasmuch as he would have wagered $20,000 upon him. He adds that the mysterious “uncle,” or friend, has a “barrel of money,” and would have been willing to have staked it all upon his success.

The winner of the race thereupon proposes that he bring his “uncle” there, and that another race be arranged, and it will be an easy thing to “beat” his friend out of a large sum of money, which may be divided between the pair. Of course, as the reader has probably already understood, the two racers are confederates. The proposed victim—the man who has been backing the first racer—falls in with the suggestion and urges the mysterious tramp to induce his friend to come. The second sharper, however, professes great reluctance to defraud his “uncle,” and says that he will go to the latter’s farm and go to work. His confederate and the dupe accompany him to the train, the former constantly urging him to consent to the proposed scheme. At the last moment, the simulated virtue of sharper number two vanishes, and he says that he will induce his “uncle” to come down and lay a wager upon his success, provided that his connection with the scheme shall be kept forever a secret.

In due time the tramp returns, accompanied by an individual to personate the moneyed man who is to put up the necessary stakes. Arrangements are made for the race, the bets are made, and at the termination of the contest it is discovered, much to the surprise of the victim who has been backing the winner of the first race that the tramp, who was on that 358occasion so easily defeated, has won without difficulty. The stakes are paid over to the winners, and the party of scoundrels at once take their departure.

Sometimes the swindlers find it necessary to place a long distance between themselves and their victims. The latter are tolerably certain to discover, without much reflection, the manner in which they have been defrauded, and they are apt to follow up the gang in company with officers of the law. I have known cases where confidence men who have successfully worked this scheme, have been compelled to disgorge the lion’s share of their ill-gotten gains.

This is another of those bare-faced schemes of fraud which are daily perpetrated upon an unsuspecting public. The method of operation is extremely simple, and it may be that some of the readers of this volume may be able to discover, from the description here given, the manner in which a gross imposition has been practised upon them. The “flim-flam” operator appeals, not to the avarice but to the good nature of his victim.

The favorite localities for playing the trick are fairs, circuses and railroad trains, and—as in the case of a large number of confidence games—large sums are sometimes paid for the “privilege.” The innocent looking news agent or peanut boy is often an adept at practicing this sort of fraud. The accommodating individual whom you see outside of a circus tent, carrying a small valise, from which he produces tickets which he offers for sale is apt to be a “flim-flam” sharper, who pays a percentage of his gains to the proprietors in consideration of being allowed to carry on his practices with immunity.

The game is always worked in substantially the same way. To begin with, the train boy, after selecting his victim, (otherwise termed “mark,”) he approaches him with an offer to sell something—perhaps a book, perhaps candy, possibly fruit. It is of comparatively little consequence whether he buys or not. The next move of the sharper is to ask the proposed dupe to give him a bill of large denomination for several small ones, which he produces. Sometimes he introduces a quantity of small change. After counting the money into the stranger’s hands, the swindler begs him to count it back to him, in order that he may see that it is right. This done, the scoundrel “palms” one of the bills or pieces of money, i.e., secretes it in the palm of his hand, and turns over the cash (apparently intact) to the “sucker,” who, nine times 359out of ten, puts it into his pocket without looking at it. Men on circus grounds operate in the same way, though generally for larger amounts. Sometimes a bill is folded in the middle, so that each end may count for a separate note of the same value.

As illustrating the inherent uncertainty of betting, the following story of the adventure of an old negro slave in Alabama during the days before the war may serve at once to “point a moral and adorn a tale.” “Old Mose” was a tried and faithful servant whose inclination towards amusement his mistress was disposed to indulge. One day the aged African became possessed with the demon of gambling, and confided his desires to his mistress. Finding that remonstrance was in vain, she finally determined to give the old man five dollars, with which he might amuse himself in any way that he saw proper. The negroe’s eyes brightened and his ivories were displayed from ear to ear as he grinned his thanks and disappeared. A few hours later he returned, with the same expression of supreme satisfaction still illuminating his black face. “Well, Mose,” said his mistress, “did you have a good time gambling?” “Laws, Missus, I’se done had heaps o’ fun out o’ dem five dollahs dat you gib me.” “How much money did you win, Mose?” asked his patroness. “Won lots,” was the reply; “you jes’ wait an’ let dis chile tell you. You see, I goes down de street an’ I meets a white gem’man, and we gambles on de kind o’ folks what comes ’long. I took de white people, an’ he took de black fo’ks. Fust dere comes ’long a white gem’man, an’ he gibs me a dollah. (Now, Missus, you jes’ count an’ ses how much I wins.) Den dere comes ’long two mo’ white gem’men, an’ he done gib me two mo’ dollahs. Dat makes free?” “Yes, Mose.” “Den comes free mo’, an’ he gibs me free mo’ dollars; how many’s dat, Missus?” “Six, Mose.” “Den dere was four mo’ white folks, an’ I gets four mo’ dollars; how many was dat, Missus?” “Ten dollars. Mose; you did very well; give me your money and I will take care of it for you.” “Hol’ on, Missus,” said the old darkey, “de game didn’t close right dar’. Me an’ de white gem’man stood dar fo’ about five minutes, an’ ’long comes a cullud fun’ral, and wiped dis heah niggah right off de face of de yarth.”

At this point in the conversation, Moses’ master made his appearance on the veranda, entering through an open window. He had overheard 361the narrative of the negro and thought that it would be a favorable opportunity for him to offer a little friendly advice. “Mose,” said he, “that man knew that funeral was bound to pass that spot inside of twenty minutes after you got there. My boy, never attempt to gamble with a professional, for he is sure to ‘ring in’ a cold deck on you every time.”

A typical Western gambler, well known among the profession but whose name it is unnecessary to mention, tells the following story of his experience at a game which is not generally known to the public. It is designated by the euphonious appellation of “fly loo,” and was first played in this country either in Texas or New Mexico. The method of play is simplicity itself. Each man lays a piece of sugar on the table and the first one that gets a fly loses the drinks or stakes. The gambler in question was one day sitting in a resort at Denver, when a smooth-faced gentleman from the East walked in and suggested “fly loo.” His proposition was accepted, and two lumps of sugar having been procured from the bartender, the pair sat down to await the result. It had been stipulated that the owner of the lump on which the first fly rested was to be considered the loser and should pay the other a dollar. The first fly alighted on the lump of the gambler, as did also the next eight. It began to dawn upon him that the man from the Atlantic coast must have doctored his lump, inasmuch as not a solitary fly would approach within a foot of it. He felt sore, but just then he conceived a brilliant idea. He proposed that they try ten “goes” at $10 a-piece. The stranger assented and the money was put up. The loser then insisted upon a change in the rule, and that the man on whose lump the first fly alighted should win instead of lose. To his great surprise the smooth-faced stranger readily assented. No sooner, however, had the lump been placed upon the table than the flies began to swarm all over the latter’s lump for ten straight times, not one coming near that of the man who had proposed the change. Of course the Eastern man pocketed the stakes and the other was probably the maddest man in Colorado. He knew he had been fleeced, but he was utterly unable to tell how it had been done. Finally he called the stranger aside and said, “My friend, don’t think I am impudent or inquisitive, but I have a curiosity to know how you wound me up. If you will put me on, I’ll promise not to work the game in your territory, and buy a bottle of wine.” He laughed and said, “Well, I don’t mind telling you that I put a drop of stuff on my lump that will make a fly hunt for the next county mighty quick.” II thought as much,” answered the loser, “but how about the last time we played?” “Oh, I supposed you would want to switch, so I just changed lumps on you.”

The most astute professionals sometimes over-reach themselves. I was once playing poker with a young man, an entire stranger to me before the commencement of the game, whom I soon discovered to be a practiced gambler. It did not take me long to discover the particular species of the trick which he was playing. I recognized what is known among the “profession” as the “top stock.” An explanation of this trick may be found in the chapter relating to poker. It is enough to say here that it consists in so arranging the hands, that the proposed victim, when he asks for fresh cards, shall receive a good hand, while the dealer himself, who of course takes the second draw, gets a better one. After a little experimenting, I found that when I asked for three cards on the draw, I usually received three of a kind. While my opponent would always draw three or more, but invariably succeeded in getting three of a higher denomination than mine. After thoroughly satisfying myself as to his tactics, I continued playing until I thought that the time had come for me to act. I had resort to a little policy, whereby I succeeded in winning all the money which he had with him beside a silver watch, the value of which, however, scarcely exceeded $1.25. After the deal, when he asked me how many cards I wanted, I replied that I had made a mistake in my hand; that I supposed I had a pair, but found that I had not. Throwing down my cards upon the table, I asked for five. Any old poker player will understand the effect of such a demand upon the arrangement of the cards by the dealer. For the benefit of those who have never played poker, I may explain that the six upper cards had been previously “fixed” in such a way that I should receive three of a kind, while he would get another set of three but of a higher denomination. By drawing five cards I completely overturned his scheme. As a matter of course, I drew what is known as a “full house,” i. e. three of one denomination with a pair of another. My unfortunate adversary had been rash enough to make his wager before the draft, feeling confident that I would either “stand pat,” i. e. bet on the hand which I originally received, or draw one, two, or perhaps three cards.

He cherished a conviction that in any event he would be able, through the aid of his “top stock” to hold a hand superior to mine. When he perceived that I had seen through his little game and had secured five of the cards which he had cunningly arranged, he was well aware that I held a “full.” His face turned all the colors of the rainbow, and he made no objection whatever to my gathering in the stakes. At his earnest request, I returned to him his watch, but accompanied this friendly act by a bit of advice to the effect that the next time he tried to play “top stock” on a stranger he had better make himself tolerably certain that his antagonist had not seen the same game played before.

The confidence which some men possess in their own ability to play card games which they know nothing about would be sublime if it were not so amusing. I was sitting one evening in a gaming house watching a number of men playing poker. While thus employed a broken-down gambler approached me and asked me if I would lend him $5.00 with which he might play against the faro bank. He added that he would much rather that I should loan him $20.00 in order that he might sit in the poker game. I asked him if he was “dead broke,” and he replied that he was. I next asked him if he was a good poker player, and he made answer that he was the best bottom dealer in the country. I looked at him a moment and said, “It seems rather strange to me that an expert like yourself should be without any money. I used to travel a good deal in Arkansas, where the people managed to support themselves in part by killing ’coons and selling the skins. These skins they generally hung up on the outside of the house to dry. When I came across a cabin, the outer walls of which were covered with skins, I made up my mind that the occupant was a good hunter. When I saw only one or two hanging out, I felt satisfied that the owner was either very shiftless or a very poor shot. Now Bob,” I continued, “if you are as good a poker player as you claim to be, where are your ’coon skins?’”

The same question might be asked of many men who make great pretensions to ability in higher walks of life than gambling. Whenever I hear a man loudly boasting of his own ability who cannot point to any one great thing which he has achieved, I always feel like asking him “where are your coon skins?”

On general principles it is usually safe not to lend money to a man who promises to “pay you in the morning.” Professional gamblers form no exception to the general operation of the rule. A blackleg, who was known among the fraternity as “Stuttering Jim,” once fell into misfortune in St. Louis, while I was a resident of that city. Just what fraud he had been guilty of, I do not now recall; but I remember that the police justice fined him five dollars. “Jim” had no money, and appealed to the clemency of the court for a suspension of the fine. The justice asked him if he was willing to leave town, and if so how long he would require to get beyond the territorial limits of the State of Missouri. The culprit eagerly grasped at the prospect of freedom, and turning to the magistrate with a beaming smile, said: “J-j-judge, wh-what’s the b-best time ever m-made over the b-bridge?” His appeal was not without 364effect, and the judge allowed him six hours in which to take his final departure from the western shore of the Mississippi. I was among the first men whom he met after his exit from the court house. Concealing the fact of his trial and sentence, he asked me for a loan of $10 “t-till m-morning.” I saw that he was in distress and at once made up my mind to give him the money which he needed. However, I determined to make use of caution. “Jim,” said I, “are you sure that I will see you in the morning?” “W-well, John,” said he, “n-n-not if I see you f-first.” It remains to be added that “Jim” has up to this time scrupulously kept his promise. I have never seen him from that day to this; probably when I meet him he will take great pleasure in redeeming his word.

Among the common devices of faro gamblers to entrap victims, few are more common than to suggest to the proposed dupe that he enter a gambling house and play against the bank, at the same time receiving the secret assistance and co-operation of the dealer. That is to say, the latter individual, who works for a salary, will so manipulate the cards that the outside player shall win the proprietor’s money, after which the dealer and the winner will divide the profits. This scheme usually works well and even old gamblers are sometimes entrapped by it. A veteran dealer of New York City is authority for the following statement, a reminiscence of his own experience:

“A few years ago I was one of the dealers in a faro bank up town, and an acquaintance whom I liked very much was a dealer in a similar bank in the next block. Both were reputed to be, and undoubtedly were, ‘square’ games. The proprietor of the game my friend dealt for, however, was known to be extremely close and mean in money matters, and everybody disliked him, but as his game was trustworthy, his place was well patronized.

“I was not surprised one day when my friend came and told me that ‘Old Nick’ (that’ll do for the proprietor’s name) owed him $5,000, representing his interest in the game in lieu of a salary, which he refused to pay over. My friend proposed that I should come to his bank and play while he was dealing, and he would fix the deck so that I could win out what ‘Old Nick’ owed him and something over for myself. Being a dealer myself, and knowing that a sign from my friend would indicate just how the cards were to run through a deal, I saw that it was possible for me to right my friend’s wrongs and make a few hundred out of ‘Old Nick.’

365“The first night everything seemed to go wrong. I got the sign to play ‘single out’ and the cards ran ‘double out,’ and when I played ‘double out’ they ‘singled out.’ I lost $1,000 and left the place, as mad a man as you ever saw. The next day I met my friend, who declared that it was the most astonishing thing he ever heard of, that he had acted squarely all through, and that somebody must have changed the decks in the drawer of the table so that he got hold of the wrong one. He offered to make my loss good if I did not win out the full stake at the next sitting. He seemed square and I believed him. The next night I lost $2,000 more, and when I left the place I was crazy mad. I didn’t dare say anything there, for it would have hurt me at my own place to have it known that I was in a ‘brace’ at another man’s game. I decided to wait until the next day and give the false friend a thrashing at least.

“The next day, however, the bank was closed and the dealer had skipped. ‘Old Nick’ had lost money on the races, had grown desperate, had ‘plunged’ and ‘gone broke.’ His partner, my friend, the dealer, knew that the bank would close and roped me in for a ‘stake’ to get away with. I was terribly angry, for I had been influenced almost entirely by my sympathy for my friend and I wanted to help him out.

“Did I ever get my money back? Well, I should say I did! I was out West two years ago, and one night strolled into a game in Kansas City. Just as I was about to buy a stack of chips, I noticed my friend in the look-out’s chair. He saw me at the same time, and motioned for me to come to him. As I approached he drew out a roll of money and said, ‘Here’s the dust you loaned me some time ago; much obliged, old man.’ I counted it and found it correct. Calling another man to the chair, he led me aside and explained that he had been in a desperate strait at the time and had always intended to repay me. He was now prosperous, he said, and making a fortune rapidly. I played at his game all that night and lost just the $3,000 he had paid me. I felt very queer when I went away, but I felt too cheap to say or do anything. I have come to the conclusion that there’s no money in ‘bucking the tiger,’ unless you are behind the game. I never play in front of the table any more. I can’t afford it.”

There exists a class of people—and its members are far too numerous—who, while condemning gambling in the abstract, and particularly outspoken in their denunciation of the vice when practiced by members of their own family, nevertheless have such a respect for money, that “lucre,” even when won at the gaming table, is not too filthy to command respect for its owner. The motto of such people seems to be: “Get money—honestly 366if you can, but get it.” An old acquaintance of mine once told me the following story, which is an illustration of the foregoing reflection, for the truth of which he vouched:

The young man, whom we will call James, once lived in a small Western city. His fondness for amusement led him into bad company, and he plunged into all sorts of dissipation, soon becoming a devotee of the green cloth. His parents deplored his lapse from morality, and frequently consulted together as to the best means of effecting his reformation. To deny him admission to the house might be to send him to ruin; persuasion they had found to be utterly without avail; example he derided and threats were a subject for mockery. Accordingly, they decided to adopt an attitude of what might be called, for want of a better name, “armed neutrality.” They determined to allow him to occupy his room and take his meals at home, but never to speak to him. The wayward son used to return to the paternal roof at all hours of the early morning, and after a few hours of sleep would make his appearance at the breakfast table. His father filled his plate and his mother poured his coffee. The rest of the family carried on a conversation, but no one spoke to James. One night the youth had been “playing in great luck,” and had returned home a winner to the amount of several hundred dollars. The following morning at the breakfast table his little sister asked her mother for half-a-dollar, with which to buy a school book. The old lady referred her to her father, who looked sour and querulously said that he saw no reason why he should buy it. The prodigal had heard what had been said, and drawing a roll of bills from his pocket handed the little one a five dollar bank note, saying: “Here, sis, get your book and keep the change.” His mother looked at the old man, and the latter stared at his son. Raising her spectacles and looking at her erring boy with a glance of mingled affection and pride, she asked in honied tones: “James, son, dear, is your coffee sweet enough?”

In various chapters throughout this work, I have related experiences of my own in which I have exhibited myself in the light of being naturally rather timid. I do not think that my inborn proclivities were towards physicalphysical cowardice, however much they may have inclined me toward vice. The truth is, that “conscience doth make cowards of us all.” A few incidents in my own career may serve to illustrate the truth of this principle.

I was once playing poker with a partner and a stranger. My confederate and myself had succeeded in winning a large amount of money from the greenhorn who had been rash enough to try his luck against us. 367Success had so far emboldened me that I lost all regard for ordinary prudence. I dealt the greenhorn four kings and gave myself four aces. He was irritated in no small degree by his losses and determined to bring matters to a focus. When he looked at his cards and saw that he had four kings, he drew a Remington six shooter from his pocket, and laying it upon the table announced his intention of shooting any man at the board who had a hand to beat his. My partner was struck with terror and signalled me to allow the man to win. I felt rather uneasy myself, but determined that if I must die I would at least pass out of this life with the best grace possible under the circumstances. Looking at my adversary with a bland expression I said, in dulcet tones, “you don’t mean before the draw, do you, sir? I would rather look for a free lunch than for a fight any day.” This remark appeared to mollify him somewhat, and I asked him how many cards he wanted. He looked at me grimly and said, “None.” “Well,” said I, “I believe that I shall have to take two.” Having said this, I discarded two aces, drawing in exchange the first two chance cards which happened to lie upon the top of pack. Of course, this ruined my hand, but I am inclined even to this day, to believe that it saved my life.

I recall another incident which illustrates the same principle. In almost every country town there are many men who like to be regarded as “sports.” They consider themselves champion card players, and are fully convinced of their own ability to get the best of any stranger who may put in an appearance. When they find that they have “caught a Tartar” and are losing money, they not infrequently resort to the expedient of calling in some local bully, whose brawny arms and ponderous fists may accomplish, through brute force, what they have failed to effect through skill. I once found an illustration of this fact in a small Missouri village.village. I was playing poker in a room at the hostelry, with about as unsavory a lot of country “bummers” as it was ever my bad fortune to meet. Among them were men whose physiognomy indicated that for many years they had held their own through the aid of sling shots, jimmies and other “implements of modern warfare.” The nose and cheeks of most of them testified to their devotion to the pleasures of the wine cup,—or perhaps I should say their fondness for the consumption of corn whiskey. I was playing with marked cards, and was gradually but surely winning all their money. Their disgust knew no bounds. It was not long before there entered upon the scene an American citizen of African descent upon whose ebony skin charcoal would have made a white mark. His scarred and battered face gave him the appearance 368of a veteran of the prize ring who had returned home for purposes of recuperation and repairs. He modestly took his seat in a corner of the room, and half closing his eyes began to sing this plaintive ditty:

I had heard of “old black Dan” from men of my profession who had visited the same town before. He was an amateur prize-fighter, who, with proper training, might have made his mark as an athlete. To pick a quarrel with him was the last ambition that I had on earth. I thought it was best to meet him on his own ground. Accordingly, I counted up the value of the pile of chips which I had before me, in order that I might know just how the game stood at the moment of his entrance. Without betraying any apparent emotion, I began to sing the following impromptu doggerel:

It is hardly necessary to add that “Dan” got his full proportion of the winnings.

In “skin” gambling houses of a low order, it is not an uncommon practice for those around the table to steal the chips of a player whose attention is temporarily diverted from the game. I once had an experience of this character in Wichita, Kansas. I had a considerable “stack” lying before me on the table and turned away my head for some purpose or other, to find on again looking at my pile that my chips had been abstracted. I was aware of the character of the house in which I was playing and knew that stringent measures must be adopted if I expected to recover my stolen property. Accordingly, drawing a pistol (which, by the way, was not loaded) from my hip pocket, I stated in a loud tone of voice that if the man who had taken my chips did not return them to me at once I would shoot him on the spot. My action produced a profound sensation. Not less than a half dozen men sitting near at once handed me chips, the result being that when I returned my revolver to my hip pocket and resumed my seat I had more than when I had turned away my face from the table. As the game proceeded, I observed that a typical Westerner was watching me very closely with a look the reverse of friendly. When I had finished playing I arose from the table, cashed 369my chips, pocketed my money and walked out of the room and down stairs. On reaching the side-walk I found the unpleasant looking stranger close at my heels. “Look here,” said he, “you said something upstairs about somebody stealing some of your chips. I reckon that you meant me. You’re kind o’ handy with your shooting iron; I’m going to give you a chance to use it.” At the same time he drew his own pistol. I perceived that I was in a dilemma. My weapon was not loaded and the stranger’s manner left no doubt as to the sincerity of his intentions. “How are we going to settle this?” he went on. I suggested that we should shake hands, turn back to back, each walk fifteen paces, and then turn and fire. To this he agreed. We carried out the programme up to the point of turning back to back and starting to walk the prescribed number of paces. With solemn and stately tread he measured off his portion of the stipulated distance, but when he turned around I was no longer visible to the naked eye. While he had been stepping off fifteen paces, I had contrived to cover two hundred.

One of the best known characters around Sioux City in 1876 was a scout known as “Wild Bill.” He had a weakness for poker, though he knew no more about the game than a baby. The consequence was that he was “picnic for the sports,” and they fleeced him right and left. He was repeatedly warned that he was being robbed, but he always replied that he was able to take care of himself. One night he sat down to play with a fellow named McDonald, a “fine-worker” and expert. McDonald did as he pleased, and the scout found his pile getting smaller and smaller as the game progressed. As he lost he began drinking, and midnight found him in a state of intense but suppressed excitement, a condition that made him one of the most dangerous men in the West. It was at this juncture that McDonald, smart gambler as he was, made his mistake. He should have quit. However, “Wild Bill’s” apparent coolness deceived him. Finally the scout seemed to get an unusual hand and began to bet high and heavy. McDonald raised him back every time, until finally the top of the table was out of sight. At last there was a call. “I’ve got three jacks,” said McDonald, throwing down his hand. “I have an ace full on sixes,” replied Bill. “Ace full on sixes is good,” said McDonald cooly, turning over his opponent’s cards, “But I see only two aces and a six.” Whipping out a navy revolver, the greenhorn said in a tone of determination, “here’s your sixes, and here,” drawing a bowie-knife, “is the one spot.” “That hand is good,” said McDonald blandly, arising, “take the pot.”

The “telegraph,” as explained in the chapter on Poker, is a favorite resource of professionals. It is not always easy to employ this stratagem, but when it can be employed successfully the results are of a sort extremely satisfactory to the manipulators. While I was running a saloon in Columbia, Missouri—which was in fact, but a cloak for secret “brace” gambling—I had an apparatus of this sort attached to a peep-hole in such a manner that I could readily signal to my confederate when it was safe for him to bet high. Of all victims in the world the “skin” gambler is especially rejoiced to meet a man who is in the habit of drinking to excess. During my entire career as a gambler I always felt reasonably sure of winning the money of such a man. On the particular occasion to which I am about to refer, two individuals, both somewhat inebriated, dropped into the saloon, and it was by no means difficult to engage them in a game of poker. My partner, whose name was Forshay, sat at the table together with the strangers, while I retired to a convenient spot in order to work the telegraph apparatus. The device succeeded admirably. Forshay experienced no difficulty in winning the money of the chance visitors, but in his exhilaration over his success he forgot prudence. The wire went through the floor; two casual customers entered the place and called for drinks; Forshay jumped up from his seat to wait on them, and forgetting in his excitement that the secret wire was attached to the bottom of his trouser’s leg by means of a fish-hook, omitted to detach the same. The result was that he went sprawling full length upon the floor, the entire mechanism of the machine being exposed to the curious eyes of any member of the vulgar herd who might have happened to be about. The situation was a critical one, but Forshay rose equal to it. One glance towards the table satisfied him that the two “suckers” were so far gone in their cups that any man of average intelligence might have driven a royal Bengal tiger across the table without attracting their attention.attention. Forshay himself was so far gone under the influence of the “ardent” that a small object, such as a jack rabbit, might have escaped his notice, but his fall had a sobering effect upon him. When he arose from the floor his clothes were covered with sawdust, and he was altogether as disreputable an object as one would wish to see. Brushing the dirt from his knees and apologizing for the torn condition of his nether habiliments, he resumed his seat at the table, which he occupied just long enough to detach the hook from his clothing. He waited upon the customers and returned to his place without having attracted the attention of the greenhorns. This anecdote has a moral of its own. In the first place, it is in itself a condensed temperance lecture; in the second, it may serve to convince the reader that however attractive a saloon may be, he can 371never determine by himself what sort of risk he runs by engaging in a “friendly” game, at any of the tables which the hospitable proprietor offers for his use.

The excitement of play has prompted men to wager almost everything that they possess, and sometimes a good deal that they did not own, but it is doubtful whether any game was ever played for quite as strange a stake as that once indulged in by a professional gambler who was temporarily “under a cloud” in Georgia. The blackleg in question had become involved in a dispute with one of the natives over a game of cards, and the disagreement had resulted in the Georgian going to the hospital and the gambler to jail. Popular prejudice against gambling ran high in the community at the time, and the professional was advised by his counsel that he was likely to have a rather hard time in getting out of the scrape. While a prisoner, he cultivated the acquaintance of the sheriff, whom he found to be a good-natured, jovial sort of a fellow. One day he discovered, by accident, that his custodiancustodian was a devotee of faro. It appeared that he had been moderately wealthy at one time, but had lost nearly all his property in playing against faro banks, and would still walk ten miles through a swamp to get a chance to play again. The gambler saw his opportunity. He chalked out a layout on the floor of his cell, procured an old pack of cards and proceeded to deal faro for the sheriff. Buttons were used for chips, and the officer of the law would squat outside the grated door of the cell and tell the prisoner where to place his bets. In a few days the gambler had all of his ready cash. Then he sold a mule and lost the proceeds. Head by head of the sheriff’s live stock went the same way. Then he put up his watch and chain and a suit of clothes. The professional won them and insisted upon their delivery to him. In a week the prisoner’s cell presented the appearance of a country store. It contained boots, hams, a pair of scales, all the sheriff’s stationery, a barrel of flour, a saddle and a feather bed. At last the Chief Executive Officer of the county came to the cell to interview his prisoner. “John,” said he, “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. You have won everything I can move except the old woman and the kids. Now I’ll play you a game of seven-up for all that I have lost against your liberty.” The prisoner promptly assented. They played through the grated door, and it was probably the most exciting game to both parties that either of them had ever indulged in. At last the score stood six to six. The gambler turned up a jack. “That puts you out,” said the sheriff and he unlocked the door; “now get out.” The blackleg lost no time in taking advantage of the permission. The Sheriff fired a shot 372at his retreating form, undoubtedly claiming that this right was reserved to him by the terms of the wager. Probably his excitement rendered him nervous; at all events the charge passed over the head of the fleeing ex-prisoner and crippled a darkey in an adjoining corn-field. The gambler who narrates this bit of experience always assures his auditors that only the pressing nature of his business prevented him from stopping to inquire how seriously the negro was hurt.

The following story relative to “Uncle Dan Rice,” the veteran showman, has appeared before, but will certainly bear repetition. The following version of it is given, as nearly as possible, in his own language.

“When they talk about winnin’ money at cards,” he said, “they make me tired. Why they don’t bet big money nowadays. They ain’t got the money in the first place, and if they have they ain’t got the nerve to put it up. What’s $30,000? Sho! Why I won $280,000 one night playin’ poker. I won it from two smart gamblers, too—Canada Bill and George B. Pettibone. O! they were cunnin’ but your ‘Uncle’ Dan was too smart for ’em. George Pettibone taught me to play chuck-a-luck and won my money, but I got even with him.

“It was this way: I had my circus in Cincinnati in 1851. The cholera broke out and we had to get away quick. So I loaded the whole durned circus onto a boat and started for Pittsburg, drew all my money from the bank and put aboard. I had about $350,000 in cash. Carried it in a safe in my state-room. People was a-dyin’ on the lower decks, and Canada Bill, Pettibone, my ringmaster, named Fowler, and I went upstairs to play poker. Did that to keep our minds off the cholera, don’t you see? We started in at a quarter limit. Then we got to playin’ a no-limit game, and I had ’em then. I had dollars to their buttons. About 4 o’clock in the mornin’ we got to bettin’ on a hand. All had big hands. We played with a short deck. Took everything below the tens out and threw ’em overboard. Bill and Pettibone had everything on the table—money, watches, diamonds, and everything. I told Fowler to watch ’em, and I went back to my state-room and got $250,000 out o’ the safe. My wife says—good woman, my wife—she says:

(“I had it in canvas bags. It made an armful.) ‘I’m goin’ to bet it,’ says I.

“I threw it on the table. ‘There,’ I says to Bill and Pettibone, ‘I raise you that.’ They demanded a sight. I wouldn’t give it to ’em. It 373was a no-limit game, don’t you see, and they couldn’t see my hand without putting up the money. They didn’t have any more.

“They drew bowie knives. Yes, sir, bowie knives—great big long fellers. I whispers to Fowler. I says: ‘Swipe the swag and sherry your nibs.’ That’s slang you know. Then I says to Bill and Pettibone, I says: ‘Hold on, hold on; don’t let’s have any trouble,’ and while I was sayin’ that, I picks up a chair and hits ’em both. O, I lammed ’em good. Lord, I was a strong young feller then. People came runnin’ out in their night clos’—great excitement. The cap’n wanted to throw Bill and Pettibone overboard but I wouldn’t let him. I gave ’em their watches back. I handed my wife a big diamond ring. That shut her up. Then I promised her I’d never gamble any more, and I never have.”

I have always regarded faro dealing as being but a very few degrees less respectable than operating upon the floor of the stock or produce exchange. The same essential elements are present in both cases—a disposition to obtain something for nothing, a rash venture by an inexperienced player, and a determination on the part of a practiced veteran to win the money of his antagonist. As illustrative of this point I might recount a narrative told of a certain gambler who once visited Chicago. For two or three days he played poker with decided success, and found himself the winner of several hundred dollars. Elated by his good fortune the idea occurred to him that he possessed all the qualifications necessary to operate upon a wider scale. He determined to try his luck upon the Chicago Board of Trade. One of his friends suggested to him that however much he might know about dealing or “holding out” a poker hand, he was utterly ignorant of the course and manipulation of the wheat market. His friend also urged that a capital as small as his would not go far toward the control of a “corner.” However, serenely confident of his own sagacity, the poker player determined to take the chances. Employing a broker, he made a purchase. For a day or two the market went in his favor, and he smiled at the contemplation of his own superior wisdom. He wrote to his father, who lived in a country town not more than a hundred miles away, to meet him at the depot with a carriage the following Saturday; that he was about to return home loaded down with presents for all members of the family. But, “woe betide the cruel fate!” In less than twenty-four hours after sending this exultant message a decline in grain wiped out all his margins and left him comparatively penniless. His next messagemessage to his father was of a decidedly different tenor. It ran thus: “Dear father; meet me at the nearest railroad crossing with a hat and pair of shoes. I have a blanket myself.”

One of the most bare-faced, yet at the same time most successful confidence tricks which I ever saw perpetrated was played upon an individual who prided himself on the strength of his eyesight. Going into a bar-room one day, he offered to wager that he could look directly at the sun longer than any other living man. There were three or four professional sports sitting around, one of whom promptly offered to cover any amount which he might wish to put up, provided he was allowed ten minutes to produce a contestant. The terms having been accepted, the stakes were put in the hands of a third party. The “sport” went out of the room, and soon returned, accompanied by a rather dilapidated looking individual who said that he “reckoned he could look right smart.” At the same time, he stated that he did not wish to risk blindness in both eyes, but was willing to venture one of his optics in any good cause. The party went out into the sunlight, and the man who had proposed the wager looked steadily at the orb of day for a number of seconds that was actually surprising. When pain compelled him to lower his gaze, the “dark horse” which the gambler had brought forward covered one of his eyes with his hand, and, raising his head, apparently looked at the sun without being in the slightest degree affected. He easily surpassed the record of the first gazer, and the confidence man claimed and received the stakes. The stranger reluctantly acknowledged that he had fairly lost his money and departed much chagrined. Probably he is not aware to this day that the man who had excelled him had only one eye and was looking at the sun through a glass substitute for the one which had been removed.

This term, as understood among gamblers, refers to that method of dealing which consists of drawing a card from the bottom of the pack instead of, or at the same time with, one from the top. I once met a gentleman at St. Louis, who had been a physician of some standing, but who had yielded to his gambling instincts to such a degree that he had lost not only his money, but also his self-respect. We will call him Doctor Rodman. As an illustration of the inveteracy of his passion for play, I need only mention the fact that one night, while engaged in a game of poker, I saw him draw from his mouth his artificial teeth, which were attached to a gold plate, and offer to stake them for $2.00.2.00. He claimed to be a professional, and undertook to enter into a partnership with me. I asked him to indicate what was his “strong-hold” in the line of a professional card sharper. He said that he was as good a “bottom dealer” as there wasas there was in the country. I sat in a room while he was playing and 375watched him closely with a view to ascertaining how much he knew about running the cards from the bottom of the pack. I soon saw that while he could draw two cards at the same time, one from the top and the other from the bottom, he did it so clumsily that the operation was accompanied by a resounding thwack, sufficiently loud to attract the attention of every player at the board. When he left the table and came into the open air, I told him that an idea had just occurred to me, through working which he and I together might beat the world at playing poker. I added that I knew it to be a “sure thing.” His interest was awakened at once, and he impatiently asked me to tell him what my project was. “Well,” said I, “Doctor, I have a horse pistol right here in my pocket. I’ve noticed your skill as a bottom dealer, and I believe if you will only give me a signal when you intend to draw a card from the bottom of the pack, I’ll fire off my gun at the same time, and so fully attract the attention of every man in the room that nobody will notice what you are doing. At all events nobody will hear that horrible noise that you make in practicing your little game.” The doctor’s face fell, and I have never been able to tell why, from that moment forward, he always appeared to avoid my company.

I was once traveling through the country with a partner named Barnes. He was not without some good traits, but he was unquestionably the smallest pattern of a man in money matters that I ever had the misfortune to meet. I used to twit him with this fact, and he was accustomed to account for a peculiarity which he did not attempt to deny by saying that he owed it to his grandfather, who had brought him up. He was fond of telling stories of his ancestor’s meanness. When the old gentleman used to send him down stairs, of a winter night, after apples, he used to insist upon his whistling all the time, in order that there might not be any doubt as to the fact that he was not eating any on his way back to the kitchen. Another narrative which he was fond of relating about his grandfather was to the effect that the old man once hired him to go supperless to bed in consideration of the payment of five cents. The next morning his affectionate grandparent, finding that he was exceedingly hungry, insisted upon the return of the five cents before allowing him to eat his breakfast. How much truth there may have been in these stories of Barnes I cannot tell, but I had an opportunity once of observing the closeness of his calculations. We were stopping together at a hotel. He was going out to visit a young woman that evening, and, being engaged in making his toilet and wanting some perfumery, he asked me if I would take a good-sized bottle which was standing upon the dressing case, and 376repair to a drug store to buy five cents worth of attar of roses. It occurred to me that five cents was not much money to invest in perfumery, but as I knew nothing of the value of attar of roses, I took the bottle, together with the nickel which he handed me, and started for the drug store. When I arrived there I handed the bottle to the man behind the counter, and told him that I would like to get some attar of roses. He smiled graciously, and asked me how much I wanted. In an off-hand way, for I felt rather ashamed of the mission with which I had been charged, I replied: “Oh, give me a nickel’snickel’s worth.” I shall never forget the expression that came into that man’s eyes. He glared at me for a full minute without a word. Then, in a commiserating tone he said: “My friend, attar of roses is worth twenty-five cents a drop, but if you’ll hand me your nickel I’ll let you smell of the bottle.”

It is not necessary to say that from that time forward I did not undertake to execute any commissions for Barnes of a precisely similar character. As I have said before, like a yellow dog, he was not without his good points, but to discover them required more patient assiduity than I possessed.

As is explained in another chapter, a favorite device of confidence operators is to induce a victim to back a good runner for a race which it has been previously arranged that he shall lose. The method in which the trick is played is one set forth at that part of the work above indicated and need not be more fully described. One of this class of gentry once undertook to “work” a similar trick upon a wealthy man in a western town. He succeeded in making his dupe believe that he was an expert skater. The “sucker” was fond of athletic sports and much given to betting, and in the hope that he had a fair prospect of winning a large sum during the following winter, after the ice had formed and the weather was propitious, he supported him all through the summer. The sharper lived in clover until the cold blasts of winter had touched the lakes and streams with an icy kiss. The smooth, glassy surface being well adapted to the use of skaters, his patron suggested that they should talk business; i.e., make arrangements for the skating contest. The confidence man saw that the “jig was up,” and placidly looking his host in the eye, said: “Well, Colonel, to tell the plain truth, I don’t know much about skating nohow, but I’m the doggondest best swimmer in the country.”

The preference which some men give to whisky over food is not only surprising, but at times, decidedly embarrassing to those who do not 377share in the same disposition. A striking illustration of this assertion once happened in my own experience. In company with two partners I was operating a game on the fair-grounds at Macon, Missouri. Luck had not been particularly propitious to us during the day, and night fell upon three hungry and tired gamblers, whose combined resources did not exceed $7. To get something to eat was the main trouble with us all. One of the party was deputed to go into town and purchase some provender, the fact that we were all camping on the grounds preventing our visiting a hotel or restaurant in the village. Unfortunately, the man selected for this all-important duty was one who never hesitated between a glass of liquor and a loaf of bread. I am fully aware that the same statement might be predicated concerning many a consistent prohibitionist; the difference between the prohibitionist and our messenger, however, was that while the former would take the bread, the latter invariably chose the stimulant. We waited long and patiently for his return, and as the hours passed away our hunger increased. We began to doubt whether he might not have deserted us, and the question presented itself, should we ever see him again? At last, in the glimmering darkness we discerned his form approaching with rather uncertain tread. As soon as he came within hailing distance, he accosted us.us. “Boys,” said he, “I’m all there.” To say that we felt relieved is to state the case mildly. From the length of time which he had taken to execute his commission, we felt he must have provided a “lay-out” which might have tempted Epicurus himself. The reader may judge of our disappointment when he put down a package which he evidently regarded as the most precious object of life, and on opening which, we found it to contain precisely three bottles of “appetite bitters,” for which he had paid $2.00 per bottle. We said nothing; we felt that language was inadequate to express our feelings. The hour was near midnight, and we retired to our beds upon the ground, in the hope that the sweet oblivion of sleep might bring to us a happiness, equal in degree, if differing in kind, from that which was enjoyed by our companion.

Much is said in this volume regarding the venality of the police. An efficient municipal administration can always suppress gambling, if the task is undertaken in genuine sincerity of purpose and with an inflexible resolution to succeed. As tending to show how susceptible is the average policeman to the influence of a bribe I might relate stories which would fill a work of considerably larger size than this. I have had an extensive and varied experience with the officers of the law. I was once arrested in a Missouri city for having perpetrated a scheme of fraud upon 378a verdant and gullible stranger. When the policeman placed his hand upon my shoulder and informed me that I was under arrest, my first impulse was to get away, and I twisted my body into as many contortions as are discernible upon the face of a man who is shaving himself with a dull razor. I soon found that escape was impossible. The blue-coated minion of authority held me with a tenacious grip. Then I began to appeal to the finer instincts of his nature. I told him that I was innocent; he laughed at me. I told him of my poverty, talked to him of my family, and otherwise appealed to the gentler side of his character. He listened to all I had to say in silence, and with a smile that Artemus Ward would have described as “coldly cynical.” Inserting the thumb and forefinger of my right hand in my vest I drew out a ten dollar treasury note, which I quietly slipped into the hand of the protector of public morals. His large fingers closed over it with the same firm grasp with which they had prevented my escape. Stepping back from me one or two paces, he looked earnestly into my face and exclaimed, “Well, begorrah, an’ Oi believe Oi’ve got the wrong man.”Oi’ve got the wrong man.”

There is a class of amateur gamblers who are always ready to fasten themselves upon men whom they discover to be professionals, with a view to induce or to compel them to divide their winnings. They are wont to claim that without their assistance the blackleg would not have been able to have won anything. These men are as essentially dishonest as any confidence man either inside or outside the penitentiary, but they are not usually particularly astute. I was once playing in a poker game in an Indiana town, where one of these gentry sat directly over my left hand. As the game progressed and the gentleman from the rural district perceived that I was winning largely, he began to kick me under the table. I at once perceived what he wanted and returned his kicks with great vigor. When the play was over and we had left the room, the unsophisticated individual approached me and inquired how much I thought was his share of the money which I had won. I was not at all surprised, and answered him in the blandest tone, “nothing.” “Why,” said he, “didn’t I kick you under the table that I was in with you?” “Yes,” I replied, “and didn’t I kick you right back that you weren’t?”

One evening, while I was running a saloon at Columbia, Missouri, in the absence of business I began carefully to study the characteristics of the loungers about the place. They were all broken-down “bums,” men who claimed to be gamblers, but who were never known to have a dollar 379in their pockets. As I have said, trade during the day had been very quiet, and I felt that something must be done to enliven the proceedings. Taking the gamblers apart, one by one, I lent each one of the four two dollars, with which to sit in a poker game which I told them I was about to open and in which I proposed to take a hand myself. To an old and penniless gambler, the prospect of enjoying all the excitement of poker playing without any risk is an alluring prospect. After I had “staked” them all, I produced a deck of cards and we all sat around the table to play. I had previously prepared a “cold deck,” with precisely similar backs, by taking all the aces from five packs, and abstracting sixteen cards from the original deck, to make the correct number. After playing a few rounds, the deal coming to me, I gave to each man at the table, including myself, four aces. To see the smile of satisfaction which lighted up each one of those four faces was worth all the money that it cost. Every man believed that he had a “sure thing.” Betting began and the limit of each man’s pile was soon reached. One player became so excited that he took off his coat and vest, and placing them on the table said, “let ’em go for what they’re worth; I’ll bet all I’m worth on this hand.” When the hands were “shown down” each man around the board displayed four aces. It did not take long for the true inwardness of the situation to dawn upon the minds of the crowd. A general “guffaw” followed, and I invited all hands to repair to the bar and indulge in a little liquid refreshment. My joke had cost me just $8.00, but the story was soon noised about town, and the following day I did the largest saloon business on record in the town since the first white man erected the little log cabin which marked the site of the present thriving city.

Once, while I was in partnership with a gambler named Martin, to whom I have frequently referred, I received a telegram from a lawyer in Jefferson City, Missouri, urging me to come to the latter place with a view to winning some money at poker. The source from which the invitation proceeded, left no doubt in our minds that it was possible to make a snug little sum, and we accordingly went. My partner represented himself as a drummer for a wholesale liquor house, while I posed as a traveling representative of a concern engaged in the manufacture of playing cards. We were introduced into the poker party without difficulty and with but very little ceremony. We found that there were seven players, and that the ante was five cents. They called it “playing for amusement.” We concluded that it would not be policy on our part to manifest the slightest anxiety to sit in the game, and therefore when invited to play we declined. One of the party repeatedly urged me to 380take a hand, saying that “it was only a five cent ante game which they were playing just for fun.” By way of reply I told him of an infatuated card player who had once entered a gaming house and was accosted with a similar invitation. Shivering and trembling, he declined the invitation, saying that a previous indulgence in the same sort of “fun” had compelled him to wear his summer clothes all through the winter.

Among the players was an individual whose dignified mien I shall never forget. When I was introduced to him he recognized my existence only by the most distant nod. I at once made up my mind that he was a member of that numerous class who, having a little money in their possession, consider themselves the superiors in point of wealth, intelligence and respectability to all the rest of mankind. I made no effort to force my company upon him, nor did I seek to cultivate his acquaintance.

Within a day or two, after much solicitation, Martin and I consented to play. Day by day the demeanor of the arrogant stranger became more and more cordial toward me. At first he condescended to speak to me by name, gradually he so far forgot himself as to offer me his hand, and finally grew so familiar that he used to slap me on the back on any and all occasions, however inopportune. The secret of this change of conduct on his part was that my partner and myself had succeeded in winning between $800 and $1,000.

This sum, however, did not represent a net gain to us, inasmuch as we were obliged to pay the distinguished member of the bar who had introduced us into the game, the sum of $200 as a commission for his services. The limb of the law was so elated over his sudden acquisition of this ill-gotten wealth that in a moment of confidence induced by a too free indulgence in the cup that both cheers and inebriates, he disclosed the secret. The result of this imprudence on his part was that an icy barrier was raised between him and his acquaintances. The stilted individual to whom I have already referred assured me that the attorney little thought that his fingers were “involuntarily contracting in a desire to grasp his throat in a suffocating clutch.” Martin and I left Jefferson City with damaged reputations, but with tolerably well filled pockets. We afterwards learned that the lawyer had been “barred out” from playing poker in any decent circle. This may have proved to have been a blessing in disguise, inasmuch as of all the poker players that I ever saw I think that he knew the least about the game.

Fannie May Harvey was the daughter of Dr. W. C. Harvey, of Roanoke, Howard county, Mo., a physician who, in addition to the social prominence which his profession conferred, had accumulated a competence and enjoyed a lucrative income from his practice. Tenderly nurtured in the surroundings of a home of wealth and luxury, of which she was the pride and pet, gifted with rare graces of mind and person, and endowed with education and accomplishments unusual even for one of her age and station, through the anxious care of parents ambitious for her future, brilliant in wealth and station, May Harvey had reached the bloom of womanhood singularly unspoiled by her advantages and surroundings, and possessed a sweet amiability of disposition and a gentle and loving way that endeared her to all who were brought into contact with her. As one has said, “none knew her but to love her, nor named her but to praise.” My father’s farm was but four miles distant from the home of Dr. Harvey, and being thus almost neighbors, we were thrown into contact at that stage of life when the heart of each was most susceptible to the tenderest and truest impulses of affection. That I should have surrendered to the influence of such a nature all the ardor of a youthful and undisciplined enthusiasm of love was not to be wondered at. That my affection, earnest and sincere, and unbroken as it remains to this day to her memory, should be returned might be wondered at, when it is remembered, as the reader will have before learned, that my name had already been associated with crime. The standing of my family had, however, shielded me to some extent from the consequences of the reckless tendencies of my life, and what might have been characterized by a harsher verdict was to some extent condoned as youthful wildness. This was sufficient to excuse our earlier association, and when the parents of May Harvey had awakened to the serious nature of our intimacy, our hearts had become knit with an affection stronger than parental remonstrance or interference was able to move. Once aroused, Dr. and Mrs. Harvey took active measures to separate their daughter from the danger which they foresaw from such a union. But, as it very often happens, opposition served but to fan the flame of devotion between us, and to strengthen our mutual resolve to unite our love and fortunes in an indissoluble tie. Finding her parents unrelenting, it became evident that the only course was to accomplish our happiness by means of an elopement, and this was carried into effect on the night of August 24, 1870. May’s natural aversion to this extreme and undesirable step, and her knowledge of the anger which it would awaken in the hearts of her parents were undoubtedly overcome not alone by the promptings of her love for me, but by the belief growing out of the tenderness of her heart, that her parents loved her too dearly to be long unreconciled and that regard for her happiness would overcome a temporary displeasure. Well do I remember that night on which she left the home of her childhood, the surroundings of luxury and the love of parents; a sacrifice to a greater love. Before leaving the house she played on the piano and sang “Good-Bye, Old Home,” with an intensity of feeling that none but herself realized. She bade good-bye to several friends with a seriousness which was mistaken for badinage, and I with a horse from the barn being waiting in the vicinity, she was soon speeding on the way to the opening of life’s tragedy. We rode eighteen miles to Renick, where we were married by ’Squire Butler, a justice of that place.

382As may be imagined, when Dr. and Mrs. Harvey learned of the event, their wrath knew no bounds. The brilliant hopes which they had entertained of a career of social distinction for which they had aimed to fit their favorite daughter, and to which they had looked forward to a marriage of wealth as the key, were not only dashed to the ground, but they had the added bitterness of knowing that it was not poverty alone to which their daughter had been wedded, but a poverty tainted by social disgrace, for the object upon whom she had bestowed the wealth of her affection was comparatively an outcast, a gambler by profession, and even at that time resting under suspicion. Looking back now, without prejudice and in the light of a fuller experience, I can hardly feel justified in condemning them for the bitter feeling which they displayed toward me. Yet, at the time, the animosity with which they pursued me awakened a deep, and, as I thought, justifiable resentment, for I had acted with honest motive, and, as I then thought, with pure and unselfish regard for the happiness of one who was dearer to me than life, for even to this day I can say with truth and sincerity that one of the sweetest faces in all the world to me is one that comes to me as a hallowed memory; and the sweetest thoughts are those which cluster around the life which, through good and ill report, we led together. And I can add now without resentment that it was not politic toward me nor christian duty toward her whose life was irrevocably linked to mine, that they should cast her off and bid her never again to darken their doors, and thus add to such unhappiness as her life encountered by long years of cold and unfeeling denial of the boon of forgiveness, for which the heart hungered from the parental love by which her childhood had been blessed and brightened. It is right to say that her father would probably have relented after our marriage but for the influence of her mother, a cold, haughty and determined woman, who said in a voice of steel, “she is dead to us all,” and who kept her relentless renunciation a cruel and living fact for nearly eight years.

Her father said: “As for my daughter—the worst punishment that could be inflicted upon her is to leave her alone with her villain of a husband.” It is sad to think that parental love could so soon become cold, and that a social disappointment should transform a mother’s tenderness into obdurate and unforgiving rancor to last, as it transpired, through so many years. In later years I had a boy whom I loved with all my heart, and had I under any circumstances forsaken him I would have expected God to desert me.

This separation and its cruel circumstances, and the disappointment of her expectation of a reconciliation after reasonable time were very hard upon the tender and affectionate heart of my wife. At times she would weep as if her heart would break, and yet I am confident that at no time, nor in any of the vicissitudes of her married life, did she ever falter in her faith in the love that had led her to make the sacrifice. We struggled along through the varying changes of fortune which make up the gambler’s career; at one time abounding in comforts, at another pinched for the necessaries of life. It is an old saying that love and poverty cannot dwell together in the same cottage longer than between two meals.meals. Out of my experience I can dispute that proverb in at least one exception, and testify that while love and poverty during the ten years we were together struggled through many a close place, love, though sometimes saddened with suffering and misfortunes, survived to the end in all its sweetness and sincerity, trust and hope.

On one or two occasions my wife wrote home, but always received the same reply—“I will never see you again.” After several years’ residence about Roanoke, we removed to Moberly, Mo., and there my wife was seriously ill and was anxious to have her father attend her. He came, and the fact of his visit did her more good than his prescriptions. We were told that her mother came with him on the occasion, but remained at the 383hotel, saying that if her daughter died she would then come and see her. What a grim and terrible illustration of the implacable and unhallowed spirit which now filled the bosom that once had swelled with pride and affection under the love of this unforgiven daughter’s childhood.

Soon after May’s recovery we removed to St. Louis, and here life began to wear a brighter outlook and the future to be gilded with a rosier hue. Dr. Harvey purchased for us a suite of furniture—the only thing he ever gave us after our marriage—and comfort and happiness seemed to give assurance of a permanent stay. But, alas! for a time, only! Soon the old vice of gambling reasserted its alluring sway, with the result which inevitably follows its capricious favors. Straightened circumstances again pinched us with their implacable necessities, and one day my wife sat down and penned the following letter to her mother:

Sealing this letter, which had melted her heart to tears, she handed it to me to mail. I went out, and after remaining a short time, returned but with the letter still in my pocket. A few days passed in which the clouds of adversity had seemed to gather thicker around us, and we were as a last resort, compelled to mortgage our furniture. “Well, John,” she sadly remarked, “it seems as if ma and all the world have forsaken us.” Seeing her so deeply affected, I took the letter from my pocket and placed it in her hand. “Oh!” she exclaimed, “it makes me feel so much better to know that my mother did not refuse my letter.”

Eight years had elapsed since she had looked upon the home of her happy childhood, when at length came an invitation from her mother to pay her a visit. For a long time the pride of the wife and a sensitive spirit wounded by long repulse, battled against the yearning love for father, mother, sisters, and home. At length she decided to go, but when only a few days there, her mother endeavored to persuade her to renounce me. At once her constant and faithful heart revolted, and she went out and ordered a man to call for her trunk. At the family’s entreaties she finally consented to remain, but it was with the understanding that she had made her choice and would abide by it; that if she deplored our misfortunes she did not regret her love. This second separation from home and from the luxury and magnificence which she saw around her, tempting her the more by their inviting contrast to the hard conditions by which experience had tried her married life, have always seemed to me to be the noblest sacrifice and adds a hallowed lustre to the brightness with which memory enshrines the recollection of her unfaltering love and devotion.

Two years more we struggled on through varying fortunes. Her father on one or two occasions visited her, but having failed to separate us, her mother gave no more sign of reconciliation. One Saturday evening my wife and self and our colored boy, Charley, went to market, and while out I purchased for her a satin dress, jokingly remarking that it would “help her to catch a new beau.” She replied, “I“I might be buried in it.” After purchasing our Sunday supplies, I put her and the colored boy on the car to return home, while I left all that was best and dearest to me to follow the irresistible and fatal fascination of the green cloth table. I gambled till a 384late hour and then started for home.home. On the street everything seemed to be “turned around”“turned around” to me, so that I was compelled to ask a policeman for direction home. Arriving, I retired to bed, but a strange and somber feeling had taken possession of me. An unaccountable sadness seized my soul; a vague and irrepressible sense of impending calamity, without any palpable or definable reason, weighed upon me, and I burst into a passion of tears. My wife asked me what the trouble was, but that I did not know myself.

On Monday her mother called during my absence, and induced her to go down town. They remained together at the Laclede Hotel during Monday and Tuesday nights. This absence seemed to intensify the gloomy forebodings which I could neither explain nor comprehend, nor shake off. It almost seemed as if I were going to lose the one joy of my life. The pall of gloom upon my mind was such that sleep or rest was impossible. For hours I would get up and walk the floor, wrestling with the shadowy terror which seemed so close and incomprehensible. Was it the warning from another world of a direful grief so soon to befall? The dread rustling of the wings hovering even now over the happiness of my hearthstone?

Wednesday morning she returned home. I remember that we had a box of sardines, and ate them out of the same saucer. She said we would go down in the same car together and might possibly meet her mother at one of the stores. She requested me to speak to her mother if we met, which I at first declined, but on seeing that it grieved her, consented to. She also requested me to buy some little presents for her little invalid sister, Zollie, whom she tenderly loved, and on leaving her I went to the St. Bernard’s dollar store and made some purchases for this purpose and proceeded with them to the hotel. Enquiring for Mrs. Harvey, I was told that she and her daughter had left for home. “My God!” I exclaimed to myself, “has May forsaken me?” I immediately took a car home, and there, to my inexpressible relief and delight, was May, herself, looking a thousand times fairer than ever before. Doubtless, she had employed this last interview with her mother in endeavoring to promote the reconciliation which her tender heart, filled with affection for both husband and parent, so fully desired. She told a friend of ours that when her mother left her that morning she had said: “Daughter, I would rather see you in your grave than continue to live with that man.” Little she recked that before the sun should go down upon the bitterness of her heart the fell wish would become a tragic reality.

I was at this time interested in a foot race and was in training at Court Brilliant race track. I kissed her good-bye about 10 o’clock of the day her mother left St. Louis, saying that I would be back for dinner between 3 and 4 o’clock in the afternoon. Little did I dream that this embrace had parted us forever on earth! When I arrived home the colored boy, Charley, met me at the door, saying, “Miss’ May fell down stairs and was hurt bad.” Alarmed, I hastened into the house. It was full of strangers. I rushed to the bedside, and there, white and still, lay my wife, the dear one who had so often told me she would lay down her life for my sake. I put my lips to hers; they were not yet cold. With a cry of agony I knelt by her side and my heart seemed to cease to beat. It could not be possible that my May, so full of life when but a few hours before I had left her, was now lying dead before me! That those eyes would never again open to look upon me with an affection that never wearied or grew faint! That those lips were never more to open to speak to me one word of hope or love! Words fail to depict the anguish and the utterness of the loss which it seemed so hard to realize. Death is hard and cruel even when it comes to those whom age or disease has long marked for its own; but how unutterably sad when it comes without warning and sweeps away in one moment the brightness and sweetness of life alike from the victim and from those who are left to mourn!

385I was informed subsequently that in descending the stairs she had caught her foot in her dress and fallen headlong, striking the door sill with her head. She was carried up to her room, insensible, and lay for about three hours in a comatose condition. At length she rose up in bed, exclaiming, “Where is John? Oh, ma! ma! you break my heart! You won’t forgive me! Take down my hair, I am dying!” This was the last effort of consciousness. She lay back in bed and passed quietly into the silent sleep from which there is no waking. She expired at half past three on April 29, 1880.

Her father, who had that morning arrived at the Union Stock Yards, was notified and came immediately, and I have often wondered what were his thoughts as he stood by the bedside of his dead child, to whose life his unforgiving spirit had brought so much sadness. In this trial there was one circumstance that has always afforded me a melancholy satisfaction. Although we had been poor almost the entire portion of our married life, at the time of her death I was in a position to give her honorable and reverent sepulture, and to respect her wishes oft expressed in life with regard to burial. She had always desired to be laid to rest in a corner of the lawn at her parental home, at Roanoke, and there it was agreed her remains should be taken. This time, as she crossed the threshold of the old home, there was no unkind look or word of reproach, for upon her pallid and peaceful brow there was enthroned the majesty of the sovereign fate of all, before which the paltry passions of pride and anger shrink away in shame. As she lay there surrounded by father, mother, sisters and friends, the look of trouble and care which had rested there of late had all disappeared, and only the sweetness and peace of eternal rest remained. Listening to the expressions of love, sympathy and admiration which came from those who surrounded her bier, I could not but think that it might have been better if a few of the tokens of affections now extended around her lifeless form had been bestowed while her warm and loving heart had hungered and yearned in vain during the struggle of our married life. But pride and anger had been allowed to stand in the way of natural affection, and both hearts had suffered. It was now too late for vain regrets to make atonement or to undo the wrong from which only death gave relief to her gentle spirit.

I certainly think if her parents could have seen us on several occasions struggling through the hard places, they would have come to our relief. Her father showed at times that he felt kindly for his child and was willing to take her back into his heart as he had taken her in his arms when a little child, but her mother, who exercised a great deal of influence over him, would not forgive nor allow him to forgive. I suppose she thought she was doing a mother’s duty and that morality compelled her to treat her child as a stranger and an outcast. I have sinned often in allowing the tears to gather in the eyes of my dear wife, but I know this: she was troubled more by the way her parents treated her than by any sorrow that came through my life. True, I was a gambler, and as she said, “God knows, that’s bad enough!” but I was always good to her, and so far as it was in my power, strove to make her happy.

I have sometimes thought that I did her a wrong in our marriage. From the time I was sixteen years of age I had been familiar with the vicissitudes of a gambler’s life, and had always in good luck or bad fortune remained light hearted. If fortune smiled upon me I was the gayest of the gay; if fortune frowned I whistled and waited for a better day. With my wife it was otherwise. She had been brought up so tenderly that she knew not what it was to have a wish ungratified or a want unsupplied. She was not in any way prepared to meet the fickle and uncertain experiences to which a gambler necessarily subjects his family. As a flower bends before the wind which blows too rudely upon it, so she bowed when ill luck brought us to want and privation. The only excuse I have to offer is that I sincerely loved her and thought I could make her life happy. If I failed may God forgive me, but I did the best I could.

386As I look back after the experience of years, I come to this conclusion—she was too good for me. In the hours of gloom there was never a look or word of reproach. Had there been more of the force of a sterner character about her I might have yielded to her influence and stopped gambling, settled down and become a steady, industrious, God-fearing man. I say God fearing because I always had a deep sense of religious truth. My companions used to say, “John, you were never cut out for a gambler; you would make a good minister.” This element of sternness she did not possess. Her nature was all love and gentleness, and so, like two heedless children, we played with life; ate of its good things when fortune brought us plenty; drank of its bitter water when we had lost our all.

I thought then that it was terrible for her to be cut off almost in the springtime of her life; that my affliction was unendurable, and that life without her would be intolerable. But I feel now that all things are in the hands of One whose wisdom is beyond our thought. Better for her to rest in the dreamless sleep of eternity than to bear the shame and trouble that a gambler brings upon his family. Her power over me for good has been greater in death than in life, although at first I did not listen to the voice of love which came to me; yet there was a constant power drawing me to the better life. If angels are allowed to pray for and visit their holy influence upon those they love upon earth I know now that my dead wife followed me through all the years of my subsequent career until the light of God’s truth broke in upon my heart in the prison at Jeffersonville.

Like all kindred vices, gambling flourishes best in large cities. Centres of commerce are also centres of speculation, and the man whose brain has been busy all day in the consideration of perplexing problems of trade finds it easy to transfer the theatre of his ventures from the counting room to the gambling hell. There is, besides, a class of men,—and notably of men engaged in the learned professions—who claim that they find at the faro or poker table a relaxation and a healthful amusement. It is unnecessary to point out the fallacy of such a view. Any recreation the nature of which is to stimulate some of the most ignoble of the passions that sway the human heart, to debauch the morals and to work the ruin of those who have resort to it, can scarcely be characterized as legitimate, far less as innocent or healthful.

Moreover, the transient population in every metropolitan city is enormous, and strangers are regarded by professional sharpers as their peculiar prey. The holding of a fair, the assembling of an encampment, in a word, the gathering of any great crowd draws gamblers to a town as a carcass attracts vultures. Hence it is that the gambling element becomes a power, both pecuniary and political, in large cities. Professional cheats are numerous; they band themselves together for purposes both offensive and defensive, and their cunning is matched only by their rapacity. None know better than they that it is entirely within the power of the municipal authorities to prevent the successful conduct of their nefarious calling. It follows that they must have a tacit understanding with the latter, in order that they may enjoy what they denominate “police protection.” In other words, officials sworn to enforce the laws must be induced to “protect” those who openly violate them! The influences brought to bear to accomplish this end are multiform, but may be resolved into three general categories. Money is freely used, and the acceptance of a bribe places the receiver within the power of the payer; political influence is also employed, liberal subscriptions being made to the campaign funds of both parties, but besides these two agencies there is yet a third. The professional gambler has an intimate acquaintance with the criminal classes; he knows their movements and their haunts, and more than one arrest which the public considers as “unusually clever” is made upon information given to the detectives by men who are willing to hand over a friend to the gallows in consideration of their own immunity from interference. The statements regarding local gambling contained in this chapter are in part based upon the personal knowledge and in part upon trustworthy information derived from authentic sources.

Among the most prominent gamblers in Chicago in the early ’40’s were George C. Rhodes, the Smith brothers—George, Charles and Montague—Conant (familiarly known as “King Cole,”) John Sears, Cole Martin, Walt Winchester, Blangy and Curtis. Some of these men lasted until a few years ago, but I believe that at present few of them survive. The last one to conduct business in Chicago was George (nick-named “One-Lung”) Smith, who not many years ago ran a handsomely equipped establishment on State street, opposite the Palmer House. He was a gambler of the old school, fond of “high rolling,” and fearless even to recklessness. On leaving Chicago he went to New York, where he passed through all the varying vicissitudes of a gambler’s life. One day a run of luck filled his coffers to overflowing; perhaps within a week his losses had reduced him almost to penury. He died gambling on borrowed capital; using money loaned him by men who retained confidence in him because of their knowledge of his abstemious habits and his long (if unsuccessful) experience.

In those early days faro had not attained its present popularity, and in some houses whole days might pass without anything but “short games” being played. In the latter case, however, ten per cent of the stakes went to the proprietors as a percentage, or “rake-off” due the house. Brag, poker, seven-up, cribbage and even whist were favorites, and in some rooms chess, checkers and backgammon were occasionally played, the proprietors, however, invariably receiving their stipulatedstipulated proportion of the wagers. The roulette wheel did not make its appearance until after 1850, and hazard, “stud” poker, the “big wheel,” twenty one, rouge-et-noir, the “squeeze spindle” and high ball poker are of comparatively recent introduction.

John Sears was another of the “old time sports,” whose commanding figure, attired richly but in perfect taste, was formerly a familiar figure upon Chicago streets. He was a singularly handsome man, of jovial and generous temperament, and with faultless manners, the latter characteristic being perhaps partially traceable to his French descent. Possessed of a fair education, he was very fond of reading, and was well versed in the writings of the standard poets. He adored Shakespeare and worshipped Burns. He was an entertaining conversationalist, and was fond of interspersing choice and apt poetical quotations with funny stories, of which he had an inexhaustible fund. His friends (and their roll numbered many, outside gamblers’ ranks) loved him dearly. He enjoyed the reputation of being a thoroughly “square” player, and though he died poor, his demise was widely and sincerely lamented.

“King” Cole (Conant) was endowed with some of the same traits 390as was Sears, and popular among his associates. He played boldly and won heavily, but spent his winnings lavishly. In 1852, in company with Cole Martin, he went to St. Paul, where they opened one of the earliest gambling houses in that city. The firm prospered, but having squandered their gains in riotous living, returned to Chicago, comparatively penniless. There Conant died, a financial, physical and moral wreck.

“Skin” gamblers came to Chicago at a very early period in the city’s history. At first they conducted no regular houses, but dealt banking games at various places, as opportunity offered, paying ten per cent. of their winnings to the owners of the rooms used. It was not long, however, before this class of professionals began to find for themselves permanent locations. For many years, and even down to the mayoralty of “Long John” Wentworth, patrons of the race courses were familiar with the faces of H. Smith, Bill McGraw, Dan Oaks, “Dutch” House and “Little Dan” Brown. Roulette and chuck-a-luck were run in full blast at these gatherings, and “Dutch” House was considered as particularly skillful in conducting “the old army game.”

All these men have passed away. With the exception of one who died at Milwaukee possessed of some property, their “last end was worse than the first.” Bill McGraw died of delirium tremens, and “Little Dan” Brown ended his days in the poorhouse.

Gambling became more and more open, and the ranks of professionals were swelled, year by year, until at length the business was conducted with scarcely a pretence of concealment. This was the state of affairs when “Long John” Wentworth was elected mayor for the first time. He at once inaugurated a policy of reform. His first crusade was against swinging signs and other street obstructions, a vast number of which were “gathered in” during one night and piled in one heap at the corner of Lake and State Streets. The next morning the Democrat (the mayor’s paper) announced that all persons who had lost property of this descriptiondescription the preceding night would find it at that locality. Claimants began to appear early, and each and all were promptly and impartially fined under the city ordinance.

The gamblers began to feel apprehensive. Wentworth warned them through the columns of the Democrat that they would be the next victims of the besom of reform, but long immunity made them incredulous. They were not left long in doubt as to the sincerity of the mayor’s intentions. One warm summer afternoon he opened his war of extermination by sending two policemen to visit Burrough’s establishment, which was in a building on Randolph Street, standing on the present site of Epstean’s Dime Museum. The officers climbed upon an adjacent roof and gained entrance to the rooms through the rear windows on the second floor, which they found open and unguarded. They proceeded leisurely, and 391captured no one but the dealer, who tarried to secure the contents of his cash drawer. The players incontinently fled down the stairs, at the foot of which they rushed into the arms of a cordon of police, behind whom towered the gigantic frame of “Long John” himself. He it was who headed the mournful procession that wended its way to the calaboose in the basement of the Court House, encouraging the drooping spirits of the gamesters by insuring them in stentorian tones, and in language more forcible than elegant, that he “intended to teach them a lesson that they would remember.” He personally superintended the booking and locking up of the prisoners, and announced that if any person holding a city license appeared to offer bail for any one of them, the license would be summarily revoked. This threat was leveled particularly at saloon keepers and hackmen, whom Wentworth cordially detested, and between whom and the gamblers there existed the warmest friendship.

An exciting episode of the raid was the appearance at the calaboose of an attorney, “Charley” (now Colonel) Cameron, who demanded an interview with a client—one of the four Smith brothers, all of whom were in the lock-up. His request was refused, and going outside he attempted to hold a consultation through the grated window. The watchful eye of the mayor espied him. “What are you doing there, you —— rascal?” fairly shrieked His Honor. “Get away, I tell you; get away!” Cameron replied that he was exercising the right of an attorney in consulting a client. Angered beyond endurance, Wentworth rushed at him. “Don’t you dare to touch me,” shouted Cameron. “Oh, no; Oh, no” yelled the mayor; and grasping the attorney with a vise-like grip, he forced him into the city prison, never relaxing his hold until he had seen him safely placed behind the bars.

All these proceedings may have been the very acme of arbitrariness, but they are worth recounting, as showing how raids were conducted under the first administration of “Long John.” Everything found in the rooms was confiscated, and when the tenants returned they found only bare walls and a carpetless floor. The proprietors plead guilty and were fined heavily. The “inmates” appealed to a higher court and were each mulcted in the sum of twenty-five dollars and costs; the total expense of each player, including attorney’s fees, being about sixty dollars. Cameron caused the arrest of the mayor for assault and false imprisonment, but the case never came to trial.

Thus ended the first, and, up to the present time, the only raid upon a Chicago gambling house conducted by the city’s chief executive in person. It proved one of the most effective known to history. Open gambling ceased at once, and the “hole-and-corner” variety of the vice was soon hunted out. Banking games were no longer to be found, and the few poker rooms that were started in out-of-the-way places were speedily discovered, 392raided, and forced to close. Occasionally a game of faro was dealt; Saturday night being the time usually selected and the game lasting until well-nigh into Sunday morning; but when an adjournment was had, it was “sine die,” and no two consecutive games were played at the same place.

It must be remembered that all this occurred before the beginning of the present era of club life, which has done so much to pervert the morals, if not to overturn the foundations of society. It is a notorious fact that the heaviest play in Chicago to-day may be found in the most aristocratic and exclusive clubs. The police, of course, are not aware of it. Every man in Chicago doing business in what is known as the “Board of Trade district” has heard of the existence of a small club, whose membership is chiefly composed of operators on the floor of ’Change, and most men about town know where it is located. The appointments of the rooms while not luxurious, are of simple elegance and the cuisine and buffet are said to be matchless. Stories are current of fabulous sums having been lost and won across the tables in this exclusive resort. It is charitable to suppose that the authorities lack either the knowledge or the legal power to interfere with the gambling here conducted. However this may be, the fact remains that the patrol wagons laden with blue-coated officers of the law rattle over the stones beneath its very windows, intent upon proving at once their watchfulness and their fidelity by arresting a half-score of Mongolians for indulging in “fan tan,” or “running in” a dozen negroes who may be found “throwing craps.”

Still, even before the days when Wentworth reigned autocrat of Chicago, and even during his administration, there existed in the city a club, composed of choice spirits selected from both the professional and commercial walks of life. Among its shining lights were such men as Doctor Egan, Maxwell, Maxmire, Judge Meeker, Justice Lamb, Judge Wilson, Col. Carpenter, “Bob” Blackwell, and a host of other men equally well known in their day. Politics and religious creeds were forgotten. Relaxation, unrestrained social intercourse, and mental improvement were nominally the objects sought. At the same time often a game of brag was played. This was the favorite pastime, although poker had its devotees; whist held its own, while cribbage, and even old sledge, were not too plebian amusements. Games were sometimes played for high stakes, among the most venturesome players being Egan, Maxwell and Carpenter.

At these gatherings hilarity was unbounded. Thomas F. Marshall, of Kentucky, during one summer that he spent in Chicago was wont to charm the members with his oratory, logic, wisdom and wit; John Brougham, E. L. Davenport, and James E. Murdock, famous the world over for their histrionic talent, were frequent and welcomed guests. Of these perhaps the former was somewhat the favorite with the members. 393He wrote a poem addressed to Egan’s daughter, and dedicated a book to the doctor:

[In this connection, it may not be amiss to repeat a well authenticated story of Murdock, which has come down as a tradition from the days when the club flourished. The members took their guest to the race course to see Chicago’s favorite win. So elated was the crowd over the triumphs that champagne flowed like the pent up rivulet bursting through a rocky chasm. That evening Murdock was to play Claude Melnotte. When he undertook to recite the description of the palace by the lake of Como his articulation became thick and indistinct. Recognizing the demands of the situation the great tragedian hurriedly bowed himself off the stage. His place before the foot-lights was promptly taken by Manager McFarland, who, in tones of the severest courtesy, apologized for the “sudden and unaccountable (sic) illness of Mr. Murdock,” in consequence of which he craved the indulgence of the audience during the few moments necessary for him to consume in dressing, when he, himself, would assume the part. Assent having been secured, McFarland finished the role to a crowded if not over-critical house.]

Keno was just beginning to grow into favor with the gaming public at the time when Mayor Wentworth so ruthlessly suppressed the vice. Some of the games were “square;” others “brace.” The latter were at first conducted by “Billy” Buck, and later by “Ed” Simpson. Both men were fond of drink, and the games were run in meanly furnished rooms in localities ill suited to their successful operation.

The gambling fraternity, recognizing in Wentworth a foe who could be neither cajoled, bribed, nor intimidated, began, with practical unanimity, either to look for some other walk of life in which they might exercise their peculiar talents, or to seek localities where the head of the city government was more amenable to “reason.”

“Long John” was succeeded by Mayor Haynes, and the hydra-headed monster once more began to lift its head from the seclusion into which it had been forced. In other words the gamblers determined to see whether the new city administration was to be controlled by the same influences and actuated by the same principles as had been its predecessor. Slowly they felt their way. At first Daniels, Avery, Sears, and Winchester opened their houses in a quiet and unobtrusive manner. Other members of the fraternity, finding that these were not molested, followed suit, and during several successive administrations, down to the time of Medill, everything was smooth sailing. Raids were of infrequent occurrence, and altogether farcical in their character. They appeared to be conducted not so much with a view of suppressing the vice or injuring the business of the houses raided, as for the purpose of raising a sort of indirect tax, or levying an illegal assessment. No one ever thought of destroying the 394personal property found in the resorts, and the fines imposed were usually very light. In fact, so little attention was paid to them that the proprietors were wont to admit the officers with the utmost cheerfulness; and when a hell was “pulled” hacks were at once called into requisition and the dealers and players rode together to the office of the nearest police magistrate, where bail was at once accepted, and the party again entering their carriages, returned to the rooms and resumed play. Of course, under such a regime, gambling houses multiplied rapidly, and to attempt an enumeration of the resorts or of their keepers would occupy too much space. A few of the more prominent, however, may be mentioned. These were the Smiths, Holland, Howland, Scott, Robbins, Lawler, Holt, Jones, Bachelor, McDonald, Martin, Walpole, Cameron, Dowling, Peters, Page, Hynes, Wicks, Blanga, Curtis, Wallace, Buchanan, Kellogg, Bowers, Taylor, Donaldson, Corcoran, Nellis Adams, Daniels, Hugh Dunn, Dutch Charley, Cy Janes, H. Jeff & Co., Hankins, H. Smith, and Beach.

One of the best known houses during this period was that of Theo. Cameron, at the Northeast corner of Clark and Madison Streets. Fred White was employed as dealer. The profits of the establishment were very large, owing to the fact that the proprietor employed competent “steerers,” who found little difficulty in securing dupes, whom he was fond of calling “fat suckers.” But Cameron was a man who, had he made a hundred thousand dollars in a night, would have contrived to get rid of it during the next twenty-four hours, even if he had to burn it up. Among his compeers he was known as “a bad man from Texas and handy with a gun.” One evening several “tough” citizens, among whom was a recent graduate from the State institution at Joliet, dropped into his place and lost all the money which they had. Meeting a friend on the outside, the latter informed them that they had undoubtedly been “skinned.” After holding a council of war they concluded to return to the place and demand that their money be returned to them. Accordingly, the three went up stairs, and while two stationed themselves at the door, the ex-convict entered the apartment, pistol in hand, and demanded the money. While the dealer was endeavoring to placate him, Cameron entered the place and took in the situation at a glance. Stealing, with cat-like step, to the sideboard, he took a revolver from one of the drawers and opened fire on the intruder, wounding him at the first shot. A mutual fusillade followed, which continued until the victim dropped dead. Cameron promptly surrendered himself, but when his trial occurred, found no difficulty in securing abundant evidence that he had acted strictly in self-defense.

Subsequently the same man opened a “brace” game at 68 Randolph Street. The place was expensively furnished, and was conducted on a scale of prodigal extravagance. The “sporting” fraternity knew it as a 395“bird house.” The lodging rooms were fitted up most luxuriously, and were always at the disposal of the guests and employes. The sideboard was stocked with the choicest liquors, and with cigars of the finest brands, while the wines were the best the market afforded. “Dr.” Ladd was Cameron’s partner, owning a half interest in the house, and it was his duty to supervise this part of the business. NotwithstandingNotwithstanding all this lavish outlay, the house made a great deal of money; yet when the hells were again closed and the gamblers forced to seek other fields of action, Cameron was so poor that he left the city with scarcely five hundred dollars in his pocket.

“Colonel Wat” Cameron ran a house at 167 Randolph Street. It enjoyed the reputation of being a “square” game, and was liberally patronized by a good class of players. He finally came to grief, it is said, through the machinations of “Gabey” Foster and “Old Ben” Burnish, who, however, allowed him a percentage of the winnings. They made a great deal of money there and in other parts of the city.

“Gabey” Foster, whose name is mentioned above, was not well liked by the fraternity at large, who regarded him as a decidedly mean specimen of humanity. He became a confirmed victim of the opium habit, and “hitting the pipe” at last brought him to his death. His brain became affected, and while at Little Rock, Arkansas, he wandered away into the woods, where his body was found frozen stiff. His paramour sent for his remains and gave them a decent interment.

Another noted “brace” dealer of those times was a man known as “Jew” Hyman. He possessed a fine physique, and a mind of more than average capacity. He was fond of playing against the bank in other houses, and found no difficulty in scattering his winnings. He was much devoted to all the pleasures of sense; a high liver and fond of women. He married a notorious courtesan some thirty years ago. He died in a West Side Chicago lodging house, broken down in health, and with a disordered brain, and was buried by the woman to whose fortunes he had linked his own, and who had supported him for many years.

In 1863 the city received a new influx of “skin” gamblers, some of whom are still residents of Chicago, but not at present actively engaged in the practice of their “profession.” As tending to illustrate the characteristics of a certain class of “brace” dealers, and as serving to show the depth of degradation to which the gambling vice will sometimes sink its votaries, the following incident may prove not only interesting, but instructive. The story is literally true, only the names of the actors being withheld. The gang of sharpers who came to this city in 1863 was one of the most unscrupulous that has ever cursed any city. They commenced operations as “ropers in” for the most disreputable resorts. It was their custom to gain access to the hallways of gaming houses in 396which players were allowed some little chance of winning, and turn out the gas. As soon as a visitor appeared, some member of the coterie would inform him that the place was closed for the night, and at once “steer” him to some hole where he was certain to be shamelessly plundered. At length, one of them contrived to become proprietor of a small den, which his fellows at once made their headquarters, and where “suckers” were robbed without the slightest regard to even the semblance of decency.

Among the visitors to this place was a man who occupied a position of high trust in a well known private corporation. The keeper of the hell assiduously cultivated his friendship, and easily won his money. He then insinuated into the mind of his dupe the belief that his only hope of recovering his losses was to plunge still deeper into the game. Step by step the unfortunate man fell. Knowing the combination of the company’s vault, it was easy for him to gain an entrance thereto and abstract large amounts of currency. This he did night after night. At length he abstracted $5,000 in one package, carried it with him to the den in question, staked it at the faro table, and lost every cent. The proprietor had always posed as his friend, and the wretched devotee of play took him into his confidence. He told him that he was a defaulter to the extent of $31,000. “Better go and get it all, and see if you can play out,” was the advice of the gambler. He added that if he lost it he would be in no worse condition than he then was. After considerable argument and no little persuasion, the official of the corporation consented, and the two went together to the company’s office. The gambler held a lamp in order that his dupe might be able to see more clearly the combination of the safe. When it was opened he extended his hand for the money, which the victim handed to him. With the money in his possession, the scoundrel’s manner soon changed entirely. He told the unhappy defaulter that it would be far better for him to go to California, where he would keep him well supplied with money, while meanwhile a compromise might be effected with the company. This was not at all satisfactory to the embezzler, who insisted upon taking the money and risking it at play. But the gambler was obdurate, and flatly refused to turn over any more cash than was necessary to enable the miserable man to leave town. They drank and quarreled until morning. The position of the official was a most distressing one. He dared not return to the office; he was absolutely penniless; and to attempt to compel the surrender of the money by the gambler would be to proclaim his own shame. Accordingly, he found himself compelled to accept the terms proposed to him. His pretended friend stuck close to him, escorted him to the train, bought him a ticket and gave him a little money and much advice, bidding him farewell with a profusion of promises. The money which the absconding 397treasurer had taken with him was soon spent, but the man who had been the cause of his ruin refused to take any notice of his appeals for further assistance. At last the unhappy man concluded, like the prodigal in the parable, to “arise and go to his father.” The latter was a man of wealth, and on learning of his son’s whereabouts, at once sent him money with which to come home. As soon as the victim reached Chicago, the gambler was arrested and placed in jail, where he languished for some three months, being unable to secure bail chiefly because of his notoriously bad character. He finally secured his release through a compromise, restoring the $20,000 which he had taken from the defaulter on the night before he left the city. The victim of his knavery died soon afterwards of consumption, supposed to have been aggravated, if not induced, through the dissipation to which he resorted in order to drown his shame.

At the expiration of Mayor Haines’ term of office, Mr. Wentworth was again elevated to the chief magistracy of the city. He found a very different state of affairs from that which he had left. While things had not exactly “gone to the dogs,” the laws were by no means strictly enforced and many of the minor city ordinances had become dead letters. Particularly was this true in the case of those relating to bawdy houses and gaming hells. This circumstance may be accounted for in part by the fact that there did not exist an overwhelming public sentiment in favor of their suppression. Then, as now, there was a large and influential element in the community which openly claimed that while these resorts were to be condemned on principle, their toleration in a large and constantly growing city was a necessary evil. Another class protested loudly against any interference by the legislative or executive departments of the government with what they were pleased to denominate the “personal liberty of the citizens.” Others, still, who never gambled themselves, looked upon the harm done by this class of houses as being no affair of theirs, and regarded the ruin of the occasional players at faro with the utmost indifference.

Wentworth was quick to feel and respond to the public pulse upon this question. During his second term he was by no means the terror to evil-doers that he had been throughout his first. He had already shown what he could do, and the cognomen of a “reform Mayor,” appeared to have for him no further charms. While his enforcement of the laws cannot be said to have been lax, neither was it particularly stringent. Nevertheless, he occasionally made life exceedingly interesting for the gamblers.

The years during which Mayors Rumsey and Sherman held office, were halcyon days for Chicago sporting men. This was the era of the war, when gambling flourished all over the country and raised its serpent head with a brazen effrontery never seen before. Paymasters, 398contractors and army officers gambled with a reckless prodigality which was as surprising as it was reprehensible. These classes constituted, perhaps, the richest prey for the professional gamblers. Next to them, the numerous professional bounty-jumpers, who rapidly scattered at the gaming table the money out of which they had defrauded the government. Those were mad, wild times, when money was abundant and speculation ran riot. It was pre-eminently a period of “brace” games, the reckless players being apparently utterly indifferent as to the character of the game at which they staked their money.

Among the professionals who came prominently into public notice at this time were William Leonard, (sometimes known as “Old Bill”) Otis Randall, George Trussell, and Judd.

The latter was known as a “forty-niner.” He entered upon his career as a gambler in the far west, carrying a roulette wheel on his back from one mining camp to another. He accumulated a considerable amount of money through gaming, and retired from its active pursuit. Going from Chicago to New York he became associated with John Morrissey in the proprietorship of some of the most elegant gaming houses in that city. Rumor has it that he also had an interest in several resorts of an inferior grade. He was what is known among the fraternity as an “all-round sport,” equally adept at all games. His fondness for liquor proved the cause of the loss of his fortune, and compelled him once more to become a wanderer.

George Trussel, who during the time of which we are writing, owned and conducted one of the most popular resorts in Chicago, was a man of fine physique, scrupulous in his dress, and extravagant in his tastes and habits. His establishment was elegantly, if not sumptuously furnished, and the refreshments provided for the guests were noted for their fine quality, no less than for the fastidiousness displayed in the manner of their service. He came to a wretched end. His discarded mistress shot and killed him at the entrance to Rice’s livery stable, as he was returning with a horse and buggy in which he had taken her rival for a drive. The case awakened no little interest at the time, and the trial was fully reported in the daily prints. The woman was acquitted by the jury, whose sympathies were aroused by the deplorable tale of seduction, neglect, abuse and desertion which she revealed.

Another gambler who met a somewhat similar fate was Charley Stiles, who was shot and killed at his room in the Palmer House by a courtesan whom he had outrageously abused. The verdict of the jury in her case was a somewhat anomalous one. They found her mentally irresponsible at the time of the commission of the deed, yet fixed her punishment at one year’s imprisonment in the penitentiary.

399Mayor Rumsey ruled with a by no means iron hand. The blacklegs found comparatively little occasion to find fault with his administration of city affairs. Occasionally, a complaint on the part of some victim or an unusually bitter newspaper attack would compel him to resort to harsh measures. At such times, one or two raids would be made; the gamblers were forced to open their safes, and the tools and furniture taken away, though their destruction was rarely attempted, the owners being usually allowed ample time in which to sue out writs of replevin.

Reference has been made to the prosperous times which the fraternity enjoyed under the rule of Mayor Sherman. Connected with his administration, however, was Chief of Police Washburne. In the latter official the gamblers found a bitter and uncompromising foe. He raided the hells constantly, earnestly and viciously. Furniture and tools costing thousands of dollars were ruthlessly destroyed; and if the owners replevined the property seized and attempted to resume business “at the old stand,” they soon found they had reckoned without their host. Washburne at once paid them a midnight visit, and again removed the paraphernalia of their houses. It was his custom to insist upon heavy fines, and this circumstance, taken in connection with the destruction of property, soon made the business unprofitable. He gave the “sports” no rest, harrassingharrassing them night and day.

His laudable efforts to suppress the gaming houses were materially hampered by the treachery and insubordination of his officers. The sympathy of a very large proportion of the police force was with the proprietors of the hells, and the latter were constantly apprized of intended raids, and were generally kept tolerably well posted as to the intentions and doings of the chief. As a matter of course, for services such as these the “crooks” were willing to pay, and pay well. As a result of this state of affairs, it was no uncommon occurrence for the raiders to find a house empty and securely closed at the time of their nocturnal visit. Sometimes the keepers adopted other tactics. Instead of closing the house, they quietly awaited the arrival of the police, in company with a few pretended players, whom they had hired to submit to an arrest. On such occasions, the only property found consisted of an empty tin box and a few stacks of old and worn out chips.

Notwithstanding all these hindrances, Washburne was vigilant and energetic. His exertions knew no cessation. He not only rendered it unsafe to conduct a gaming house, but made it dangerous and costly to be caught in one. The contest proved to be an unequal one, and the gamblers abandoned the field to their determined antagonist. To their patrons they said that it was their intention to “close up for a little while, until the storm blew over or the authorities were fixed.” For a time, there was no public gambling in the city, but soon some of the more 400venturesome members of the fraternity began to “play a little on the quiet.” They at once discovered that this would not do. The risk of playing was so great, however, that only “brace” or “snap” games were opened. The efforts of the blacklegs in this direction were supplemented by the opening of “bunko” rooms, with occasional ventures at rouge-et-noir, while “top and bottom” joints were scattered about the city.

Gaming, as such—by which is meant the playing of a game of chance—was unknown. The sports were penniless and needed money; they were aware that their operations must be conducted quickly if they were to avoid arrest, and in consequence, they had resort to every sort of device known among professionals as “sure things.” The robbery carried on was of the most outrageous and shameless description, and the harvest, if confined within a brief period, was golden while it lasted. Temporary games were numerous and gamblers thrived. Hotels, lodging houses, the back rooms of saloons, in fact, every available place was utilized. Rooms were rented for a short time only and cheaply furnished, here, there and everywhere. Yet Washburne hounded them from place to place, although embarrassed by lukewarmness, if not positive corruption on the part of his subordinates. Indeed, there was an element in the force which was constantly plotting against him and incessantly scheming for his removal. Many of his descents upon the hells proved futile for the reasons already stated. Despite all these hindrances, however, the strife went on, and Washburne showed no sign of weakening.

When Mayor Rice assumed control of the city’s executive department, the gamblers began to resume operations more openly. They soon found that prosecutions were by no means so numerous as they had been while Washburne filled the position of Chief of Police, while raids were comparatively infrequent. Boldness soon succeeded timidity, and during the latter part of Mayor Rice’s term, as well as throughout the mayoralty of Mason, the list of gaming houses was constantly augmented. In fact, “crooks” found no better territory for their operations throughout the length and breadth of the land than Chicago. Confidence men swarmed upon the public streets and plied their nefarious vocation without let or hindrance. The fame of the city as a safe stamping ground for swindlers soon spread abroad, and there occurred a general hegira of gamblers to a place where they knew that they ran no risk of molestation. As a result, Chicago was soon filled with a set of sharpers drawn from all quarters of the United States, and comprising as motley, disreputable and dishonest a class as ever cursed any city under the face of Heaven. Wealthy “suckers” were found in abundance, and “brace” dealers, “bunko” men and rogues of every description carried off money in bundles.

401Among the most prominent men engaged in gambling in Chicago at this period were Harry Lawrence (afterward a dealer in “Rock and Rye,” and partner of Morris Martin), Mike McDonald, “Bill” Foster, “Big John” Wallace, “Little John” Wallace, “Trailer,” “Appetite Bill,” “Nobby Tom,” Sam Hueston, Harry Monell, “Bill” Close, “Hank” Maguire, Tom Daniels, “White Pine,” “Snapper” Johnny, “Rebel” George, “Long” John, “Billy” Singleton, Grant, “Jake” Lehman, “Johnny” Molloy, Lew Lee, “Jew” Myers, and at least fifty more of the “small fry” class.

The winnings of some of the men named above were a theme of gossip among gamblers all over the continent. The “bunko” men were particularly successful. To rob a man out of $5,000 was a common occurrence; $7,000 was occasionally made; while there were those who repeatedly won $10,000 from a single victim; and one of this class of sharpers succeeded in taking $20,000 from one of his dupes. Meanwhile the profits of the “skin” houses were enormous.

This was the state of affairs existing at the time of the visitation of the city by the holocaust of 1871, when the United States military were called upon to protect the people and the city was placed under martial law. Thugs, thieves, confidence men, “skin” gamblers and rogues of every sort might be found on any street corner. From Harrison Street on the south, to Lincoln Park on the north, roamed a homeless, hungry, penniless mob, whom the prospect of starvation soon drove across the river to the West Side. With the crowd went Martin, Kellogg, Batchelder, McDonald and Dowling. “Watt” Robbins and John Lawler opened a house on State Street, and the games measurably flourished until the election of Joseph Medill in the spring of 1872.

He assumed office with many promises of reform, which he carried out to the best of his ability. One of his first acts was a declaration of war upon the gamblers, and vigorously was it prosecuted. The houses were promptly and permanently closed, and the only gambling done during his term of office was attended with great risk to those who engaged in it. Still, the task of supplying the needs of the destitute and guarding the other interests of the city were so great that some were found who ventured to incur the hazard of playing an occasional game, which was, of course, always of the “brace” variety. Yet, on the whole, Medill fully merited the high encomiums bestowed upon him by the enemies of gambling for his effective, restrictive policy and his manly enforcement of the laws.

He was succeeded by H. D. Colvin, familiarly nicknamed by the sporting men as “Harvey,” just as the same class afterwards spoke of Mayor Harrison as “our Carter.” His was an administration which might be fairly described as one under which “everything went.” Scarcely had 402he taken his seat before the gamblers began to furnish and open many houses in all quarters of the city. Those who had emigrated from the South to the West division, returned to their former haunts. Among the rest was one who located himself at the corner of Clark and Monroe Streets where he conducted the European Hotel, with a saloon and gambling rooms attached. This place continued to run for many years. The worst elements of the community were in the ascendent. Dance halls, concert saloons and disreputable houses of every description abounded and flourished. “Toughs” of every grade walked the streets without fear; and the bunko men, “brace” dealers, monte players and “crooks” of high and low degree openly plied their vocations. The “sucker” who wished to lose his money, had his choice of no less than eight “brace” gaming houses, twelve bunko shops, and an innumerable assortment of joints where rouge-et-noir, wheel of fortune, and “top and bottom” were but a few of the devices employed to fleece greenhorns. The mayor manifested utter indifference to the enforcement of the laws, and it was said that his personal example was not of a kind to instill into the minds of the average citizen a respect for authority. Of all the “free and easy” cities in the Union, Chicago was at this time the worst. The town was literally handed over to the criminal class who held high carnival by day as well as by night.

One of the best known gamblers who flourished at this period, and who has since attained considerable influence in local politics soon forged to the front and became the recognized “boss.” It was commonly stated at the time that he was personally interested in not a few resorts of questionable character, and that he was wont to levy a contribution upon every gambler who came to Chicago. Be that as it may, it is certain that the games no longer lurked in dark corners and out of the way localities, but opened their doors upon the city’s principal streets, their proprietors carrying on their nefarious business with as little concealment as though they had been engaged in legitimate commercial pursuits.

Another professional sport who figured prominently before the public at that time as proprietor of two “dollar stores,” with back-room attachments where “bunko” and “top and bottom” were played, has since become a reputable citizen, the proprietor of a large store in Chicago, and is reputed to be millionaire.

The press scored Colvin roundly, and the indignation of the decent, law-abiding citizens against him knew no bounds. Threats of impeachment were freely made but never enforced. Vice and crime continually stalked brazenly through the streets until the close of his term when he was succeeded by Mayor Hoyne, who gave way, in turn, to Heath.

The rule of the latter was as radically stringent as that of Colvin had been disreputably lax. He at once set about righting many wrongs, 403establishing order, and enforcing the laws. The work which he thus mapped out was an herculean task, for pandemonium reigned and the “gang” was determined not to be driven out without making a severe struggle. One of Heath’s first orders was to the effect that the gambling houses should be closed. The proprietors seemingly acquiesced, but actually carried on business surreptitiously, and raiding was at once begun. When the police endeavored to force an entrance into the gambling rooms at the “Store,” a well known resort on Clark Street, connected with a hotel, they committed the blunder of breaking into the rooms of the caravansary. The wife of the proprietor promptly resented this intrusion upon the premises by firing at the officers, although no one was hit. She was arrested and defended by A. S. Trude, who secured her discharge from Judge McAllister on the plea that her house was her castle and that the law justified her in defending it. The incident caused much excitement in the city at the time, and Mayor Heath became yet more aggressive and was as unremittent in his attentions to the gamblers, whose houses he kept closed.

In 1877 a loud cry was raised against “bunko” and “bunko steerers,” and it was charged that this class of swindlers found victims in alarming numbers, and that the unsophisticated “stranger within the gates” was being guided to his financial ruin with great rapidity. On motion of Alderman Cullerton the mayor was instructed to appoint a special committee to ascertain if public gaming houses were tolerated in the city. His Honor named as such committee Aldermen Cullerton, Phelps and Waldo. The “bunko” men were subsequently thinned out by the police.

Carter H. Harrison succeeded Heath as mayor. The radical policy of his predecessor was not pursued by the new incumbent, and charges were constantly made by the press that gambling was rampant in the city.

Austin Doyle had been chief of police under Mayor Heath, and for a time filled the same position under his successor. The frequency of complaints by victims and the numerous and bitter attacks upon the administration in the public prints stimulated Mr. Doyle to take active measures toward suppressing the vice. Through his energetic tactics the houses were compelled to close their doors, and for a time public gaming came to an end. Doyle, however, was offered a responsible position in the employ of a private corporation, and resigned his public office. His successor did not meet with the same success in suppressing the nuisance.

Harrison served two terms and it is not too much to say that throughout the greater part of the four years during which he was mayor those who wished to encounter the “tiger in his lair” found little difficulty in gratifying their inclination.

Roche followed Harrison, holding the reigns of city government for two years. He owed his elevation to office in a large measure to the support 404which he received from the “law and order” element of the community, and was tacitly if not avowedly pledged to carry out their wishes. He soon began to make things interesting for the gamblers. They were given fair notice of his intentions and instructed to close. Those who failed to comply with his command soon discovered that the city’s executive meant what he had said and had the power to enforceenforce his behest. Public houses were forced to close their doors, and the city for a time enjoyed a comparative rest. Occasionally games were played at the hotels, private club rooms, and over saloons, but generally speaking it was a “hole-and-corner” sort of play, and it was by no means an easy matter to discover where the games were going on. The result was that many of the “sports” who had prospered during the years preceding, found themselves forced to seek “fresh fields and pastures new.”

When Roche’s name was presented to the public as that of a candidate for re-election the hostility of the fraternity toward him quickly found vent. His opponent, Cregier, received the support of the men who had learned to hate the administration which interfered with their business, and he was elected by a very decided majority. At the present time the number of gambling houses in the city may be said to be legion. The proprietors have taken leases of the premises for two years, in some cases giving the previous tenants a bonus to move out; removing partitions, enlarging entrances, building new stairways, and otherwise intimating their belief that, for a time at least, they cherish no apprehension of molestation. Raids are infrequent, although, occasionally, a few Mongolians are captured while playing “bung-loo,” and once in a while a squad of negroes is taken to the station as a punishment for being detected in playing “crap.” The larger houses suffer but little from police interference. When a raid is made on one of these establishments, the officers placidly await the coming of the patrol wagon while the players escape through a convenient window or sky-light. Enough “pluggers” are captured to fill one or two wagons and are driven to the nearest police station with much clatter and display. The proprietors promptly bail out their employes, and the next morning pay the small fines imposed upon them. Within an hour or two after the descent of the police the game is again in full operation.

Some idea of the success which attends public gaming houses in Chicago at the present time may be formed from a consideration of the fact that the largest and best patronized house has, on an average, forty men on its pay-roll; that sometimes twenty games are in full blast at one time; and that the estimated net winnings of its owners amount to $20,000 a month. To this place professionals are not admitted, it being found more remunerative to encourage the patronage of amateur players. 405So notorious is this fact that the habitués of this resort are commonly termed the “dinner pail brigade.”

The following may be accepted as a correct statement of the regular weekly salaries at a Chicago house doing a good business: Two faro dealers at $40 a week; three ditto at $35; two roulette croupiers at $30; two hazard dealers at $30; two stud-poker dealers at $30; one outside watchman at $20;20; one doorkeeper at $25; sixteen “pluggers” and “cappers” at $2.50 per day; total salary list, $690 per week.

It is fair to presume that this is an average outlay for weekly salaries by the numerous gaming houses. The estimate does not, of course, include miscellaneous expenses, such as rent, fuel, lighting, free eating and drinking for the habitués, nor the large percentage on profits paid to “ropers” and “steerers.” It must be plain to the dullest comprehension that a business of such magnitude as to be able to pay nearly $700 in weekly salaries, is in favor of the army of unemployed gamblers who are temporarily “down on their luck.”

However, there are some gaming houses in the city where high rollers can always gain admittance and find congenial company; where the obliging proprietors are always willing to “remove the limit” for a regular patron; and which enjoy the reputation of being comparatively “square.”

One of the peculiar features of Chicago gambling is the reported existence of a “gamblers’ trust.” The use of the word “trust” as applied to establishments which cannot in any sense be called commercial, seems, on its face, to be anomalous, yet, if all reports be true, the term is not a misnomer. It is understood that a combination of sporting men exists, the nature of the tie that binds them being the contribution by the proprietors of each establishment belonging to the pool of either a fixed sum weekly or an agreed percentage of the winnings toward a common purse. Just what is done with the money is known only to those who handle it, but when it is remembered that the contributors enjoy practical immunity from police interference, its disposition is a fair subject of conjecture.

Within the last month (July, 1890), the question of selling pools upon races has loomed up into prominence. One of the chief operators in this line, a man who is reputed to have cleared $190,000 through this means during the racing season of 1889, has invoked the aid of private detective agencies for the suppression of his business rivals. The latter have retaliated by employing the city police to interfere with his operations. The result has been a sort of Kilkenny fight, in which charges seriously reflecting upon the city’s chief executive have been filed in the courts.

With the exception of New Orleans—and possibly of Chicago—it is doubtful whether public gambling ever took deeper root in any Western city than the metropolis of Missouri. This fact may be attributed partly to the mixed character of the early population, in which were blended the elements of the French and Southern natures. Games of chance seem to appeal more strongly to the hot-blooded temperament which is kindled into warmth by a Southern sun, than to the more phlegmatic disposition of those who have been reared in Northern latitudes. Another cause for the popularity and prevalence of gambling in St. Louis is to be found in the fact that for many years that city enjoyed the distinction of being the chief commercial centre of the Mississippi valley. Not only was it the entrepot and point of transfer for vast quantities of freight, the handling of which gave employment to a large number of men, but emigrants on their way to the far West found the city a convenient place in which they might rest and recruit, and at the same time purchase supplies.

The result of this latter circumstance was that professional gamblers from all points of the compass flocked thither, making the city a sort of headquarters from which to make predatory excursions upon the steamboats that plied the lower Mississippi. Scores of the best known sporting men in the United States have, at one time or another, made St. Louis their abiding place.

Among the earliest professionals to locate there were “Jim” Ames, Henry Perritt, Bob O’Blennis, David Foster, William and Rufus Sanders, Pete Manning, Thorwegian, Hewey Gains, George Phegley, Jr., Henry Godfrey, Jim Greely, Alex. Tyler, Capt. Roberts and Ecker.

Of all these, perhaps O’Blennis was the best known; not so much for his skillful dealing as for his pugnacious disposition. He was the terror of all who knew him, and was always ready—as the slang phrase runs—“to fight at the drop of a hat.” He was struck by paralysis, and for several years before his death was unable to do anything for himself without the assistance of a colored servant, who accompanied him wherever he went.

These were succeeded by Ryan—who killed a man in Nebraska City and served a term in the penitentiary therefor—John Dewing, Ed Dowling, Kelley, “Bill” Close, “Dr.” Ladd, “Tonny” Blennerhassett and “Count” Sobieski.

The latter married a woman who had been the plaintiff in a breach of promise suit, which was one of the causes celebres of the city’s judicial history. He occupied gorgeously appointed apartments near Mercantile Library Hall, in which, on Sundays, he was wont to entertain a choice party of congenial spirits with banquets which Epicurus himself might 409have envied. At the conclusion of the feast the “Count” would produce his dealing box and layout, and proceed to entertain his visitors by dealing a quiet game of faro, the result usually being that when the party broke up for the evening the guests found that they had transferred most of their surplus cash from their pockets to those of their courteous but more fortunate (?) host. Liquor, however, proved Sobieski’s ruin. His wife separated from him because of his intemperance, and he wandered about, aimlessly, until death overtook him at Salt Lake City. His widow went after his body, which she buried in St. Louis. She received $10,000 on his policy of life insurance, the payments on which she had kept up during the years of their estrangement.

Other “old timers,” who flourished here before the war, were Dow Catlin, Charley Coulter, Joe Butch, Frank Smith, Dan Ward and “Bill” Williams.

In the early days of public gaming it was popularly supposed that play was conducted “on the square,” and as a matter of fact, “brace” games were not so notoriously common then as in later years. Yet there was never a time in the history of this vice when professional gamesters would hesitate to resort to unfair advantages when their funds were at a low ebb, or they believed that the trick might be safely played. But in the exciting days which marked the beginning of the war, “skin” gambling became more common, and in 1862-63 there were “brace” dealers in abundance.

Of the skilled artists in the manipulation of the pasteboards at that period, whose faces were familiar to all who sought the “tiger” in his lair were George Griffen (a Bostonian, who, coming to St. Louis well-nigh penniless, soon acquired an interest in four gaming establishments), StuartStuart Eddy, George Phegley, August Whitman and Jack Silvia. Of the latter, it is credibly reported, and generally believed by the fraternity, that on one occasion when he had lost all his ready cash, together with all that he could borrow on his watch and jewelry, he actually pawned his artificial teeth (mounted on a gold plate) in order to obtain fresh funds with which to play against the bank. He died in Leadville, a pauper, after having won at gaming many thousands. Money was subscribed to bring his remains to St. Louis for burial.

Besides there were “Gabe” Foster and Ben Burnish, afterward well known in Chicago, who ran a place opposite the Planters House, there being three others in the block. It was about this time that “Dick” Roach made his appearance in St. Louis. He came from Detroit, a beardless youth, but soon found employment as a dealer in a house located at the Southeast corner of Pine and 4th streets. He had not been long so engaged when his peculiar talents in this direction began to develop themselves. As a player against the bank he “made a large 410stake,” and at once secured an interest in a gaming establishment. His fortune is to-day estimated at $500,000, and his career furnishes a striking exception to the general rule applicable to the lives of men of his profession.

The members of the fraternity who have been mentioned may be said to have constituted the first and second “crops” of St Louis gamblers. The craze which followed the discovery of silver ore at Leadville, Colorado, brought a third. Among them were such men as Hank Wider, Johnnie Morgan, Lou Lee, Tom Daniels, Al Masterson, “Jimmy” White and John Hall, the latter being generally better known under his sobriquet of “Coal-oil Johnnie;” Bensby Brothers, Charley King, Pete Manning, Bill Binford, Joe Duke, Charley Durgie, Cave Brothers, Harry Embree, Bill Kirrick, Lightborn Brothers, Cill Howard, Bob Ray, and Sam Cade, who died suddenly.

Of all these perhaps “Coal-oil Johnnie” is the best known. His career was an eventful one, he having contrived to compress, within his comparatively short life, enough adventurous escapades to fill a volume. His end formed a fitting termination to his vicious course. On leaving St. Louis he went to Chicago, where he obtained employment as dealer in a “brace” house. He left the latter city suddenly “between two days,” taking with him the “bank roll” of the parties for whom he was working. His wife followed in quest of him. She found him at Terre Haute, Indiana, dead drunk. In his company was a woman. Enraged beyond endurance at the sight, Mrs. Hall drew from her pocket a revolver, the contents of whose chambers she emptied into her husband’s body. She was, of course, at once arrested and in due time tried, but her counsel experienced no difficulty in securing from the jury an acquittal of his client on the ground of emotional insanity.

At the time of which I am speaking “skin” houses were far more plentiful in St. Louis than “square” ones, and the city at the junction of the Mississippi and Missouri afforded even a better field for the operations of blacklegs than has even her rival by the shores of Lake Michigan in the latter’s palmiest days. There was little effort made to clothe the business with even the flimsiest veil of secrecy. All the resorts were wide open and, in the slang of the fraternity, “everything went.” “Steerers” were almost as numerous as “suckers,” and, when the city detectives announced their intention to arrest these gentry on sight the latter snapped their fingers at the police, openly set the authorities at defiance, and brazenly continued to ply their nefarious calling. Gambling was practically unrestrained, and play ran high. Business men, lawyers, doctors, artisans, actors—men from every walk of life—gambled as a pastime, while those who made the practice of the vice their sole business thrived proportionately.

411“Squeals” from victims were of daily occurrence, and the authorities found themselves compelled to take notice of the complaints. It is not too much to say, however, that the executive department of the city was for many years honeycombed with corruption. One police official, who occupied a position very near the top round of the ladder was understood to have realized $28,000 as the result of his extortion of blackmail from gaming-house keepers. It followed, as a matter of course, that when the officers of the law found themselves compelled to make a raid upon one of these resorts the descent was accomplished in a most perfunctory manner. The common practice was to send notice to the proprietors in advance that they might “expect visitors” at an hour named. The gamblers being thus forewarned, the police rarely found anything to justify stringent measures. The paraphernalia was generally safely stowed away out of sight; and if, by chance, any gambling instruments were captured, their owners were generally privately advised as to where, when and how they might recover their property.

As tending to illustrate how the mania for gaming had taken hold of all classes of society, I cannot forbear to relate the following anecdote of Mr. F——, who, at the time of which I am speaking, was president of one of the St. Louis banks. While the tale may bring a smile to the lips of the man who, even as an amateur, has taken a hand in a “little game of draw,” it is not without its moral. The story runs thus: One morning as the janitor of Mr. F——’s bank was swinging open the heavy doors which guarded the treasure of the institution from the marauding hands of covetous midnight strollers, he discovered sitting on the steps three tired-looking citizens, one of whom clutched tightly in his hands a sealed package. But a short time elapsed before the cashier appeared upon the scene. “Gentlemen,” he suavelysuavely asked, “how can I accommodateaccommodate you? Do you wish to make a deposit?” The man with the package eagerly assured him that he had come to negotiate a loan. “What security do you offer?” asked the cashier; “government bonds?” “Government nothing!” answered the would-be borrower. “I’ve got something that knocks 7-30’s clean out of the ropes.” And producing the bundle which he had so jealously guarded, his two companions gathering close around, he proceeded to explain the situation: “You see,” he went on, “these gentlemen and myself have been playing poker all night. I’ve got a dead sure thing, but they’re trying to ‘raise me’ out. I want $5,000 to ‘see’ them with. See here.” And he unsealed the packet and showed its contents to the astounded bank official. “This,” he explained, “is my hand. I’ll show it to you, but don’t let them (indicating his companions) see it. You see we sealed it up so the cards couldn’t be monkeyed with.” The cashier looked at the cards; they were four kings and an ace. (This was before the days of a “royal flush,” and beat any other hand then recognized.) 412Coldly did the financier regard the precious pasteboards, and austere was his glance as he returned them, saying in freezing tones, “this bank, sir, doesn’t lend on cards.” The disappointed applicant for a loan turned sadly away, dejectedly saying to his comrades, “boys, I’m a chump if he isn’t going to let me be frozed out on this hand.” And he gazed ruefully down the street. At this moment Mr. F—— opportunely came in sight, and was at once recognized. Quick as thought the distressed gamester appealed to him for assistance. The bank president had himself been spending the night at the poker table, and he comprehended the situation at a glance. Rushing behind the bank’s counter he seized several bags of double eagles and accompanied the trio to the room where the game had been in progress. In a brief time he returned to the bank, threw down the amount of the loan, together with $500 interest on the accommodation, and glared at the cashier. “Ever play poker?” he asked. The abashed official meekly confessed his ignorance of the game. “Well, sir,” pursued the president in tones of deep earnestness not unmixed with a touch of sarcasm, “if you had you would know better what good collateral is. You might as well understand, once for all, that four kings, with an ace for a confidence card, is good in this institution for our entire assets.”

One of the best known characters in St. Louis in those days, and who afterward achieved no little notoriety all over the West, was John Lawler. He was a jovial, reckless, devil-may-care fellow, but possessing many traits which rendered him popular among his acquaintances. He first appeared among St. Louis sporting men as a “roper” and venturesome player against the bank. Innumerable anecdotes are told of him illustrating his character and setting forth his experience, both in that city and elsewhere. His ups and downs were numerous and abrupt. One evening, while sitting in a restaurant waiting for his supper, there entered a man from Newark, Ohio, with whom he had a slight acquaintance. He lost no time in engaging him in conversation, and soon succeeded in “steering” him into a “brace” house, where he lost $340. As soon as Lawler could get away from his companion he returned to the room to claim his percentage on the amount won, which was handed to him at once. Repairing to another resort he seated himself at a faro table and began to play. Luck favored him and it was not long before he found himself $1,100 ahead. He “cashed in his checks,” and privately determined to purchase an interest in a small game on the succeeding day. Among the bystanders, however, was George Ross, a faro dealer, a Philadelphian, and a most jovial companion. He suggested to Lawler that it was a pleasant night for a drive. The latter assented, and the two drove to the Mansion House, where they had supper, which they washed down with several bottles of wine. On their return to the city, Lawler said that 413it was his “lucky night,” and announced his intention of winning enough to reimburse him for the expenses of the jaunt. He went to a gaming house and again began to “buck the tiger,” but the fickle goddess deserted him and he arose from the table without a dollar. He was a man of most irascible temper, and when he lost would frequently butt his head against the wall and attempt to pull off his ears. On one occasion when he had dropped his last cent at the faro table, he became so excited that he threw an oyster loaf which he was taking home with him at the ceiling of the room directly over the dealer’s head. The scene that followed was a laughable one. The string broke and the oysters fell in all directions, a fair portion of the loaf bespattering the dealer’s face. From St. Louis he went to Chicago, where, in 1867, he became interested in some of the best houses in that city, being associated with such men as Captain Ash Holland, George Holt, Mat Robbins, and McDonald. At the time of the great fire he was reputed to be worth $40,000. It is said that he sank $20,000 in leasing, altering and refitting the Southern Hotel, at the corner of Wabash avenue and Twenty-second street. He also lost heavily at faro, often walking up to the table and betting $1,000 on a single turn.

While in Chicago he became involved in a shooting scrape, the result of which proved very serious. The party whom he shot was named George Duvall, a “sure thing” player, as they are styled, who had played “monte,” “top and bottom,” and “high hands” at euchre up and down the Arkansas, Red, and Upper Mississippi and Missouri rivers. He had won considerable amounts, of which he lost in playing against faro bank. A few years ago he married at Cincinnati, and since then has published a book on gambling, in which he recites many of his own personal experiences.

At the time of the shooting above mentioned, a woman with whom Duvall was well acquainted complained to him that Lawler had insulted her upon the street. Duvall proceeded to hunt him up, and on meeting him assaulted him, knocking him into a mud puddle, where he left him. As soon as possible Lawler returned to his room, where he changed his clothing, and having armed himself with a revolver sought out Duvall, whom he found on the south-east corner of Clark and Madison streets. He opened fire at once, hitting his adversary in the hand. Duvall took refuge behind a telegraph pole and thus protected himself from the three additional shots which Lawler fired before he was arrested. He was indicted for assault with intent to kill, tried, convicted, and sentenced to the penitentiary. A new trial was granted, and eight months after the shooting he was acquitted. During his incarceration his hair had turned from black to white, and by the time he had liquidated his indebtedness to his counsel he was entirely penniless. Although he afterwards succeeded 414in getting upon his feet again, and owned an interest in several gambling houses, his old-time luck seemed to have deserted him, and he was compelled to commence dealing for stipulated wages. When Mayor Roche closed up the games, he opened an elegant club room on Clark street, with cozily furnished apartments in the rear, in which he kept house with an estimable lady whom he had married. The police raided his place. The mortgage on his chattels was foreclosed, and he succeeded in saving only $100 out of the wreck. With this sum he sent his wife to her relatives, and he himself started for the Pacific Slope. He is at present understood to be at Tacoma, where he is reported to have acquired some real estate and to be doing well.

“Bob” Potee another well-known and exceedingly popular sporting man of St. Louis, met a sad fate. He was sober, gentlemanly, and well bred, and a high roller. He was married and well-to-do. He removed from St. Louis to Kansas City, where fortune so frowned upon him that, becoming despondent and weary of life, he disappeared and his body was afterwards found in the river, into which he had thrown himself.

Another suicide among the gamblers at St. Louis was John Timmons, who killed himself at Leadville, for some unexplained cause. His rash act occasioned much surprise among his numerous friends, to whom he had always seemed the very incarnation of cheerfulness and high animal spirits.

Yet another victim of faro who came to a similar end was Captain Ash Hopkins, one of the most popular river captains who sailed from St. Louis to New Orleans. He was loved and respected by all who knew him, but after a debauch in which he had lost several thousand dollars at one bout with the “tiger,” he was found dead at sunrise of the following day at the Southern Hotel. He found himself unable to meet his responsibilities in this world and had madly appealed to the court of eternal justice.

Far different, however, was the manner in which Charley Teenan met death. Although a professional gambler, he had many of the elements of a hero. He was dealing faro in a resort opposite the Southern Hotel at the time of the burning of that immense caravansary. Seeing the flames, he rushed from his rooms across the street to the blazing building. Up the ladder he went and into the hallway, seeking whom he might rescue. Once, twice, thrice, four times, he brought half suffocated victims to the window and sent them down the ladder. Once more he went back on his errand of mercy, but the flames and smoke repulsed him and he saw that he had no time to lose if he were to save himself. Returning to the window he saw that the ladder had been removed to another casement, in order to rescue others. He climbed upon the sill and sprang toward the ladder, hoping to catch it. Fatal leap! Missing his hold, he fell an inert mass upon the stone flagging below, and was picked up mortally wounded. He was carried to his gambling room and laid out on his faro table.

415John Mackey, another old-time St. Louis gambler, fell from his chair, dead; alcoholism being the cause of his demise. Fisher, a case-keeper at a Fourth street gaming house, was found dead on a lounge in the rooms when the place was opened for business in the morning. He sprang from aa good New England family, and was well educated and well read. He was a natural card player and was an expert at many games, and particularly proficient at boston, cribbage and whist. Professionals had won large sums of money through betting on his play. The original cause of his downfall was his love for liquor, and his downward career was rapid. He was a man of brains who might have made his mark in some one of the learned professions, but who deliberately yielded himself a victim to a strange infatuation, which caused him to end his life as a case-keeper in a common “brace” house.

It surely seems as though Heaven had attached to the vice of gaming a peculiar curse. Money won through this means rarely proves of benefit to its possessor, as is shown by the large number of gamblers who have accumulated considerable sums and yet died paupers. Another circumstance which cannot fail to impress itself on the thoughtful mind is the fact that so many of the profession have, as the slang phrase runs, “died with their boots on,” while their death has remained unavenged by the law. Charley Dalton, a St. Louis sport, was shot in the back in the post-office at Salt Lake City, by one Obie, who charged him with having insulted his wife. Alex. Crick, a protégé of “Old Jew” Abrams, a St. Louis pawnbroker, who served a term in the penitentiary for receiving stolen goods, was shot and killed by a courtesan in a house of ill-fame.

A somewhat similar case of those already described was that of “Star” Davis, a popular sporting man of St. Louis, after whom the celebrated racer, “Star Davis,” was named. He had a large acquaintance, by whom he was well liked. He was a man of intelligence and refined tastes, and an exceedingly venturesome player. While on one of his periodical sprees, being grossly intoxicated, he fell down stairs and broke his neck.

The author well remembers a member of the fraternity who frequented the gaming resorts of St. Louis during the period of his residence in that city. He was familiarly known by the sobriquet of “Sugar Bob.” When I first began to “steer” for faro banks in St. Louis, I found some difficulty in inducing the victims to enter the house for which I was acting. Accordingly, I employed “Sugar Bob” to decoy men whom I selected, dividing my percentage with him. He received this singular cognomen from the oily manner in which he used to sympathize with “suckers” after they had been fleeced. If his honeyed words failed to console them for their losses, it was universally conceded that there was no further use for attempting to employ the influence of kindness.

Governor Johnson was born in St. Clair County, Illinois, on the 18th of January, 1836. His natural tastes early inclined him to the study of the law, and he was admitted to the bar at St. Louis in 1857.

His official career forms a part of the history of the State which he has so well served; it does not call for extended narration in a work of this character. But one remark need be made in passing—that as his private character has been without blemish, so is his public record unassailable. It may not be out of place, however, to call attention to the fact that it was through his unshaken firmness and unswerving fidelity to the law which he had sworn to uphold that gambling was finally successfully suppressed in St. Louis. In vain had every agency been employed before to accomplish the same result. The pulpit had thundered denunciation; the press had lifted up its voice against the evil; fleeced victims had complained to the police, who had in turn periodically raided the gambling dens with sledge hammers and batons; yet all efforts had proven futile until the arrival of Governor Johnson upon the scene. In him the gamblers recognized a foe of keen intellect, sterling integrity and iron will, a man to be neither deceived, cajoled, bought nor bullied.

In person Governor Johnson is spare, but well proportioned. His countenance is grave, yet benignant; thoughtful, but unclouded, indicating a mind well stored through deep research and capable of grasping at once the most profound problems, and the most intricate details. Nor does the face belie its promise. To comprehensive sagacity he joins unfailing accuracy, and to a subtle faculty of discrimination he unites a well-nigh inexhaustible fertility of expedient. Add to this rare combination of qualities in their highest form of development an almost incredible power of long-sustainedlong-sustained application, and you have an ideal lawyer, and it is only as a lawyer that he will be considered in these pages.

Either from natural predilection, or through force of circumstances, Governor Johnson’s most pronounced professional successes have been attained as a criminal practitioner. To sway a jury is his forte and his delight, and in the accomplishment of this end he well knows how to employ the keen shafts of polished sarcasm, the scathing denunciation of fiery invective, the cold logic of convincing argument, and the impassioned appeal to tender sympathy. It has been well and truly said of him that jurors enter the box as strangers to him, but leave it with a sentiment of respect akin to regard. He has learned how to reach and touch the secret springs of the human heart, and need acknowledge no master in originality, tact or delicacy of touch, before which tears succeed mirth, and in turn yield to indignation.

418His practice in the criminal courts has pitted him against such brilliant luminaries of the legal firmament as Uriel Wright (deceased), Senator George G. Vest, William Wallace, Judge Henry D. Laughlin, and Joseph G. Lodge (deceased), with a number of others equally as prominent in Missouri; Ex-Governor Palmer and William O’Brien, of Illinois; Ex-GovernorEx-Governor Jenkins, of Colorado; besides a long array of other eminent men. Before all these he has poised his lance like a true knight, nor can it be said of him that any of them have laid him low.

But distinguished as he is as an advocate before a jury, he has attained no less distinction as an examiner of witnesses. No fixedness of feature, no previous drilling in a cunningly-devised tale can hide the truth from his trained and watchful eye, which reads the secrets of the witnesses’ soul as though it were an open page.

Among the multitude of cases whose successful conduct has made him famous, a want of space forbids a mention of but a few.

One of his most noteworthy triumphs was obtained in the trial of the train-wreckers at Paola and Wyandotte in Kansas, when he and associates defeated the array of legal talent opposed to him by the trusted lieutenants of Jay Gould.

Another was his triumphant vindication of Fotheringham, the alleged dishonest messenger of the American Express Co., whose character he exonerated and for whom he secured the substantial damages of $20,000.

Another was in the successful defence at Gallatin, Mo., of the celebrated Frank James.

But what has always seemed to me to have been his crowning professional success was attained in the trial of Michael Horner, charged with murder in the first degree for the killing of Boswell, at Mt. Vernon, Lawrence Co., Mo. Both the accused and his victim had been farmers of Lawrence Co. for about five years before the commencement of the feud between them, which had its origin in a charge brought by Boswell against Horner (and denied by the latter) of seduction of the former’s sister. A succession of personal encounters ensued, but the combatants were always separated by mutual friends. At length, on July 18, 1885, Boswell, while at work in his field, saw Horner riding down the lane. Leaving his reaper and climbing the fence, he began a vigorous bombardment of his old enemy with fragments of rock. Horner, without dismounting, drew his revolver and emptied the contents of three chambers into the body of Boswell, who fell lifeless to the ground. In due time the slayer was arraigned, tried, found guilty of murder, and sentenced to confinement in the penitentiary for ninety-nine years. A second trial was granted, and occupied two weeks, 300 witnesses being summoned. The excitement throughout the country was intense, and the court-room was daily 419crowded by ardent sympathizers with either side. But Charles P. Johnson was for the defence, and so ably did he conduct and plead the cause of his client that the jury, after brief deliberation, returned a verdict of manslaughter in the fourth degree, and the penalty was fixed at a fine of $600. The scene which followed the reading of the verdict would need the pencil of a Hogarth to portray. Horner—who, despite all the efforts of his friends to secure his release on bail, had lain in jail since the killing—remained for a moment motionless through agitation; then jumping three feet into the air and wildly gesticulating, he shouted the Southern warhoop (known in the North as the “rebel yell”), which was taken up and repeated again and again by the vast crowd which packed the chamber to overflowing. In a delirium of joy, his young wife, hastily entrusting her baby to the nearest pair of arms, sprang toward the jury, whom she hugged and kissed by turns. Then both she and her husband mounted to the bench and grasped the judge by either hand, which they shook as vehemently as though they had been veritable pump-handles. In vain did the sheriff seek to restore order, but he was finally compelled to suffer the wild enthusiasm to find its vent. Horner was overwhelmed with congratulations, in which joined both friends and former foes. And in the midst of the wild confusion—in it, but not of it—stood the great advocate, whose genius, labor and eloquence had rendered such a result possible.

It may be that the reader will think that the author has been too lavish in his encomiums of this truly great man. Possibly so; yet the praise proceeds from the love of a grateful heart. Were I to find myself in the antipodes, and involved in difficulties calling for the aid of sound legal advice, the one man of all others to whom I would apply, and whose services, did my means permit, I should certainly retain, is Charles P. Johnson.

The reasons for my preference are easily explained. Governor Johnson, unlike many other lawyers who have attained prominence as practitioners in the criminal courts, does not desert his clients after he has secured their acquittal. To me he has proved a friend in need and in deed at the darkest hours of my life. He knows my character thoroughly; he has defended me more than once; and that I have not fallen into graver crimes than those which I now confess with shame, is due to his wise, fatherly counsels, and to the fact that he first implanted in my breast the desire to reform my life.

Nor is my case a solitary instance. His great brain is no less quick to conceive than is his great heart to execute. His quiet charity is as unostentatious as it is far reaching and comprehensive, and the number of those who owe their reformation to his patient, untiring efforts, will be known only when the secrets of all hearts are revealed.

Despite the fact that there is upon the statute books of New York a stringent law against gaming, the great American metropolis has been called—and not unjustly—the very paradise of gamblers. It is said, by carping critics, that there is scarcely a street without its gambling resort, all private, of course, yet the location of which is well known to those who indulge in that excitement.

The favorite game—as all over the North American continent—is faro, and the stakes vary according to the class to which the house belongs in which the game is played. In some of the lowest hells a stake of five cents is not despised. These houses are frequented by the poorest working men, discharged soldiers, broken down gamblers and street boys. In this connection it may be said, that of all the street boys in the world perhaps those of New York are most precocious. It is no uncommon sight to see a shoe-black, scarcely three feet high, walk up to the table or “bank,” as it is euphoniously termed, and stake a nickel with the air of a young spendthrift to “whom money is no object.”

At any of the later hours of the night, in any one of the cheap eating houses which abound in or near Broadway, from Spring Street north to Tenth Street, can be found one or more shabby-genteel men who bear unmistakable evidence in their speech, manner and appearance, of long continued, and generally disastrous, “fighting with the tiger.” These are the canaille of gamblers, who hang precariously on the edge of a terrible fascination, and manage to supply the necessities of life in a cheap way, from chance success in small bets and by a few dollars picked up by guiding more profitable customers to the houses where they are known. Strictly speaking, there are more “cappers” than gamblers. They are not only at the bottom of the “profession,” but their right to the proud (?) title of “sporting men” is stoutly denied by their more prosperous and reputable brethren of the green cloth. Improvident, uncertain in habits and language, unscrupulous, they are the natural products of sporting life, but which the faro banks nevertheless strive, although in vain, to shake off. Every house has several of these forlorn attaches, who play when they have money, and introduce a desirable stranger when they can; who are constant in their attendance upon the banquets that are daily spread in these houses, but are thus obliged to take the chances as to lodgings, and raiment. When they have worn threadbare the hospitality of the gaming house-keeper (as sometimes happens), they subsist—God and themselves alone know how.

Very different in most respects is another class of gamblers who can be seen any fine afternoon decorating Broadway with the splendor of their apparel, for, as a rule, the sporting fraternity is unexcelled in elegance of 421attire. If you meet in Broadway a man who lounges listlessly onward as though he had no well-defined object in life, and whose garments are cut in the latest style and of the finest material, you may wager he is a gambler in good luck, provided his silk hat is in the highest possible state of polish and his watch chain unusually massive. Very elegant in appearance, very quiet and gentlemanly in their demeanor, are these professional sports of the better class at all times and in all places. Gamblers of this type are usually men of intelligence far above the average, and among the hundreds of men eminent in science, literature and art who flock to the high-toned hells of New York, it is no easy task to find greater brilliancy of wit, higher polish of deportment, or more geniality of manner than are exhibited by the dealers at first-class metropolitan gaming-houses.

In the Bowery and on the side streets, may be met professionals of a very different class; brazen-faced men, with bristly mustaches and hair closely cropped like a convict, with apparel obtrusively gaudy and loaded with jewelry apparently of gold and precious stones. These are men to be avoided as the sharks which their appearance and their every act proclaim them to be. They are proprietors of, or “steerers” for the third-rate dens, where a “square” game is never played, even by accident. Should faro fail to return a profit, these fellows are ready to try anything else, from a game of poker down to outright robbery, as a means of obtaining money. Honest labor they abhor and despise. Any man, they say, can make a living by work, but it requires a smart man to get it without. They cherish a deep and abiding conviction of their own shrewdness; and their egregious conceit sometimes leads them to attempt some one of the confidence games in which “skinners” are adepts, in the perpetration of which they usually ingloriously come to grief through their native clumsiness. When they have no small dens of their own, their chief occupation and main reliance is as “ropers in,” and in view of their uncouth, repulsive appearance and address it is surprising that they are as successful as they are in enticing strangers into the wretched holes where they can be fleeced.

These strangers, thus inveigled, come under the name of “occasional players,” and are the vivification of all gambling, whether guided by the better class of ropers into gilded resorts, or by these vampires into the lower cribs. So long as one sporting man wins from or loses to another, no harm is done to the community at large, but no good is done the gamblers. It is the “occasional players” who furnish the means to replenish the faro banks, without which, they would soon be empty; the strangers who play not more than two or three times in their lives are the meat upon which these harpies fatten. It is not singular, that the novice is so apt to try his luck when he has once been induced to enter 422the gambling house. The universal game is faro; and looks so simple, so safe, so entirely fair, that the chances appear rather in favor of, than against the outside player.

It is made yet more alluring by its surroundings. Nowhere has sumptuous elegance been attained in such perfection as in the first-class gambling saloons of New York. Generally each has a suite of rooms, the largest of which is devoted to faro, with perhaps a roulette wheel in one corner, while others are sacred to short card games, and one is always exclusively used as a banqueting hall. All are furnished without regard to cost, but there is never anything in any of them to offend the most fastidious taste, although there may be sometimes a grim humor in some of the decorations, as is the case in one house where a magnificent oil painting of a tiger is suspended from the wall immediately over the table, so that none of the players can look up without meeting the glaring eye of the beast, which is held to be the presiding deity of the game. But such suggestions as this are very rare, as in general there is nothing anywhere but the faro table to declare the uses of the place. Take that away, and the visitor would imagine himself in the private parlors of a gentleman whose great wealth was fortunately equaled by his refined taste. This delusion would be strengthened by a seat at the banquet, where the viands are of all possible varieties, and the best quality, and are served with a finished elegance in the plate and all table appointments, including the waiters, which are not exceeded even in the most select private houses. At the table and on the sideboard in the saloon are liquors of excellent quality, which, although freely offered, are never pressed upon the visitor, and it is possible for a man to frequent these resorts for years without acquiring a taste for liquor. There is, in fact, very little drinking in them, and none at all of that fast and furious potation which hurries so many thousands of Americans to physical, mental and moral ruin. No sight is rarer in a first-class gaming house than to see a man maudlin drunk. An intoxicated man is never allowed to profane the place. If he appears in the person of a valuable patron, he is quietly led away, to be put to bed in some remote room; but if he comes as an unknown casual he is put into the street with little ceremony but without violence.

These statements, however, apply, of course, only to the first-class and most prosperous establishments. The places next in order ape them in everything, but are far below them in all. A second-class house has sometimes even more of glitter than its rival, but it is easy to see that it is pinchbeck grandeur. There is an absence, too, of the refined taste which presides over the decoration and furnishing of the better house. These rooms are glaringly painted, filled with odds and ends of furniture of all ages and patterns, so that they look not unlike the wards of a hospital for superannuated and diseased household goods turned over in 423their old age to the auctioneer’s hammer. The suppers and liquors, however, most plainly proclaim the lower caste of the place. While the variety of both is abundant, the first are execrably cooked and served, and the quality of the latter would not be strange to the most experienced patron of the ordinary Bowery saloons, which are proverbial for furnishing every kind of beverage except good.

But if the second grade houses are bad in these respects, there are some below them which are much worse. If a man can digest the so called “game suppers,” and survive any considerable drinking of the liquids which are offered as pure whiskey and brandy in the lowest classes of faro houses, he ought to be able to insure his life on the most favorable terms, and the appointments of these houses are in keeping with their entertainment. The chairs, sofas and carpets were of the most tawdry description when new, but are ragged with long and ill usage; the gambling checks, which range in price from twenty-five cents to one dollar, are grimed and dented with much handling; the faro table, elsewhere enticing with its newness and cleanliness, here is old and smeared with grease; the dealing-box, which in first-class houses is of pure and polished silver, here is of pewter, and dingy. So are all the minutiae of these places. They are repulsively suggestive of squalid and unprosperous vice; and if by any chance a gentleman enters, he leaves at once, to lose his money under more elegant, or at least cleaner, auspices.

Faro houses in New York have rarely exceeded one hundred in number, except during the latter part of the war, when speculation, going mad in Wall street, stalked over the land, demoralizing and ruining thousands. In those feverish times faro-playing naturally increased with stock gambling, and the faro houses multiplied until they fluctuated between one hundred and twenty and one hundred and thirty in number. Of late years, however, they have decreased, and a few years ago, when public excitement on the subject had given rise to the sensational statement that the city contained six hundred of them, ninety-two was the largest number that could be found open at any time. The number seems small in comparison to the size of the city, which, beside the large resident reckless population, contains tens of thousands of strangers, anxious not to miss any of the sensations of the metropolis. Yet these faro banks not only are enough to do all the business presented and enticed to them, but some of them have a very precarious life owing to the lack of custom. The first and second-class houses are under very heavy expenses, a principal item of which takes the shape of rent. They must be and are located in the principal thoroughfares near the leading hotels, with the exception of those anomalous institutions known as “day games,” which are found in Ann, Fulton, and Chambers streets, for accommodation of the business men, many of whom have acquired the bad habit of seeking solace for the 424vexations of legitimate transactions in the delights of faro. A seizure was made of these places lately, upon the ground that they are of all the gambling establishments in the city the most dangerous to the public. It is not necessary to endorse this statement in order to justify the attempt to suppress day gambling, but if activity in this direction is intended to excuse the toleration of all other houses, it will result in more of evil than good. The night houses, into which strangers are inveigled and robbed, are the resorts of young men of fortune, who here take the first step on a downward road which leads them and their families to shame and ruin, are worthy of at least equal attention. Beside being more frequented, these night houses have a much greater number of hours for play. The day houses are in full operation four or five hours per day, but in the night houses a game can be had in the afternoon and at any hour at night, while the average of play, take them altogether, is fully eighteen hours of each twenty-four. In the absorption and waste of capital, the half-score of day houses cannot be compared to those where most of the play is at night.

It is well-nigh impossible to get accurate statistics upon this point, and resort must therefore be had to approximate figures, which are, however, very near the exact truth. The faro banks of New York have as capital a little less than one million dollars, which is very unequally divided, as the ninety-two houses vary from $2,000 to $50,000 each, although only three or four have the latter amount, and the average banking capital is about $10,000. It is impossible to say what amount of money changes hands upon this basis. It is asserted that the average yearly winnings of all the banks taken together is about fifty per cent. over and above the expenditure required to keep up the establishments, so that every year these gamblers absorb about $500,000, while the gross profits are more than 100 per cent. These figures are conclusive that the way of the transgressor, if he be an occasional player rather than a dealer, is hard.

“Bunko Land,” on Broadway, of a fair summer evening, extends from Twenty-third to Thirty-third street. Here, meandering softly along in the twilight, or boldly facing the glare of the electric lamps, New York’s gamblers are to be seen in mid-summer and mid-winter alike. They know well enough who their friends in authority are. They are fully convinced that charges against McLaughlin and Carpenter, like charges against Williams—which have been so often and so unsuccessfully made—are not likely to come to anything as long as their friends are on deck. And that means, of course, just as long as the gamblers’ weekly stipend is forthcoming.

Until the furor over the raids on Nos. 86 Fulton street and 15 Ann street shall have faded out, as all the anti-gambling furors do, it will no 425doubt continue to be true that “gambling has stopped in New York.” That for the public. Of course, gambling never stops; it is only a little harder now to find a “game,” and a little harder to get into it after it is found. A couple of years ago all gambling was stopped in New York—officially—for eighteen months. John Daly moved from his familiar stand, No. 39 West Twenty-ninth street, to a private house on Forty-second street, and only admitted his “true friends,” and such of the public as could produce at the door, cards of invitation. There was a similar and general shifting of quarters and barring of doors in Ann street, Fulton, Barclay, Fourteenth streets, and at the famous old 818 Broadway, which goes on forever, apparently, however raids come and go. That sudden revolution in the habits and habitats of Gotham’s “sports” was due, just as their present stringency of circumstances is due, to a raid from authorities other than those locally in charge of the precincts where the gambling houses are situated.

All raids, to be in any degree effectual, must be made either directly from Police Headquarters, or by Comstock’s or Whitney’s men. This bold assertion is not made—everybody knows it is true—for the purpose of warranting inferences as to the integrity of the officers immediately in charge of the district where the games are in progress, but because it states an undeniable fact. Inferences are easy. This is one of the few readily accessible facts about gambling.

There are gambling games to which the initiated can gain access now at No. 39 West Twenty-ninth street, in Fourteenth street, the second door from Thiess’, at No. 818 Broadway, at Gallagher’s in Barclay street, at Delacey’s in Chatham Square, at Nos. 12 and 15 Ann street—all close together—Bret Haines’ in Barclay street, and at a good many quiet haunts of tigers so well trained that their footsteps are like velvet and their howl is inaudible. So it is scarcely necessary to go for mere sport to Phil Daly’s Long Branch Club, against which “Baron” Pardonnet has been waging such an ineffectual warfare, or to the famous Saratoga Club, at which “Colonel” Shepard has been vainly launching the awful curse of his boycott.

The raid which made John Daly move, and which produced so great a stringency in the chip market for the time being, started at No. 1 Ann street. It is rarely that an eye-witness describes, from the inside, an official descent on a gambling house. There are generally too many personal reasons for silence. Here is a description by a player at the time of that famous raid. It might also serve as a good description of almost any raid on New York games:

426“I had just ‘coppered’ $5 on the queen to the intense disgust of a half dozen fellows who were playing her to win, when the ‘nigger’ who kept door came bounding upstairs, three steps at a time, fairly pale in the face, and whispered to the proprietor:

“‘Boss, there’s some men at the door that won’t go away, and say they’ll break the door down if I don’t let ’em in.’

“‘Quick!’ answered the proprietor, ‘open the door and ask ’em to step right up.’ The words were not out of his mouth before he had slipped the bank roll into the safe, gathered all visible chips of the banks, and asked all the players to gather up theirs, stuck the chips into the safe and locked the safe door, saying, ‘Boys, put your chips in your pockets and come around this afternoon and I’ll cash ’em in for you.’ In a flash all evidence of present gaming were wiped out. There were only a couple of tables, a dozen or so players, the proprietor, smiling blandly, and—a policeman in sight.

“In less time than it takes to tell all this the still shivering door-keeper had ushered in three ‘plain clothes’ men from headquarters. At the same time the police officer, in full uniform, who was already in the room—and who had been playing with the rest of us, mind you—edged towards the door so as to seem to have come in with and after the raiding officers. He was the worst frightened man in the crowd. But, with quite remarkable presence of mind, considering the strain on him, the officer in uniform stepped promptly back into the foreground, with a pitying smile on his face, and seizing the beard of the proprietor of the game, said to the raiding officers, who looked as if they wondered where he had come from:

“‘And sorry I am, gentlemen,’ ‘Bud’ interrupted, with a bow and a smile, ‘to make your acquaintance under such unfavorable circumstances! What will you have to drink?’

“You could have knocked me down with a feather. ‘This then,’ thought I, as all hands stepped up to the sideboard and took a friendly drink; ‘this then, is one of those terrible raids we read so much about!’

“The“The players, fortunately for me, were not molested in the least. They melted away into the early morning gloom (it was then about 2 o’clock), and the officers who carted away the cards, the faro layouts and the roulette wheel, melted away to headquarters and made their report, and that afternoon we all went back and Kirby cashed our chips—of course he knew just about how many were out—and everything was lovely. No officer thought of touching the safe which contained the ‘roll,’ the only thing of any great value about the establishment, and nobody suffered any great loss or discomfort. But there wasn’t any more dealing there for a great many months. And maybe the officer in uniform, 427who was playing there in blissful ignorance that a raid was to be made, didn’t catch it from Kirby for not giving him warning!”

A few weeks ago, before the spasm of virtue which constricted the public circulation of chips, a New York business man—whose name may be put down as Allan Allriver, being not altogether unlike the same—was approached on Twenty-eighth street by a professional gambler of his acquaintance who had paraded Broadway and hung about the corners until he was almost on his uppers. “Look here, Mr. Allriver,” said the gambler, “let’s you and I open a gambling house. I know of a good ranch on this very street that we can rent cheap, and if you’ll furnish the roll and let me run the game we’ll both make a barrel of money.”

“That’s“That’s all right,” answered Allriver, “but what’s to prevent us from being pulled the very first night?”

“I’ve inquired into that,that,” replied the gambler, “and am assured on high authority that we will be guaranteed police protection for exactly $25 a week. The usual price is from $25 up $100; we are getting off cheap.”

Mr. Allriver is still thinking about this offer and the remarkable statement with it. There is food for thought in it for the tax-payers. But the charge that police officials are bribed by gamblers is—as the old English Judge said about the charge of assault on women—“most easy to make and most difficult to disprove.” It has the advantage, however, of being even more difficult to prove.

Suppose a police captain or lieutenant were paid $25 a week by the proprietor of a gambling house for protection or advance notice of raids, no papers, or writing, or receipt, or voucher of any kind will pass between them. The proprietor and the police officer will not meet, nor will they be seen or known to communicate with each other in any way except through trusted intermediaries. Through them, one representing the “sports” and the other the “boss cops,” the agreement will be made and the money will be paid. They may meet each other and slide a “wad” from fist to fist as they shake hands on Broadway of a fine afternoon, or they may do their business over a friendly glass of beer at a Sixth avenue saloon table about 2 A. M. If either of these agents tries to squeal, his principal promptly denounces and disavows all knowledge of him. Then who is believed, the poor, unknown, characterless go-between or the “reputable business man” and “faithful police official?”

The elaborate system of bolts, bars, chains, double doors, and the like, which confronts one—either stranger in search of sport, or officer in search of prey—at the entrance of an established gambling house is not 428intended as a direct barrier to the admission of those in authority. Unauthorized raiders are of course kept out by this means. But no proprietor of a gambling house in New York would dare to maintain that system of defense in the face of known police or detective authority. It would “get the force down on him” forever. When an opening is demanded “in the name of the law,” the bolts are shot back, the chains loosened, the big nail-studded doors are unlocked. But all this undoing, and unloosening and unfastening takes so much time that the proprietor has had an opportunity before the police get into the “hell” itself to put away that which he wishes to conceal, and to put it away so securely that all the police in town couldn’t find it unless they tore down the walls and pulled up the flooring. It is quite needless to say that the players, if they choose, may also utilize this interval by escaping over the roof or down the back stairs.

That some of the New York gambling houses are, or have been, directly connected with Police Headquarters by means of a private wire, or at least with the nearest station house from which a raid would be most likely to be made, is firmly believed by some sporting men. But how prove it? Quien Sabe? Certain it is that there are no “slicker” citizens nor more artful dodgers, no more long-headed law breakers in this great city of “slick” citizens and artful dodgers, than are the professional gamblers. Not so very long ago, when the notoriety of John Daly’s, as a first-class gambling house, almost across the street from the Gilsey was becoming a little too loud, a stranger who in the language of the street, thought he was “fly” and who had found out—he thought—just what door to knock at to find Daly’s and a game, hammered at the door in question vociferously and was surprised to have the door opened in his face by a neat maid-servant, who asked him what his business was, assured him the place was an apartment house for gentlemen and offered to show him the rooms. He was dumfounded and retreated in good order.

Next door, all the while, was an innocent-looking millinery shop. He watched out of the hotel window hour after hour the next day, until he saw a gambler, with whom he was acquainted, come down the steps from “the apartment house.” He sauntered over, joined his friend whom he had known in Denver, and asked him to show him a game, and was taken into “the apartment house.” A large and massive-looking hat rack adorned the back hall. Seizing it by two of the hat pegs, the gambler gave it a slight twist and turned it on its well-oiled axis, disclosing a door into the rear of the first floor of the next house. Here, back of the “millinery store,” the festive roulette ball was clicking and the tiger was bucking and being bucked vigorously. Such is life in a large city!

It is on the parlor cars returning from Monmouth and Brighton Beach that the New York gamester is seen in little groups of three or four in the gayest of his mid-summer aspects. No matter if he hasn’t won a single bet all day, the gambler is “blooded” and must ride home in a parlor car. There is a group composed of three of the typical Gothamite race gamblers. The car has hardly started from the track before the porter has slipped into its nickel-plated sockets the tidy little table, which may serve either for cards or lunch. A crisp white napkin is deftly spread over it and a “cold bottle” produced, with three glasses, on a silver tray, from the porter’s larder. A cold chicken is brought out with some slices of white bread and a pot or two of golden butter. No Rothschild or Vanderbilt could order or eat a better meal under the circumstances, or sit down after a day of “sport” to a more inviting-looking board while whirling homeward on the rail in an easy chair. Yet these three men are plain, ordinary, common, badly-dressed, thick-fingered, blear-eyed and uncouth-looking “gams.” There is no “gentleman John Oakhurst” about them. Many New Yorkers recognize them and some nod as they pass on.

The big-boned man, with the ruddy, clean-shaven face, short, stiff gray hair and puffy eye-lids, eats the food earnestly and laughs, and talks in an even coarse voice. At present he is the life of the party. He wears a grayish-brown check suit, not very “loud,” a faded derby, and his fingers need a manicure. They are thick at the ends and do not look capable of deft manipulation. No doubt their owner can deal off the bottom of the pack if he wants to, without detection. He looks about fifty-two. His companions are younger. One of them wears an outlandish-looking round-crowned straw hat and a shabby suit of clothes. He has a pert, feverish-looking, but insignificant face, a red mustache and a tilted nose. The third is good-looking, dark and quiet. They talk eagerly and simultaneously, and not at all quietly of the races and of the bets, and their winnings and losings. By and by the table is cleared away and the “cold bottle” put on and big cigars are brought by the steward, who is told to “fetch the best he’s got.” Nobody has any more fun coming home from the races than professional gamblers have. They are not half bad at heart, perhaps. Before lighting the biggest cigars the steward’s got, they take off their hats and ask the only two ladies in this parlor car full of men if they have any “objection to smoke.”

The most interesting plunger at cards in New York to-day is, in all probability, that broken-down shoe-cutter yonder, who looks scarcely “good for a ten-cent drink,” but who, not very long ago, made the old-timers’ hair stand on end. His name is Bolt McHackin, and his home is in Newark. McHackin is, when not “on a tear,” one of the most skillful 430shoe-cutters in the country, and able to earn from $60 to $75 a week at his trade. His shears turn out fashionable “uppers” with a celerity and skilfulness rarely found and highly prized. When he has worked hard for three or four weeks and earned a couple of hundred dollars he gambles with a reckless prodigality. In more than one game he has risen from the table a loser to the full amount of his stakes, returning to his work not one whit wiser, and only waiting to try his experiment again. He has been known to make large winnings. Yet to “break a bank” where all the appliances for playing a “brace” game are ready at hand has been demonstrated to be an impossibility.

If any doubt exists in the mind of the reader as to the truth of the exposure of the “faked” devices described in this volume, the author would especially commend to the attention of such skeptics the following catalogue, issued by a New York house, which is here reproduced, verbatim et literatim; only the publisher’s name being suppressed. Similar catalogues are being scattered broadcast over the land. They fall into the hands of young men, to whose curiosity and imagination they appeal with fatal effect. They are easily obtained, anyone may secure one by asking for it, and the United States mail service will safely carry and promptly deliver it. Do parents wish their sons, just entering into manhood, to be exposed to such snares as these here set for the unwary? Need any further argument be adduced to justify the author in the publication of this work?

That fraudulent devices of the character described are manufactured and sold is conclusively demonstrated by the issuance and dissemination of catalogues such as this. It is the mission of the Fools of Fortune to strike at the root of this evil by holding up to the ridicule as well as the condemnation of the public the schemes and tricks by which such unprincipled scoundrels seek to debauch the morals of the young, and defraud any victim whom chance may send to their net.

The author believes that the average reader will peruse this catalogue with mingled emotions of interest, surprise and disgust. To the uninitiated it will prove a revelation of depravity at once horrifying and appalling. Yet in itself it confirms and corroborates every statement herein made as to the practices and methods of professional gamblers. The picture is a dark one, yet if it is defective in its fidelity to truth, the fault lies in a deficiency rather than an excess of coloring. Like vampires, these men fasten themselves upon the body of society, ready to draw from its veins the very life current on which its existence depends.

431The following letter from a New York dealer in sporting goods explains itself:

“Dear Sir:—In reply to yours, there is only one sure way to win at cards, etc., and that is to get Tools to work with and then to use them with discretion, which is the secret of all Gambling and the way that all Gamblers make their money.

Yours truly,

—— ——.

ADVANTAGE, OR MARKED BACK PLAYING CARDS.

By which you can tell the color, suit and size, as well by the backs as by the faces. They are an exact imitation of the fair playing cards in common use, and are adapted for any game, where it would be impossible for your opponent to win, as you would know just what he had in his hand and could act accordingly. These cards can be learned in an hour with the instructions which are sent with each pack, so that you can tell every card the instant you see it, both size and suit.

N. B. Be sure and ask for the Key or Directions, as without them the cards would be of no use to you unless you are a first-class professional gambler.

THE POKER RING.

An ingenious little contrivance for Marking the cards while playing, in a perfectly safe and systematic manner, so that in half an hour you can tell each card as well by the back as by the face. Although it is not as yet generally known, it is now in use by a few of the oldest and best professional players in the country. Anybody can use it at once.

For second dealing they are invaluable, and no second dealer should be without one for a day. But comment is unnecessary, as anyone understanding second dealing will see in an instant its value, the moment the subject is brought to his mind.

SKELETON BOXES.

German Silver. A sure thing for dealer to win every time at Red and Black, or Red, White and Blue.

ROULETTE WHEELS.

Faked Roulette Wheels that can be made to come Red or Black, or High or Low Number, just as the dealer desires, a sure thing every time.

MARKED BACK PLAYING CARDS.

Square Corners, per pack, by mail, postpaid	$ 1 00
” ” 6 packs	5 00
” ” 12 ”	9 00
Round ” per pack	1 25
” ” 6 packs	6 50
” ” 12 ”	12 00

FARO TOOLS.

Hart’s Faro Dealing Cards, unsquared, per doz.	$15 00
Also, the same in any form, “Rounds and Straights,” “End Rounds” or “Wedges,” per pack	2 25
Same, per dozen, by express	25 00
432Two Card Dealing Boxes, top sight tell, top balance, improved Lever or End Squeeze	$50 00, $75 00
Back Up Second Card Box for Red and Black, Gaff and Pull Back,	$30 00, $35 00, 40 00
Dealing boxes of every description made to order and repaired. Top balance, End Squeeze and Lever constantly on hand.
Card Punches, best	2 00 3 00
Glass paper, better than sand, per doz. sheets	1 00

ROULETTE, RONDO AND BALL GAMES.

Roulette Wheels, finest in the world	$500 00
” ” Spreads, cloth, double, 13.6×5 ft	70 00
High Ball Poker Balls, round, each	20
” ” ” Bottle, used with rubber cord, without balls	10 00

POOL AND SPINDLE GAMES.

Mutual Pool Machines	$150 00 and $200 00
Rolling Faro, 28 Aces and 4 Horses (with fake)	60 00
” ” 28 Cards and 4 Jacks (with fake)	60 00
” ” on cloth, with Spindle	20 00
Wheels of Fortune, 36 inch, 8 colors, 16 spaces, with Nickel Plated Spindle and Socket	10 00
Wheels of Fortune, 36 inch, 8 colors, 16 spaces, with wooden Spindle	8 00

DICE GAMES.

Bunko Chart, “Special Drawing,” without tickets	$5 00
Bunko Tickets, per set of 56	2 00
Ivory Dice, for top and bottom, 3 fair with Ringer	1 00
” ” double, 3 high, 3 low, 3 fair	2 00
” ” loaded, ” ” ”	5 00
Loaded Ivory Dice (Chinese make), beats everything, $2.00 each; per set of 9, 3 high, 3 low and 3 fair to match	10 00
Ivory Dice Tops, to throw high or low	2 50
Rolling Dice, or Log, for high or low	5 00
Dice Cups, harness leather, best in use	50c., 75c., 1 50

SHORT GAMES.

Monte Tickets, or Broads, per doz., by express	$ 5 00
Patent Knives, with lock, new pattern	5 00
Patent Safes, with two openings, ivory	5 00
Shiner, for reading cards dealt opponents	60
” ” ” ” ” in half dollars	1 00
Vest Hold Out, with late improvements	10 00
Table Hold Out, something new, worked with knee	10 00
The “Bug,” for holding out an extra card	1 00
Crayon Pencils, case of 12 colors	1 00

433KENO SETS.

Spring Peg Board for 200 pegs	$20 00
Pool Globes, Polished Walnut, Keno Nozzle	6 00
Large Sized Leather Bottle, Patent Nozzle	10 00
With 90 Numbered Ivory Balls	30 00

THE SKELETON CARD TRIMMER.

Or new style Stripper Plates for cutting strippers. We now offer our new style stripper plates with several new improvements attached. They can be used either with knife or shears and can be set to trim coarse or fine as desired, with movable guage to cut at any angle, best steel plates with brass screw and guages with pin socket and hinge plates.

CRAP DICE.

In reference to dice, loaded dice come inin sets of “9”—dice, viz.: 3 High, 3 Low and 3 Fair to match. But loaded dice, generally speaking, are not strong enough for craps, as it is impossible to load dice so as to make them come up any particular number every time; the best that can possibly be done is to make them come up about every other time on an average. They are generally used to beat Sweat or to throw High or Low, or to bet on averages, or in various other ways, too numerous to mention, to get the money.

The best way to fix dice for craps is to have one dice with 2 aces, 2 fives and 2 sixes on, and one with 2 threes, 2 fours and 2 fives on. With this pair of dice it is impossible to throw 7, and there is only one possible chance to throw eleven. But, if you want dice to throw 7 or 11 sure, the only way we know of is to have one pair thus: one dice with all sixes and one with all fives on to throw eleven; and one with all fours and one with all threes on to throw seven; or, one with all fives, one with all deuces on to throw seven.

NOTICE TO BILLIARD AND POOL PLAYERS AND DICE THROWERS—HIGH BALL POKER.

A New Game.—This is something just out, and for your business the best thing in the country, a dead sure thing always, no mistakes made with this. You have always got them, and can throw a high or low ball SURE EVERY TIME. This sounds like an advertisement, but I will guarantee every word of the above or will willingly refund the money; that you can control the balls is certain, and that is all you want to win the money betting on the balls as they come out of the bottle. It beats all dice throwing to death. Let all dice throwers who make dice their specialty take notice it will win Dollars where dice wins Pennies. Any man can get a game with it in a Billiard Saloon, and to get a game is to get all the money there is in the house. In his travels with one of these he can win a Million. The game is called High Ball Poker, and is simply this: 2 or 20 players put up their ante the same as in draw poker at cards, then each player draws one ball; he looks at it and bets whatever he likes if his ball is a high number, or if it is small he passes the same as with a good or bad hand at poker. The next man can raise him, and so on; if all pass he takes the pool, or if anyone calls him they then draw one ball more, or two balls as agreed upon and bet again. If the hand is called they show down and the highest hand takes the money; if there is no call the one that made the last raise takes the pool, the same as 434in draw poker without showing his hand. This is to save him from showing too many good hands, as he may stand in with the dealer; but whether he does or not it is a regular House game for the dealer, as he takes a check out for the house every time a hand that counts over a certain number regulated by himself as a percentage to pay room and other expenses, the same as any club room. He also takes out one check every time the pool is passed out three times in succession, the same as JACK POTS. With Faked Bottle and Balls the dealer can get all the money in the game anyhow. If he dont stand in with anybody he can make one player win this time and give him two big balls, high enough to count the percentage and take out one check, next time give another player two balls high enough to count the percentage and take out another check, and so on all night; and when the game closes he will have most of the checks in the box or kitty. Or he could play himself and win four or five of the big pools during the night and lose twenty small pools to square himself—do it gracefully and with some judgment and win $15 or $20 and make it appear he has lost. It can be introduced into club rooms, and made to take the place of draw poker with cards. It is attractive and fascinating, and played the same as draw, and the novice would rather play it, as he knows there will be no shuffling up on him, no monkey work with the cards, and he has as good a chance as the gambler and won’t be afraid to play alongside of him any more than he would at faro bank. That is all there is to the game, but there is a dozen other ways to win with it besides High Ball Poker, viz.: by betting on averages as with dice or raffling for a watch, etc., or betting that you can beat another man’s throw or that he can beat your throw, and other things too numerous to mention. It is a good thing and anyone who wants to win big money is foolish if he don’t have one. Anyone can use it to perfection in one minute as good as he can in ten years (there is no practice or skill required), as soon as he is shown where the Fake is, which is fully explained in the directions and you can’t help understanding it as soon as you touch the Fake; and nobody can tell when you work it, even if they know all about it, any more than they can with a Pull Back Box. Price with full directions;

Faked Bottle and 25 Ivory Balls, Round face	$15 00
Faked Bottles, each	10 00

THE BUG.

This is an entirely new invention, for the purpose of “holding out” any number of cards, and it will do it! It is very simple in its construction, easy to operate, and any person who knows that two and two are four can use it. It can be carried in the vest pocket all the time, is always ready for use, and not liable to get out of order, but should it do so any watchmaker can put it in order for a trifle, as the whole expense of manufacture is only about fifty cents. “Then why ask $3.00 for it?” you may say. For this reason—That one is all you will ever want to buy, as they do not wear out like cards. Also, after seeing it you can get one made as well as I can, and make them for your friends and sell them to all the sporting men in your vicinity, thereby injuring my trade and I get nothing for my invention; and you will wonder that the thing was never thought of before. With it you can “hold out” one or twenty cards, shift and make up your hand to suit, and your hands and person are at perfect liberty all the time. Your opponent may look in your lap and up your sleeve, but there is nothing to be seen! After having used it once you would not be without it for any price, as, like all good inventions, its simplicity is a great point in its favor, and any sporting man who has ever seen or knows its value, would not hesitate to pay $10.00 for one if he could not get it for less; and then he would be doing a wise thing and getting more than the value of his money at that. This valuable little tool will be sent, free by mail, with full and complete directions for using it.

435THE SPY.

This simple and valuable little Advantage Tool, with which you can read each card as it leaves the pack, has now reached Perfection, as far as we are concerned, as we have steadily improved upon it until we can improve no further.

The Reflector, which is convex, is imported direct from France, and is made specially for this purpose. It can be used in perfect safety either in the table or on the knee, and should the suspicion of any of the players be aroused it can be removed in an instant; your hand completely covers it, as it is only the size of a silver half dollar, and you can hold a half dozen of them without their being seen; you are at perfect liberty with your hands all the time, and if you wish you can be using the Bug or Strippers, or any other advantage implement with your hands at the same time, without interfering with the spy in the least, but anything else would be unnecessary, as the spy is to the ordinary player advantage enough in itself.

STRIPPERS.

The benefit of these cards can be estimated only in one way, and that is: How much money has your opponent got? For you are certain to get it, whether it is $10 or $10,000; the heavier the stakes the sooner you will break him, and he never knows what hurt him.

For Poker they are a sure thing, for what could be better than to hold the best hand, which you certainly can do with these cards; or, for playing Seven Up, what better thing would you want than to have your opponent deal you three aces every time he deals, with a chance of the fourth; or in playing Euchre to force your opponent to give you or your partner three bowers every time he deals, in spite of himself. These cards will do it.

In sending for Strippers be sure and state what game you wish to play with them, so that I can send you cards especially adapted for that game.

ONE OF THE LATEST—THE RED, WHITE AND BLUE GAME.

This is a new game, and one of the latest out; it is a sure thing for the dealer. With it you can make any player lose or win the Pool 100 times in succession if you like. It is so finely guaged that it cannot be detected, and any professional gambler can watch you as much as he likes. It will be useless, he cannot see anything. You could play all day with it and never know there was anything wrong with it, or be able to cheat with it, unless it was shown to you or explained with the directions that go with it, and yet it is as easy as tossing up a cent, head or tail, and anyone—a child ten years old—can work it as true and as easy as a professional gambler. No false movements to create suspicion, everything looks natural and fair and above board, and anybody will play the game, as it is very interesting and nobody but the dealer can tell whether it is square or not. Even another dealer that knows all about it could not tell by looking at you whether you were dealing square or not, but of course he would know enough not to play against you, as you have the power all in your own hands and of course would make him lose. It is a new game, and very few of the gamblers have got hold of it yet. It is a very fancy affair, finely polished box, handsome layout and 16 best ivory balls, all numbered regular, etc. Anyone can make money with it, and one night’s play will win twice the amount it cost, or in one month’s steady play anyone could win $1,000 with it. And after you had won all the money there was to be got you could show and explain it to any fly man, and if he did not know where to get one, you could sell it to him for three times the money it cost you, and he would be glad to get it. It is a good thing for anyone that wants to win. Full and explicit instructions for working sent with the outfit.

436MARKED BACK BARCELONA MONTE CARDS.

The want of this article has long been felt by the sporting men on the Pacific Coast and South and Western States and Territories. But of the thousands of gamblers who could win barrels of money with them, none have been willing to pay the price for them or the first cost of getting up plates, engraving, printing, etc. Therefore none have been made for the past fifteen years; and anyone that deals the game or plays it, or knows anything about the game, will see at once the value of a pack of cards with which they tap a game for all it is worth, in a minute, and anyone that will not pay for the privilege of a sure thing to break a Monte game had better go to work on the railroad, for he can make more money there than he can gambling. Or any Great American Smart Dealer that will not pay to protect his game from being broke, had better go with the other man on the railroad, as he is not qualified to deal his or anybody else’s money away, for with these cards the dealer can always tell exactly where three or four cards lay in the pack all the time, and act accordingly, and such a percentage with the dealer is worth half a dozen packs of cards each deal. Some gamblers seem to forget, or never to have known, that there is only one way to gamble successfully, and that is to get Tools to gamble with.

TO POKER AND SHORT CARD PLAYERS—VEST HOLD OUT.

[Note.—This is a verbatim copy of the manufacturer’s circular.]

Gents: I am now prepared to furnish you with the latest improved Vest Holdout, which for simplicity finish and Durability is Par Excellence. It will not break or get out of order, anybody can use it, it works smooth and noiseless and is as perfect as it can be made after many years of careful study. It does away entirely with the old fashioned and clumsy Breast Plate, it is now an article of merit and Value received for the money 10 times over, anybody can use it successfully with very little practice without fear of Detection for months in any game where it has not been previously exposed. Like all modern improvements its simplicity is greatly in its favor, it is strong and serviceable, no springs to Rust or Break or weaken and get out of order, in fact it is the Modern Holdout and if the man will do his work the machine will do its work. N. B. do not confound my Vest Holdout with the Sleeve machine as I don’t make or sell the Sleeve machines any more they are a failure and not practical, I have seen all the different kinds that have been made for years, and I will give One Hundred Dollars to anyone that will bring me a Sleeve machine that can be worked effectually without Detection this offer stands good for one year, and is open to all Gamblers. The only Holdout I now make is the Vest Holdout which I occasionally use myself as opportunity offers, and I know it is practical and with an ordinary amount of caution it can be used in 8 out of 10 of all the Gamblers Games in the country, any old Poker player knows that if he can win 5 or 6 of the Big Pools during the night and play on his judgement or on the square during the remainder of the night and hold his own he is bound to get all the money in time. This is the proper way to use the Vest Holdout and if used on this principle any ordinary Poker player with a moderate amount of discretion can use it month after month in 9 out of every 10 Poker Games in the country, it is a fine Invention and any one that plays cards for a living need it more than they do snide Jewelry or Flashy Clothes with holes in their pockets instead of Dollars. There is but one way to gamble successfully and that is to get Tools to work with and have the best of every Game you get into.

THE LATEST AND BEST ATTRACTION OUT—NEW STOP WHEEL.

The attention of all outside men, and of all who make it their business to work the fairs, races, bathing places, picnics, watering places, excursions, etc., is called to this 437wheel. It is invaluable, and is undoubtedly the cheapest and most attractive wheel made in this country for the money. It is a sure thing, and can be completely controlled by the dealer so as to defy detection, who can make it stop at any point desired. You can let the players spin it if they wish; it makes no difference, you can control it all the same. It is very simple, and anybody can work it to perfection with the instructions that are sent with each wheel. It is about two feet in size, and the whole weight does not exceed eight pounds. The whole apparatus can be carried with ease by one man; picked up in a second and moved to another place, and set down and started again without a minute’s delay. I have no hesitation whatever in saying that any man with as much sense as a monkey, with one of these wheels at any fair or race track, or any place where a large crowd is assembled, must get a game, and to get a game is a sure thing to get the money.

There is only one gambling house in Newport. It maintains a genteel monopoly of all business in this place. It is an old-fashioned looking building far back in the shadow of its grounds and garden, looking quite as respectable in its sombre age as the most respected of Newport villas. I do not think many of the residents are aware of its existence. Of course the diplomats and American swells have discovered its locality, but they are pledged to the secrecy of its interior as securely as the front door. It is very difficult to get in during business hours, and the little slide shutter is carefully opened before the latchet of the front door is raised. No one knows how much money is lost or won in this select quarter. Its mysteries are equal in their methods of secrecy almost to the system of Nihilism in Russia. The man who is the “responsible party” in the concern is a Mr. Abel. If he had been called Cain he would probably have been a Sunday school superintendent, such is the irony of fate. I think that if these summer resorts must actually have a gambling house, it would be advisable to use the exclusive methods that control this Newport establishment.

Of course, this statement does not include gambling at the great caravansaries and in private cottages. As to gaming of this character—which is essentially and necessarily private—it is impossible to do more than guess at its extent. Rumor has it that stakes running up into the tens of thousands are nightly lost and won, and that more than one member of the mythical “400” has found it necessary to abridge his stay at this famous watering place in consequence of losses at poker. These private games, however, are played among gentlemen, and “professionals” are strictly excluded. Yet the inherently corrupting influence inseparable from gambling is always present; nor should it be forgotten that a pill is none the less efficacious as a medicament because it is sugar-coated.

Gambling has existed to a greater or less extent on the peninsula on which stands the present great city of San Francisco, ever since the Spaniards first settled there. In the ’30’s and early ’40’s, whalers and trading vessels made the bay of San Francisco one of their regular stopping places, and when in port the captains of these vessels and the Alcalde of the place—then called Yerba Bueno—had many “hot rubs” at “monte.” It was not, however, until the great influx of gold seekers in 1848-49, that gambling obtained any marked prominence. But with the stream of gold that soon began pouring into the young metropolis of the West, there sprang up, as if by magic, games of chance of every description, which were kept running night and day.

These gaming houses were conducted on the main floors of the most pretentious houses in the infant city, and were really palaces in their way. A description of one will serve for a description of all, so we will glance into the “El Dorado,” located at the southeast corner of Washington and Kearney Streets, on the spot where afterwards stood the old “Jenny Lind Theatre,” which was eventually sold to the city and used as a City Hall, and now serves as the City Receiving Hospital. In its early days, it was a large square room, the walls of which were covered with costly paintings; at the farther end was a raised platform, on which was an excellent orchestrion; in one corner stood the bar, behind the cut glass bottles on which were arranged costly plate-glass mirrors. A side board, loaded down with choice viands, occupied a prominent place, while scattered through the room were tables, on which were kept running every known game of chance. Faro was the principal game, although the “monte,” “roulette” and “chuck-a-luck” tables were always well patronized.

Speculation in those days ran riot, and everybody gambled. The miners, after making a successful “clean up,” would go “down to the bay” to have a little recreation, or, perhaps, to send their earnings to dear ones in the far off States. But a visit to one of the gaming houses, which was generally the first place called upon, together with a free indulgence in liquor, usually resulted in the miner’s seeking some friend who might “stake” him with enough money to enable him to get back to the mines, and the wives and children in the East were compelled to wait until more dust could be gathered. Merchants, after they had closed their stores, would risk their day’s profits, which often amounted to thousands of dollars, on the turn of a single card, and if they lost, would go to their homes, hoping for better luck the next day. Mechanics, artisans, laborers, tradesmen, all risked their wages in the games, and won or lost with equal indifference.

The quantity of coin in circulation was very limited, while greenbacks 439were unheard of at that time. Gold dust and nuggets formed the principal medium of circulation, and nobody was over particular about giving or receiving the exact weight. An ounce, (Troy weight), was worth $20, and all payments were based on that scale. Shop keepers took their pay in dust, and laborers received their weekly wages in ounces. Each table in the gambling houses had its tiny scales for weighing gold, and the players, no matter what their condition was, were sure of receiving their just dues.

All the big games were “square,” and woe betide the sharper who attempted his tricks on anybody and was caught at it. If not killed, he was run out of town, nor did he dare soon to return. Occasionally a “sure thing” gambler would start a house, but as soon as suspicion was aroused that he was not running a “square” game, his tables were deserted and he was soon starved out.

Besides the “El Dorado,” the “Bella Union,” on the north west corner of Washington and Kearney, the Union, on Merchant and Kearney streets, the “Parker House,” “Meade House” and “Bill” Brigg’s place, on Montgomery street, near Pine, were some of the largest gambling houses that were running in 1849-50. In the latter year these were nearly all destroyed by fire, but were immediately rebuilt, and the number increased by the erection of several other places. During the early 50’s the “Mazourka,” “Arcade,” “Varsouvienne,” “Fontine” and “Meade” Houses were in full operation and doing a thriving business.

Among the ranks of the old-time San Francisco faro dealers, death has wrought sad havoc and but few are left of the men whose tables were nightly piled with tens of thousands of dollars worth of yellow dust.

Of the living gamblers, perhaps the best known man is “Ed.” Moses, who may be seen around the Occidental and Palace Hotels every day. His short, thin figure is bent with age, while the eyes that have so often in the past watched the sliding of the cards from the little tin box, are dimmed and sunken. The hands that years ago handled those same cards with marvelous grace and dexterity are swollen to enormous size with rheumatism. Mr. Moses enjoys the distinction of playing the heaviest game of faro on record. It was one day, years ago, that he dropped into one of the gambling resorts—not his own—no limit was placed on the betting in those days, but the dealer soon became frightened at the size of Moses’ bets. His signature was good for any amount under $1,000,000 for if he did not have money himself, he could easily raise it. The play grew stronger and stronger; everybody else dropped out of the game and left Moses a clean field. At first, luck was with him and he 440won heavily, but the fickle goddess soon deserted him. With his losses, his bets increased until at last he drew an I. O. U. for $60,000 and played it straight on a single card. It lost, and “Ed.”“Ed.” Moses sauntered up to the bar and asked all hands to drink, $200,000 poorer than when he entered the room an hour before. Moses has long since ceased gambling and is now living quietly on a snug little income. His fortune is not great, but large enough to grant him every luxury he desires.

Another old timer and a boon companion of Moses, is Colonel “Jack” Gamble. Col. Jack’s principal occupation is drinking the mellowestmellowest “bourbon” to be had and longing for the days of the Argonauts. “Bill” Briggs, who was well known throughout the country for his charitable deeds, died a few months ago. He was the last of the old timers to abandon faro in San Francisco. “Tom” Maguire, of theatrical fame, also kept a gambling palace in ’49-’50. Thomas J. A. Chambers kept the old “El Dorado.” “Put” Robinson, another dealer, is lying on his death bed at the present writing. “Bill” Barnes, Mellus, White and J. B. Massey are names well known to old Californians. These men looked upon gambling as being as honorable as store-keeping. They were all men of honor and in the turbulent times of the old vigilantes were arraigned on the side of law and order.

Other men who followed gambling for an occupation were Judge McGowan, S. M. Whipple, of Sacramento river steamboat fame, and Tim McCarthy, afterwards State Senator from San Francisco. They were all welcome visitors among the best families in town and were a power in the political affairs of the then territory and even after California had been admitted into the Union.

Their generosity was limitless, as a single illustration will show. Briggs used to leave his rooms about four o’clock in the morning, but first, he would gather up all the small change that had been taken in, i. e., quarters and a few dimesdimes, for half dollar pieces were about the smallest coins in general circulation. He would fill his pockets with them and go down to the vegetable market, where the gamins assembled every morning to gather up the refuse to feed their goats and cows. Briggs would stand on the sidewalk, pitch a handful of coins into the street and laugh until his sides ached to see the little fellows scramble for them. He would repeat the operation until the last coin had been gathered in. In this way he would throw away from twenty-five to fifty dollars each morning; but he knew it went to families who had recently arrived and who found the money a most welcome aid to their support. Similar stories—and true ones, too—might be told of many of the men above named. Men used to take their children into the gambling houses of an evening to see the sights and listen to the excellent music; and not infrequently highly 441cultivated and respected ladies visited these places, as they do the salons at Baden-Baden.

After a time it became the rage to have female game-keepers, and many of the houses had at least one beautiful siren to aid in bringing men to their ruin.

The first woman to engage in this sort of employment in San Francisco, was Mme. Simon Jules, who made her appearance one night at a roulette table in the “Bella Union.” She was a pleasant-faced woman, of medium height, with large black eyes and hair as dark as the plumage of a raven. The place, as usual, was crowded, and Mme. Jules’ table proved the center of attraction and did an enormous business. She spoke English imperfectly and accompanied each remark with the expressive shrug of the shoulders peculiar to her nature. The Alta, the only newspaper of the day, criticised her severely, but this only advertised her, and it was not long before other houses followed the lead of the “Bella Union.”

In the winter of 1854-’55 the legislature passed the first anti-gambling law, making gambling a State prison offense. Up to that time all games had been regularly licensed. The legislation had the effect of closing some of the smaller houses, and making the remainder a little less public; but the law was never enforced and there was only one conviction in the state under it; that of a “brace” faro dealer in Tuolumne, who was sent to prison more to get rid of him than to inaugurate a crusade against gambling.

In 1859-’60, Col. Jack Gamble went to Sacramento and mainly through his personal efforts and influence, secured the repeal of the law. Faro, monte and roulette were then revived, but not to so great an extent as in the olden days. In the meantime poker had made its appearance and grew so rapidly in public favor that at the time of the repeal of the law in question, it had become a formidable rival of faro and other banking games. Monte and roulette began to wane, and the year of 1873 saw their demise in San Francisco.

In the winter of 1873-’74, the legislature passed another anti-gambling law which was supplemented by sundry municipal ordinances. A lively crusade against the faro games was at once commenced, but as the only penalties imposed consisted of light fines, the games usually reopened immediately.

The persistent raiding by the police, eventually compelled many of the games to close, among others, that of Col. Gamble, who started a roadside sporting house on the San Jose road, fourteen miles down the peninsula. For a time the place prospered greatly. During several years, it beingbeing a favorite resort for stock-brokers, bankers and merchants, who had not entirely overcome their old time sporting proclivities.proclivities. “Bill” Briggs was the last of the old timers to surrender to the law. He continued 442to run a faro game behind strong barricades, until at last he too retired in disgust and public gaming in San Francisco was dead. Since then numerous games—chieflychiefly “brace”—have sprung up, but the capital behind them has been very limited and a few raids by the police have forced them to close. At present there are two faro games in operation in the city; White’s (not kept by the person of that name previously mentioned), and Lawrence’s. The former has the name of being a “square” game, but the “limit” is twenty dollars and the house is frequented only by sporting men, its patrons being bartenders, habitues of pool-rooms, “macquereaux” and men of that class. The other game, either justly or unjustly, is often spoken of as a “brace” game where “steerers” are employed to “rope in” greenhorns. It occupies several rooms in different buildings, moving from one to the other as expediency dictates, and the police have a hard time in locating it as the game will be run in one place one night, and another the next.

In the early days of San Francisco poker was unheard of. In the mad rush of those times men could not sit still long enough to play poker or any other similar game; they must needs stake their all on the turn of a single card, or on one whirl of the wheel. With the decline of the banking games, however, poker leaped into favor, and many were the elegant quarters fitted up in the upper stories of buildings in the central part of the town, where gentlemen were wont to gather in the evening to indulge in what rapidly became a favorite pastime.

The most noted of these places was situated at 14 Kearney street, which was opened in 1873 by Charles N. Felton who represented the Fifth Congressional District in the last two Congresses, and who is aspiring to gubernatorial honors at the hands of the republicans at the next election, with a good chance of having his ambition gratified. It was here that the late ex-United States Senator William Sharon, the builder of the Palace hotel, and who more recently figured the Sharon-Hill divorce suit, held forth nightly, and participated in some of the biggest poker games played. William Lent, the millionaire, who of late years has resided with his family in New York, but who is now in San Francisco with the intention of again taking up his residence by the Golden Gate; the late Johnny Skae, the many times millionaire mining operator, and John Head, with an occasional outsider, formed the party which sat in the stiffest game. Sharon had the reputation of playing the hardest game of poker on the coast, although Felton and others were generally able to hold their own against him. A $3,000 “pot” was not an unusual feature in those games, while $5,000 has been frequently lost and won on a single hand.

Of course, there were other “stiff” games, where high play was the rule, but Felton’s was conceded to be far in the lead. Everybody played 443poker, though the gambling was not so open as had been faro, monte and roulette in early days. If men did not visit the poker rooms, they played at their clubs or at private parties at their homes. The late William Ralston was fond of cutting into a game. Jim Keene, who has since lost his millions in Wall street, could hold a bob-tailed flush as long and with as much of owlish gravity as anybody; the late Heward Coitt, James Phelan, Senator Hearst and almost every other man of wealth and prominence has played the game to a greater or less extent. Politicians, lawyers, merchants, bankers, salesmen, clerks, all played, but in different resorts. The poker rooms, like faro and roulette had their day, but not long after the police turned their attention to them, the larger places, such as Felton’s, Harris’ and others closed up.

Notwithstanding that the game is played for high stakes at the Pacific, Union, Cosmos and Bohemian Clubs, there is only one poker room of any prominence in the city, which is conducted by Mose Gunst. The game is nothing like the one formerly kept by Felton, for instead of the proprietor being satisfied with his winnings and the sale of liquors, the game deducts fifty cents out of every one dollar fifty pot. The owner keeps a number of “pluggers” about the place to join in the games and keep them going. They are paid a salary and turn their winnings over to the house. While the direct charge of cheating cannot be made against the establishment, the cards are played very close and the visitor finds it an exceedingly hard game to beat, and gentlemen do not honor the place with their presence unless in a mellow state, and then rather because they are “making the rounds” than for the purpose of playing. A wealthy well known railroad president not long ago “dropped” several thousand dollars there one night recently, and since then has given the place a wide berth. All the cigar stands along Market Street have back rooms for poker parties, but each place has its regular patrons and strangers rarely visit them. The games are small, a twenty-five dollar pot being considered a bonanza.

From the earliest days shaking dice has been a popular mode of gambling. Nearly all the large saloons had, and still have, small rooms partitioned off where parties of four or five would gather around a small table and roll the ivory tubes for large stakes. There was no regular dice game established until E. J. (Lucky) Baldwin, of turf fame, assumed the personal management of his large hotel on Market Street, when he set aside one of the rooms for dice and another for poker. The place was very popular with the wealthy young men about town for awhile, but after being raided by the police a few times, the games broke up, although private parties risk their money on the turn of the dice almost nightly. There was another game in operation in connection with the Occidental Hotel bar for a time, which was very popular with theatrical 444people. W. J. Scanlan, the Irish actor, ran up against the game one night and by means of a smooth box was cleaned out of $2,000. The affair leaked out, but it did not deter Henry (Adonis) Dixey from trying to beat the game, with the result that he left money and paper to the amount of about $1,800 with the sharpers. This had the effect of breaking up the game, which was conducted by Charlie Hall, manager of the Bust Street Theatre, Harry Bradley, Jim Nellus and a bar-keeper named Welch, and since then the most that has been done in the way of dice playing at the Occidental, has been in shaking for the drinks and cigars. This last is universal in San Francisco. A man will step up to a cigar stand and “shake” the proprietor for a cigar, and then go into a saloon and repeat the performance with the barkeeper. If he wins he gets his drinks for nothing; if he loses he pays the price of two. Parties of gentlemen will shake dice for the drinks, the one getting the lowest throw paying for the party. The Italian fruit peddlers who go around among the stores and offices are always supplied with a dice box and the clerks, and even the solid business men, call the cubes into requisition to settle the price of a bunch of grapes or a dozen of bananas. If the business is dull the throwing may continue for some time, nickels instead of fruit being substituted for the stakes. The Italians are natural gamblers and will stake their last cent on any supposable contingency. Bootblacks shake dice with their patrons to determine whether the latter shall pay for two “shines,” or have his boots varnished free of charge.

In 1882, stud poker became the rage and flourished until it was prohibited by the legislature, two years later. The act, as passed, fixed heavy penalties, in the form of fine and imprisonment, to the playing of this and several other “short” games, which were specifically enumerated. Every underground saloon, and many of the better class of drinking places, such as the Baldwin Hotel, had a stud poker game in operation. The dealer is in the employ of the house and does not take any cards himself or make any bets, but deducts a percentage or “rake-off” from each “pot,” so the house is certain of winning every time. It is only one form of petit larceny. The dealers of these games were generally men of the lowest moral principles, and there were always from one to three “pluggers” in the game, so that by a little manipulation of the cards outsiders were easily despoiled of their money without being compelled to resort to robbery in the form of percentages. The large games were conducted on a more honest principle. Still occasional players found it next to impossible to win. The “brace” games had for their patrons (or victims) principally boys and young mechanics, with occasionally a countryman. It was a blessed thing for the morality of San Francisco when stud poker was abolished. There has not been a game in the city for more than thirty-six months.

445For a number of years the sale of lottery tickets has been steadily increasing in California, until at the present time it is estimated that fully $300,000 is squandered in this way every month, fully two-thirds of which is expended by San Francisco alone. When the tickets were first sold in that city, the purchasers were chiefly, if not entirely, women of the demi-monde and their male companions. Then the sporting element got into the habit of buying tickets, and their example was soon followed by clerks; book-keepers and others belonging to the middle classes. Finally their employers began to invest, although at first keeping the fact a profound secret. They gradually became bolder and ultimately their wives, sisters and daughters concluded to try their luck, until now all grades of society, and both sexes are regular contributors to the income of the concern managed by Generals Beauregard and Early, buying their tickets openly and making not the slightest attempt at concealment. With the growth of the habit, the number of agents has increased until now fully one hundred people, male and female, earn a comfortable subsistence by selling lottery tickets. It is not an uncommon thing for a lady to be solicited to buy a ticket on the street by well dressed women. There is a law prohibiting dealing in lottery tickets, and prescribing a penalty for their purchase as well as for their sale; but as the police are all regular purchasers, they are very lax in following out the provisions of the law. There is a local lottery known by the euphonious title of the “Original Louisiana Lottery,” which has done a profitable business. Whole tickets are sold at fifty cents, but the principal transactions are in “halves.” This concern has no drawings of its own, but pays its patrons on the basis of those of the company. The “Mexican National Lottery” also sells many tickets in San Francisco, but the “Louisiana” surpasses all others in popular favor, and the Golden City ranks among the largest patrons of the serpent-like corporation, which has for so many years held the Pelican State in an anaconda-like grasp.

As has been said, a due meed of praise should be accorded the police for the efficiency of their action in suppressing public gaming. That a Chief of Police who has been, in times past, himself a member of the fraternity should introduce and enforce such stringent measures for the repression of a vice in which he had formerly been interested, and should follow up his former associates with such persistent intention to compel them to respect the law, is a matter for no little surprise. At the same time, a due regard for truth compels the statement that there is one form of gambling, fully as harmful as any other, which has supplanted faro and poker and which flourishes with but little fear of molestation. There are at present in full operation in San Francisco five large pool-rooms, and any number of smaller ones. The five leading establishments are those of Whitehead & Co., Killip & Co., Kingsley & Co., Swartz & Co., 446and Connors & Morris. These pool-rooms are protected and licensed by an act of the last legislature, and it is a mild statement to say that a faro game in every block in the city would not have a more debasing effect on the morals of San Francisco than have these pool-rooms. When it is remembered that each of the principal rooms pays into the Western Union Telegraph Company, $10,000 per month for tolls, some idea of the extent of the business done by them may be formed. A conservative estimate of the amount expended in the pool-rooms reaches the startling figures of $250,000 a month. An old-time faro dealer is authority for the statement, that “these new styled bunko games” (meaning the pool-rooms) “have not left money enough in town to buy a drink with.” The pool-rooms all have private wires connected with the leading race tracks in the East, and their habitues know the result of a race at West Side, Latonia, Jerome Park, Coney Island or any other tracks as soon as the people who sit in the grandstands and witness the running. Betting on horse-racing has always been a favorite amusement in San Francisco, but it is only within the last five years that Eastern races have been played, and now the legitimate turfmen will not patronize the pool-rooms. Who, then, are the patrons? Bankers, brokers, lawyers, clerks, salesmen, printers, young men about town and the outcasts of society, besides a number of merchants who cannot control their passion for gaming. On six days in the week, at the noon hour, when the most of these individuals are supposed to be at luncheon, the pool-rooms are crowded to overflowing, and a steady stream of gold and silver pours into the coffers of these moral pest-houses. The mode of betting is the same as in the East, “straight pools” and “book-making.” A victim of the opium habit is not more deeply the slave of his chosen vice than is the infatuated frequenter of the pool-rooms. Many a bank has been brought to insolvency; many a broker has found his cash box empty; and many a merchant has discovered his trusted clerk or book-keeper a thief, made so by these places. Every cent that can be gotten hold of is poured into the pool-rooms in bets on horses that the bettors have never seen. Let a stranger enter one of these resorts and he is instantly set upon by the boys of 16 to 20 years of age, who offer to give him “sure tips” on the winners for a small percentage of the winnings. A large proportionproportion of these “touts” have never seen a race in their lives and could not distinguish a colt from a filly; all their “knowledge” of the turf has been learned in the pool-rooms. These places are situated in the heart of the city where they are most easy of access to those who patronize them. At present there is no means of closing them and there is no telling how much longer the evil will continue, inasmuch as an influential local politician is heavily interested in one of the principal rooms, and as he controls his party in the state and that party has a safe working majority in the legislature, 447which does not meet again until January, 1891, there is no immediate prospect of relief. With such a state of affairs, it can readily be seen that there is not a great deal of money left for other games, such as poker and faro.

A San Franciscan will bet on anything, from a dog fight in the street, to a presidentialpresidential election. Boys that are hardly out of dresses bet cigarette picture cards on their fighting or foot-racing abilities, while their elders are equally willing to risk their money on more important sporting events. For the past eighteen months, the various athletic clubs have been giving monthly exhibitions; that is, glove fights to a finish, between professional pugilists, for large purses. The result is, that the city is overrun with prize-fighters of all degrees of ability. The law on the subject of prize fighting has been so construed that fights to a finish, in an athletic club room where no liquor is sold and not less than five ounce gloves are used, cannot be interfered with. Of these clubs, the California is the most aristocratic and wealthy. Here, on exhibition nights, may be seen, seated around the ring, judges, lawyers, bankers, merchants, railroad magnates, doctors and college professors. None are above attending any meeting which they think will be a good one. At the recent meeting between Dempsey and La Blanche it is estimated that not less than the sum of $40,000,000 was represented by those at the ring side. The betting on that fight reached into the scores of thousands, and so it is with every branch of sports and games. If two men play a game of billiards and are evenly matched, they generally play for a stake besides the price of the game.

With the development of the world-famous Comstock silver lode in 1860, there sprang up in California an entirely new mode of gambling; that of speculating in mining stocks. These mines are located in Story County, Nevada, and Virginia City arose in their midst almost in a night, like a mushroom; speedily developing into a rushing speculative town of 100,000 inhabitants, and almost as rapidly sinking back into that most hopeless of all conditions of decay, a “worked-out” mining camp, its present population numbering less than four thousand souls. The chief operations were carried on in the Golden City where two mining boards were arranged—the San Francisco and the Pacific—with branches in Virginia City. Every reported “strike” of ore was telegraphed to San Francisco, and the stock of that mine soared out of sight, only to drop back again at the next report and leave penniless hundreds of people, who, a few hours before, were worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. The veriest “wild cat” mine in the state had its stock listed, although not an hour’s work had ever been done toward developing it. This stock was sold as readily as that of the well known mines, but not at such high figures. Men became fabulously rich one day, and were sunk equally as 448deep in poverty the next. San Francisco can never forget the fever of excitement when the public pulse beat at fever heat, and every nerve was strained to its utmost. Laborers forgot to buy food for their families in their mad desire to possess a few shares of stock; servant girls neglected their duties in dreaming of sudden riches. Men rushed, shouted and acted like lunatics all day long, while high bred ladies sat in their carriages in front of their brokers’ offices hour after hour, in a frenzy of excitement, deluging the overtaxed clerks with orders for stock. What old Californian will pretend he was not half insane when “Ophir” (par value $100), touched $2,000 a share? Where could the poor man be found in 1874, when “Consolidated Virginia” and “California” jumped to $1,400? They were plentiful enough, however, after the break. The craze continued until 1878, when “Sierra Nevada” reached $800, and with the decline of that stock came a return of sober sense. Since then, the times have been gradually failing in their resources, and the speculative fever has subsided, until, at present, mining stocks cut no figure whatever in the finances of the state. Some of the old timers who can get money enough to buy a few shares, still hang around the boards, half of whose seats, which fifteen years ago could not be bought for $10,000 cash, are now deserted and are not worth anything. There is no outside capital to speak of going into mining stocks and in a few years they will exist only in memory.

The results of this madness were fearful. Hundreds of men and women were driven to suicide by their losses, while the insane asylums were filled to overflowing with victims of the stock-gambling mania. Such excitement has never been seen in any other place in the world and it is to be hoped that it will never again be witnessed. There is scarcely an old Californian who has not made money out of the stocks, but only a handful were enriched. Flood, O’Brien, Mackay and Fair owned the mines and controled the stock which was manipulated to suit their desires, and the result is that they, together with the late Senator Sharon, William Ralston, J. R. Keene and two or three others got all the money. At present, if a stock touches $10 a share, there is a decided flurry among the “chippers” and “mud hens” as the men and women are respectively termed who persist in hanging around the board rooms and losing what little money they have. The average quotations for mining stocks are from twenty-five cents from outside mines, from $3 to $4 for the big Comstock mines.

Outside of the two mining boards, there is little stock speculation in San Francisco. There are the Board Exchange and the Produce Exchange, transactions on the floors of both of which are governed by New York and London quotations. The ratio of legitimate to purely speculative trading on the San Francisco Exchange is as one to forty.

449Policy playing is practiced but little in San Francisco. An attempt was made by an element of the negro population to introduce it, but it failed to acquire popularity, even with that race, while for the whites it has utterly failed to exercise any fascination whatever—a fact which affords a striking commentary upon the difference which the influence of climate and of race have exerted upon the two cities of San Francisco and New Orleans, both fanned by the breezes originating in the tropics; the fevered heat of one is assuaged by the Gulf Stream, while the feet of the other are laved by the Japan current.

The progress of Chinese gambling in San Francisco has made such rapid strides that it is an impossibility to determine its extent at the present time. The Chinese are born gamblers and no measures, however severe, can deter them from playing at any of their favorite games of chance. The authorities have resorted to all sorts of expedients to break up the vice, yet new gambling dens are constantly springing up in the Chinese quarters of the city. This in a measure is owing to the mildness of the penalties affixed by the law, although it has been charged and proven, time and again, that the patrolmen in the Chinese quarters receive a regular stipend from the owners of gambling dens, to close their eyes to the games. They are also regular patrons of the Chinese lottery. The Chinese do not fear punishment, inasmuch as the extreme penalty for lottery, fan-tan, dominoes, or dice playing, is six months’ imprisonment, while the penalty actually meted out by the police judges rarely exceed a fine of $20 with the alternative of twenty days’ confinement. One-half of the Chinese population of this city, it is safe to say, would be willing to pass six months in jail merely to save their living expenses. Time is no object to them. Then again, it is extremely difficult to convict one of the race of any crime. They have not the slightest respect for an oath, while their appearance is so similar that they will exchange places with each other and the arresting officer cannot identify them.

The variety of games played by the Chinese is small, but they succeed in winning and losing large sums of money. Lottery, fan-tan, dominoes and dice are the only games played. Since the Mongolian has gained such a foot-hold in California, the vices of the Asiatic race have spread to an alarming extent among the white people, especially in San Francisco. White opium smokers, male and female, are almost as numerous as are the Chinese, and the majority of their gambling dens are supported by Caucasians. On the lottery game alone, it is estimated by competent judges that fully $8,000 is played in every twenty-four hours by the whites alone.

The Chinese lottery game is perfectly “square,” and is highly interesting. There are in this city ten different companies, each conducting a separate game, but all on the same principle. To understand the game 450thoroughly, one must start at the beginning and follow its workings to the end. Let us enter one of the hundreds of agencies that are scattered throughout the city with but little attempt at concealment, and purchase a ticket. These agencies are generally located in the rear of a Chinese curio shop, tea store or clothing establishment, but many laundries act as agents as well as the low saloons kept by whites along the Barbary Coast, the worst quarter of the city. The visitor upon calling for a ticket and naming the company in which he wishes to play, such as the Wing Lay Chow, Tut Yut, etc., is presented with a piece of manilla paper about four inches square. On this is a double line drawn through the center. Eighty Chinese characters are printed on this sheet, forty above and forty below the line. The player can invest any amount of money from ten cents to twenty dollars in this ticket, the winning being regulated according to the amount invested and the number of spots “caught.” We will invest the first named amount in a ticket and play it “straight;” that is, mark off ten spots. The agent then goes over the spots marked with a small brush and carmine ink. He also marks on the margin the value of the ticket, and gives the player a duplicate, retaining the original. The drawings are held at the company’s headquarters, twice a day, the first at three o’clock in the afternoon, and the second at ten o’clock at night. On one of the walls of the room in which the drawing takes place is a large black-board, to which are attached eighty pieces of paper, about two inches square, each one bearing a character corresponding to the one of those on the tickets. Each company has a different set of characters that mean almost anything. It may be a Chinese poem, or simply a collection of odd expressions. They have no significance further than that they correspond with the Arabic numerals used by the whites. On a table in front of the black-board are placed four large earthen bowls, numbered 1, 2, 3 and 4. At the hour for the drawing to take place, in the presence of a crowd of spectators the pieces of paper on the board are taken down, one at a time, crumpled in the hand and thrown into a bowl; that is, the first piece goes into number 1, the second into number 2, and so on, passing in rotation from 1 to 4, until all the papers have been distributed, twenty in each bowl. A large earthen vessel with a small opening at the top is then brought out, and in it are placed four pieces of paper marked 1, 2, 3,4, in Chinese characters. A Chinaman is then blindfolded and placing his hand in the dish draws out one of the numbers. For instance, he draws number one. Immediately bowls 2, 3 and 4 are removed and the lottery manipulator turns his attention to the remaining bowl. He places a lottery ticket before him and proceeds to draw out, one by one, the twenty slips of paper, marking off the corresponding number on the ticket with a brush. When this has been completed, he exhibits the ticket of the official drawing. Thousands of copies are immediately struck off and distributed 451among the agents, who cash their customers’ winnings. Now, to ascertain how a winning is made. Let us suppose that five of the spots which have been painted red on our ticket have been marked out in the drawing; that pays us twenty cents or doubles our investment. Six spots pay $3.25, while, if we are fortunate enough to have all ten of our spots come in the drawing, we win $297. It is a peculiar fact that, although there are thousands of whites who are perfectly familiar with the scheduleschedule of rates, nobody has been able to figure out any basis for the calculation of the Chinese. A white man may know what amount a ten-cent eight-spot pays, or a fifty-cent ten-spot, or in fact any of the many combinations, but nobody can explain the computation by which these amounts have been computed. This is the Chinese game of lottery, and thousands of dollars are invested in it every day by almost every grade of society, for the dainty lady lying in her hammock will send her Chinese servant out for tickets, which she amuses herself in marking; the staid business man invests slyly, the mechanic and laborer spends ten or fifteen cents a day tempting the Mongolian goddess of fortune, while the outcasts, male and female, play in, the greater portion of their ill-gotten gains in this fascinating game of chance.

The favorite game among the Chinese is fan-tan, or simple odd or even. Like lottery, it is played in this manner: A large square piece of matting is spread upon a table. In the center of the matting is painted a smaller square, each side being about ten inches long. The banker or dealer places two or three handfuls of small ivory buttons in the center of this square. A bell-shaped brass cup is then placed over this pile of buttons, some being left on the outside of the cup. The players simply wager any amount which they may choose on the odd or even number. In case the bettor loses, the amount of his stake is taken by the banker or “house;” should he win, he receives the sum bet minus a small percentage. In theory this game is perfectly fair, but as in almost every gambling game, sharpers have introduced a fake element, whereby the result may be manipulated. In counting the buttons, a small wooden or ivory stick is used. Inventive genius has come to the aid of the proprietor, and a stick is sometimes used which is capable of holding two or three buttons hidden from sight. If the banker wishes to add a button to the pile, he presses a spring and drops one.

In the Chinese game of dominoes, every essential respect is identical with that played among the whites. It is, however, played among the Mongolians for money to a far larger extent than among the Caucasians. In the Chinese quarter of San Francisco, it is no uncommon sight to see, running through the center of a filthy, dimly lighted, ill-smelling room a long table, on both sides of which are ranged a motley crowd of noisy Celestials, handling dominoes with lightning-like rapidity. In fact, the 452celerity of the play constitutes one of the chief points of difference between Chinese and American games. From time to time the losers pass across the table a portion of their hard-earned money. The stakes, however, in this, as in all other Chinese games, are unusually small; the result being that a Mongolian gamester finds it possible, with very little capital, to prolong his excitement throughout an entire night.

The Chinese evince no disposition to learn any of the gambling games in vogue among the whites; they have no idea whatever of poker, faro, roulette, chuck-a-luck, or any of the other amusements which play such sad havoc with the fortunes, the morals and the reputations of their brethren of fairer skin.

Last year there was a controversy of no mean proportions between the “skin” gamblers and the better elements of society as to whether or not gambling should be permitted at the California State Fair, which was held at Sacramento during September 1889. Should gambling be permitted or not during the fair was for some timesome time the question of the hour in Sacramento. As is usual with every proposition, conflicting interests were involved and two sides of the issue were presented. The pro-gamblers alleged that unless gambling was permitted the fair would prove a fizzle; that no money would be put in circulation; and that the good “red hot” times, when everybody made small fortunes out of the fair, would become only a memory of the past. On the other hand, the anti-gamblers asserted that the disgraceful scenes of the previous fair, when free gambling was allowed, should never again be tolerated in Sacramento. They desired that no more country visitors should be fleeced for the benefit of a horde of swindling “sure thing” gamblers and the gang of cut-throats, desperadoes and scum of humanity who follow in their wake and gnaw the bones of the corpses skinned by the so-called sports.

In 1888, the Chief of Police, Lees, was hauled over the coals by the grand jury, who indicted him for not putting a stop to gambling. When the time for holding the fair arrived Chief Lees, in whose mind the memory of his experience twelve months before was very fresh, announced that he did not propose to have a repetition of it. Moreover, the grand jury was in session at the time, and there was also a powerful body known as the Law and Order League, composed of the leading citizens, who openly proclaimed that the gamblers should not be allowed to open on any terms, and who declared that they would take all the necessary steps to enforce their ultimatum. At first it looked rather gloomy for the sports, who for some timesome time tried without success to obtain a concession in their favor.

453The firm of S. B. Whitehead & Co., took the initiative and bore the brunt of the preliminary skirmish. They leased a lot from the Government, seventy-six feet square, situated on the corner of 7th and K streets. It had been set apart by the United States as a post-office site, and was excavated by the lessees to the depth of some fifteen feet and covered with a canvas roof. A carpet was laid, a bar put in at one end, a pool-stand at the other, gas jets put in and a large staircase built leading from the side walk to the sawdust. In this “hole in the ground,” as the place came to be known, Whitehead & Co., announced their intention of selling pools on the races every night and morning. They claimed that their lease entitled them to use the lot as they pleased, owing to the fact that it was Government land, and was exempt from State jurisdiction. They added that while they themselves intended to conduct only a pool-selling business in the place, they had sublet the bar privileges and were not responsible for the acts of their subletees. Two sports, in order to make a test case, opened a chuck-a-luck game one night in this lot. Their attorneys were present and when the police arrested them the two men protested against the interference on the ground of lack of jurisdiction of the city authorities, the land being Federal property. The arrest was made, however, despite their protests, but the gamblers were promptly released on bail and the following day their case came up for hearing before the police justice.

The attorney for the State and county of Sacramento claimed, at the trial, that under the Political Code of California, the Government, though holding possession of the ground, had not ceded the right to make criminal arrests on the ground. The defense argued that the ground being Government land no such arrests could be made. The case resolved itself at once into a question of jurisdiction. The testimony was unimportant, but the arguments occupied the entire day. The result was that the police judge discharged the gamblers, using in his decision the following language:

“The defendant is charged with having conducted a banking game on the block bounded by J and K, Seventh and Eighth streets, in the city of Sacramento. Proof shows the accusation is true, but the defendant contends that the territory is the property of the National Government and the offense committed thereon is triable only by United States courts. The United States Constitution provides and the Supreme Court has decided that exclusive jurisdiction to try criminal offenses committed on United States territory is vested in the Federal courts. The property in question is the property of the United States and any crime committed there can only be tried in a Federal court. The remedy is quite as adequate as that offered by the State courts, since a Federal statute provides that any violation of the State Penal law committed on United States property within a State may be punished by the United States courts. Concluding that the right to examine the offense in question is exclusively vested in the United States courts, defendant is discharged for want of jurisdiction.”

454Meanwhile pool-selling by Whitehead & Co., was not molested, although, at first, the concern did a rather light business. The gamblers were elated by their success and within a few hours after a discharge a wheel of fortune was in full blast during the pool sales as was also the unlicensed bar. It was not long before other games started up outside the tent on the ground covered by the lease. The prices offered to Whitehead & Co., for such privileges were enormous. The decision of the court was regarded as a great triumph by the sporting fraternity and a correspondingly severe blow by the law and order people. The Chief of Police announced that he intended to arrest all proprietors of games attempting to do business outside of the leased ground, and did in fact gather in one or two wheels. At the same time, for some inscrutable reason, there was one game in the list which appeared to enjoy entire immunity in Sacramento. It was known by the euphonious designation of “hokey-pokey.” Consequently, no well-regulated establishment of any kind was without its “hokey-pokey” and every chance was afforded to players to lose their money.

The conflict of jurisdiction between the State and Federal authorities in the matter of the toleration of gambling at the California State Fair, affords a striking commentary on the American theory of government. In its salient features it is analogous to the dispute so often occurring in States which have, by organic law, prohibited the sale of ardent spirits, where the violator of the law of the particular commonwealth, to which he owes allegiance, is able to show a United States license authorizing him to carry on a business for the conducting of which the State law imposes a penalty. The author makes no claim to a knowledge of constitutional law. Of plain, every day common sense, in part derived through heredity, and in part developed by experience, he believes that he has a fair modicum. This latter quality of his mental organization leads him to regard such an anomaly in jurisprudence as an inherent travesty upon natural justice. That a combination of sharpers should be able to appeal to the United States statutes to protect them in a high-handed violation of State law, and in openly over-riding rough shod the will of the people as voiced by local legislative assemblies, is, on its face, the quintessence of absurdity. There can be no doubt as to the practical results of such an incongruity, so far as the Sacramento fair is concerned. A local paper of about even date contained the following paragraph:

“A victim of the gambling mania came to a sad end last night. * * * Having ‘lost his pile’ in the ‘hole-in-the-ground,’ and fearing to face the exposure of his peculation, which he knew would inevitably ensue, he ended his wretched life by placing a bullet in his heart. And yet the law is powerless to suppress gaming in this notorious resort.”

Previous to 1827, there were no large public gambling houses in New Orleans. The old Creoles played extensively, but it was among themselves or at their clubs. The flatboat men, who managed the river business, all gambled; but the establishments in which they wagered their money were small and “tough” affairs, where pistols were constantly needed. These men, the first patrons of public gambling, came from the upper rivers, usually the Ohio and its tributaries, landed at the levee opposite St. Mary’s market, tied their boats, and at once made for the nearest saloon to gamble away their cargoes. On Front Street, where the flat boats lay three deep, was a row of drinking places, the back room in each being given over to gambling. Faro and roulette were the principal games. There was no law against gambling then, nor was any license demanded; and there was no attempt made to conceal the business. In fact, from the sidewalk the passers-by could hear the roulette caller shouting, “twenty-eight on the red,” or “eagle bird by chance,” and the rattling of the chips.

Another favorite location for these flatboat gambling houses was known as the “swamp,” and was back of the town, where the Gerrod Cemetery is to-day. Here the flatboat men and many other wild characters who in those days frequented New Orleans, made their rendezvous. It was beyond the limits and control of the city police, and the “flint-lock” pistol of those days reigned supreme there, just as the revolver does to-day in some of the frontier towns.

The flatboat men were all inveterate gamblers. They would remain in the city until they had gambled away their last cent, when they “whipsawed” at home, traveling across the country, usually on foot, along the government trail through the Choctaw country of Mississippi.

The gambling of that period was rough and dangerous. The dens around St. Mary’s market and in “the swamp” were a constant menace to the authorities. Crimes of violence were more frequent in them than in all the rest of the city; and the flatboat men and gamblers frequently united to defeat the police. As a general thing, however, the municipal authorities refrained from attempting to exercise any jurisdiction over these dangerous sections. The police put forth no effort looking to the regulation of these gambling hells and left the flatboat men and gamblers to shoot and kill each other, as they saw fit. The number of murders resulting from these causes is beyond calculation, for the victims generally left no one to inquire for them or worry over their “taking off.” It was the most lawless community in the country, and the readiest with the knife or pistol. To that element, however, we owe some of our standard American stories. It was here, also, that the expression, “acknowledge 456the corn” and hundreds of others originated, such as “keel-hauling,” “whip-sawing,” “cordelling,” etc.

In 1827 gambling was introduced to the polite element of the city by John Davis, emigre from San Domingo, an impressario of the old opera house and the first impressario of the United States. Davis opened two gambling houses. One of them was on the side of the city known as the Bayou St. John, where those who wished to get away from the noise and bustle of the town and indulge in a “high old time” in a choice, quiet suburban retreat might be accommodated. The other was located on a corner in the very heart of creole New Orleans.

The Bayou St. John club house was intended more especially for Saturday night and Sunday games, Sunday being the favorite day for playing. On that day a magnificent dinner was set out by Davis, free to those who patronized his establishment. This resort soon became the best known spot in the city. Its central location made it convenient for the gentry of Louisiana. Here were to be found representatives of the bench, the bar and the commercial world. The house was opened day and night and was always crowded, the favorite games being faro, roulette and vingt-et-un, and the betting was heavy. At these public games, however, the elite and notabilities of the day did not, as a rule, participate to any great extent, special rooms being set apart for them, at which brag, ecarte, baccarat and bagatelle were played.

Nearly every man in public life in Louisiana gambled and the losses and winnings were immense. Col. Ghrymes, the leading lawyer at the Louisiana bar, and enjoying a very large income, squandered every cent at Davis’ and was always in an impecunious condition. A loss of $50,000 to $100,000 a year, or $25,000 at one sitting, was not considered very extraordinary, and there were many who dropped that amount of money in an hour.

Davis was very successful with his club house and made a large fortune, which he and his son, “Toto” Davis, spent to good purpose in building an opera house and establishing the opera in New Orleans, where it first took root in America. On music, to which both of them were devoted, most of the money won in the gambling business was expended.

The success of Davis with his “club house” produced two results; first, it greatly increased the number of gambling houses, and secondly, it induced the legislature to take a hand in the business for its share of the profits. In 1832, five years after Davis’ venture, there were fourteen large gambling saloons in New Orleans, all well equipped and furnished, and all well backed with capital. They were all making money and the legislature, having determined to get some of the profit, licensed the business, and authorized the opening and running of gambling houses on the payment to the state of an annual license of $7,500.

457All the fourteen gambling saloons or, as they preferred to be called, “club houses,” accepted the conditions. They were owned and operated as follows: Hicks & Hewlett, corner of St. Louis and Chartres; Duval, Chartres between Conti and Bienville; St. Cyr; Chentres, between Conti and St. Louis; Toussaunte, opposite Chentres on Canal, between Camp and St. Charles; Elkin, Canal near St. Charles, and Padet, corner of Canal and Camp. These seven were distributed between the first and second municipalities, about half of the fourteen in the French and the other half in the American quarter of the city.

These houses were public in the fullest sense of the word. They were never closed, running night and day, for when one set of dealers became tired, there was another to take their places. They were resorted to by all classes, but their best business was from the numerous strangers who visited New Orleans, and who always made it a point to see the world-famed gambling houses. They were lively, those “flush times,” and not unlike San Francisco in the gold fever of 1848-50.

In 1836, the gambling business in New Orleans received a double check. The financial crisis brought an end to the “flush times” and the rural or moral element got control of the legislature. Previous to that year the French element had control and it saw nothing wrong in gambling, but the country members protested against it, and, at the instigation of a Mr. Larrimore, who represented the moral as well as the American element, the license for gambling was withdrawn, as improper and immoral, the state surrendering some $120,000 of the money it had been deriving from this source, and prohibiting gambling under a heavy penalty, a fine of $1,000 to $5,000 for the first, and $5,000 to $10,000 and imprisonment for the second offence.

The act of the legislature did not meet with favor in New Orleans, which could see no immorality in gambling, and the third municipality one of those independent cities into which New Orleans was divided by the legislature, in consequence of the race prejudice between Creoles and Americans, set the State at defiance, and licensed gambling by a city ordinance. A conflict between the city and the state followed, in which the latter came out triumphant theoretically—as the Supreme court decided that the city of New Orleans could not license gambling when the State of Louisiana had forbidden it—but the decision accomplished little practically, for the gambling saloons ran on the same as ever, for the reason that public sentiment, especially in the French portion of the town, approved of them. This was particularly true of the third municipalitymunicipality, or Faubourg Maugrey, which actually owes its origin to gambling, as the name of the street indicates.

It was originally the plantation of the Maugreys, one of the first Creole families of Louisiana, and entitled to a marquisate in France, and 458was frittered away at the gaming table by its owner. Whenever old Maugrey wanted more money for gaming he laid off a section of the plantation, cut a new street through it, and sold lots; in a sort of ironical mood naming the streets after the game at which he had lost his money. Thus it is that the streets in that part of the town were named Bagatelle (a favorite Creole game in that day), Craps (played with dice and mostly confined to the negroes to-day), etc., by which names they are called even now, to recall old Maugrey’s gambling, which mainly bankrupted the richest and most famous family in Louisiana.

The act of the legislature of 1836, although it gave half the fine to the informer who pointed out a gambling house, was of no effect. The houses ran on the same as usual, not quite as openly, but bribing the city officials and the gendarmes, who at that time did police duty.

The financial crisis worked far more injury to the gamblers than did the act of the legislature since money became scarce and their business decreased so rapidly that a number of the principal houses were compelled to close.

There was a marked revival of activity in gambling circles in 1846, when New Orleans became the military center of operations against Mexico, and when thousands of soldiers were quartered there. The stimulus thus imparted to gaming was continued, if not increased, throughout the years ’48, ’49, and ’50, when the excitement of the California gold fever filled the city with emigrants moving toward the Pacific. The transient population became very large, and was mainly composed of men, who, by nature and temperament, were bold speculators, ready to stake anything or everything on the cast of a die. Their advent, moreover, caused a plethora of money, so that it is no cause for surprise that the gambling fever broke out in New Orleans in a far more vehement form than it had assumed in the days of old John Davis. Gambling houses were no longer confined to any particular section of the city as they had formerly been, but opened everywhere. Dens abounded in the neighborhood of St. Mary’s market for the accommodation of the flatboat men and river characters, while for those of more fastidious tastes, places of a better grade were opened in the neighborhood of hotels and boarding houses. But this class of resorts was especially numerous in those localities where returning soldiers or emigrants were quartered.

Despite the prohibition of the legislature, certain gambling establishments were licensed by the city to carry on the game of “rondeau” and “lotto” (since styled “keno”), under the pretence that such games were not gambling, and “from dusky eve to dewy morn,” on any frequented thoroughfare, might be heard the sonorous voice of the game-keeper, as he called time and game.

The gambling houses at this period numbered between 400 and 500, giving employment to some three thousand gamblers, dealers, etc. They 459did not resemble the elegantly furnished houses of John Davis’ day, nor were they like those which came later; they were rough, and suited to the tastes of miners, soldiers and emigrants, who mainly patronized them.

With the abatement of the California gold fever, gambling in New Orleans fell away, until it had returned to its normal condition. The number of establishments were materially reduced, but they were of a decidedly better class, being fitted up more for the rich planters than for the rough element which had for several years constituted their main support. Elegantly furnished houses, where sumptuous repasts were served to the patrons, once more began to appear. McGrath, Sherwood and PetittPetitt were the first to take the lead in this new departure.

The trio believed in “square” gambling, had plenty of capital, and were all men of mark. McGrath went North during the war, but finally settled down in his native state, and with the profits of his gambling transactions in New Orleans established the well-known McGrath stock farm. He has since devoted himself to the breeding of racing and other blooded stock, and has become one of the best known turfmen in the United States, owning “Tom Bowling” and many other famous coursers.

Petitt spent a large portion of his winnings in the raising and equipment of troops for the Confederate army during the war. He sent, at his own expense, from New Orleans to the Virginia battle fields one of the first companies recruited in the South, known as Petitt’s Guards.

Sherwood remained in New Orleans during the war, where he contributed liberally to the support of the wives and children of Southern soldiers at the front.

These were the three leading gamblers in New Orleans during the period just before the war, and were good types of their class.

“Supper rooms” were the names commonly given to these establishments in those days, for the reason that choice suppers were always supplied, with wine and cigars in profusion. Sherwood would frequently order all games to cease, and invite all his guests to a magnificent repast, during the course of which he would play the part of the courteous host, entertaining the company with a fund of anecdotes and quaint stories.

These “supper rooms” were a favorite resort, and if one failed to find in the rotunda of the St. Charles or St. Louis hotels any noted personage of whom he might be in quest, he felt reasonably certain of running across him either at McGrath’s club room, or Cassidy’s or Sherwood’s supper room, playing, talking, or at supper.

In those days, these resorts were something more than mere gambling rooms. The club house, as known to-day, did not then exist, and the commercial exchange, as understood in more modern times, was unknown. In consequence, the gaming houses (which, it must be remembered, were not at that time looked upon as the disreputable resorts which they are 460now considered to be) supplied the place of both. The same remark applies measurably to drinking saloons. Business men and gentlemen of that period were wont to make places of this description their rendezvous. These names, by the way, are still used in New Orleans in speaking of saloons and gambling rooms, the term “exchange” and “club room” having a distinct signification in that city, different from the meaning attached to them in any other portion of the United States.

In order to thoroughly comprehend this condition of affairs, it is necessary to glance, for a moment, at the then existing state of society in the Crescent City. Bachelors far outnumbered men of family. The tone of morals was low, and life was generally fast. The idea that there was anything wrong in gambling occurred to no one. Hence it was considered no more surprising to meet one’s friend in a gaming resort than to find him at his home. In fact, the club rooms, with many men at that period, supplied the place of home life.

McGrath’s, in particular, became, like Davis’ of old, a club house and social center for the men of New Orleans. It was the sporting centre also and there all the pools on the races, and particularly on the Mataurie course which, for so long a period stood at the head of American race courses, were sold.

The appointments and fittings of these houses were of such a character that only the higher classes of society were desired as patrons. McGrath, who occupied No. 4, Carondelet street, afterwards known as the Boston club (a social organization founded by private gentlemen for their own diversion) spent $75,000 to $100,000 in furniture for his place; while Lauraine and Cassidy, who had a place opposite the St. Charles Hotel, and who set the finest supper in the city, boasted of a solid silver service, including dishes and plates, unequalled in the South. Other famous gambling houses of that day, though not so well known as some of those already mentioned, were kept by Sam Levy and “Count” Lorenzo Servri (who received his sobriquet because of his polished manners and faultless apparel) and Martino, whose place was located on Canal street, near Carondelet. Besides these were numerous other “club houses,” where the visitor paid fifty cents an hour, and was entitled to refreshments free of cost, which included a well cooked dinner with claret ad libitum, besides being permitted to gamble at poker.

At all the gaming houses play was high, and wherever there was a limit it was generally removed by the proprietor if the patrons requested it. A prominent Greek merchant, representing in New Orleans one of the largest commercial houses in the world, played there night after night, losing $80,000 in a single evening, his total losses footing up a round half million, which caused the suspension of the house whose representative he was.

461In addition to these establishments, nearly all of the many steamboats plying between New Orleans and the various river points, were in themselves gambling houses. A class of gamblers travelled up and down the river on these boats. Their saloons were given up almost wholly to card playing. The principal games were Boston and Poker, the latter being played without limit. Bets from $10,000 to $25,000 were frequently made on a single hand, and one of $50,000 is recorded. When cash ran out lands and slaves were wagered.

The ante-bellum games were nearly all “square” and the gamblers were usually of better social standing than those of later days. Davis, McGrath and PetittPetitt, in particular, were looked upon as gentlemen, and were admitted anywhere, their profession not standing in the way of their social advancement. Augustus Lauraine was excluded from polite circles, not because he was a gambler but for the reason that he had violated one of the principles of the “code,” in other words, he failed to pay a gambler’s debt.

The immediate result of the war was to break up nearly all the New Orleans gaming houses. Most of the gamblers were enthusiastic confederates. The action of Petitt in equipping a company has been already mentioned. Martino went to Richmond, where he opened a house, but there was not much to be made out of confederate currency and he gave so liberally to the sick and destitute soldiers that his venture brought him no profit. It was not until 1862, when the city was in the hands of the United States forces under General Butler, that gaming again revived.

Through the favor of Col. Butler—a brother of the General—Bryant, one of the best known and oldest gamblers in New Orleans, and who had kept one of the “supper rooms” in the days before the war, was permitted to open a gambling house at the corner of Exchange Alley and Bienville street; and Fulton, a new comer, opened one a square lower down the same street. These resorts opened off the street and access was free to all comers except private soldiers, the semi-military control under which they were placed drawing the line here. Officers, however, who were plentifully supplied with money, played freely and, of course, lost heavily. But gross scandals resulted, and in 1864 General Hurlbut, by military order, directed that they be closed. Martial law proved singularly effective in this instance, and until the revocation of the order (which came in a few weeks)weeks), public gaming was at a stand still. This was an era in the city’s history, and, with the exception of a period when the District Attorney arrested and prosecuted all the gamblers in New Orleans, was the only time when gambling was completely suppressed. At all other times it has been either protected or tolerated by the authorities; carried on openly under license from the State or city, or conducted clandestinely, 462through bribery of the officials. In fact, public sentiment has generally either favored it or, at most, been disposed to regard it as a necessary evil.

After the war there was manifest a disposition to return to the old license system, under which the state received a portion of the gamblers’ winnings. One of the arguments in its favor was that the Havana lottery was taking more money out of Louisiana every month than all the gamblers in New Orleans combined, and as a matter of fact that city was as good a market for the sale of these tickets as Havana itself. In addition to regular lottery offices and ticket peddlers, every tobacconist was an agent for their sale. Tradition recorded the names of eleven winners of capital prizes. It is true that the old citizens (all of whom were devout believers in “luck”) were accustomed to wag their beards and sagely declare that riches thus acquired took to themselves wings and flew away, but they nevertheless “played lottery” every month, with the regularity of clock work, and eagerly awaited the receipt of the list of drawings, which in those days was brought from Havana to New Orleans by carrier pigeons.

The legislature of Louisiana determined to enter the field in competition with the Governor General of Cuba, and endeavored to secure at least its fair share of the business. Accordingly, in 1866, a law was passed requiring lottery ticket brokers and peddlers to take out a license, and turn over to the State five per cent. of their gross receipts. This, however, did not produce as large a revenue to the State as had been expected, as the dealers disposed of their tickets surreptitiously, and in 1868, the legislature enacted the Louisiana State Lottery, exacting a bonus of $40,000 a year, and gave it a monopoly of the business, prohibiting the sale of tickets in the Havana, or any other foreign lottery.

This plan proving successful, the legislature went a step further and determined to license gambling also. On March 9, 1869, a law was passed, empowering every one to open a public gaming saloon, who would pay a license fee of $5,000. (It had been $7,500 under the law of 1832). The payment of the money was the sole condition imposed by the law. No restriction was placed upon the games to be played nor was any distinction drawn between “square” and “brace” houses. Protection was guaranteed in the form of a promise to close and keep closed all unlicensed houses.

The new law was in force but a short time. It caused general dissatisfaction, and its repeal has been attributed to the moral sentiment of the community. This, however, is an error. While the great majority of the people of New Orleans were shocked at the result, this mattered little to the legislature, one of the most notoriously corrupt bodies which Louisiana has ever seen; and had not the gamblers themselves appealed 463to it, to repeal the law which recognized and licensed their business, it would have continued for many years.

The immediate result of the law was to make New Orleans an American Monte Carlo, the gambling centre of the United States. All the old local gamblers took advantage of the law and paid their license; but they found that they would not be allowed to occupy the field alone. The statute proved to be an advertisement of New Orleans throughout the Union, and gamblers flocked thither from New York, Baltimore, Cincinnati and St. Louis, to open places of business in a city, where it was not only free from inspection and supervision, but even legitimate.

Within a few weeks, St. Charles Street blossomed into one vast gambling hell. These resorts, some forty in number, and popularly known as “the forty thieves,” did a “land office business.” They were open night and day from the ground floor up. Every kind of gambling was carried on, with open doors, while runners on the outside enticed all passers by to enter. They had “all-round” saloons in which all kinds of games were played. The lower floor was commonly devoted to faro; roulette claimed the second story; while the third floor was set apart for keno. Generally one or two side rooms were fitted up for vingt-et-un and other games. Lunch settees and wine tables were prominent articles in their equipment, and everything was supplied which might make gaming attractive. There were no screens, the saloons opening immediately off the street; no limit was fixed, and boys and octogenarians were alike welcomed.

This state of affairs proved too much, even for the advocates of public gaming. St. Charles Street, the principal thoroughfare, had become a by-word and reproach, a very high-way of vice, if not of crime.

Notwithstanding the indignant protest of an outraged public, however, the law would have probably remained on the statute book had it not been, as has been already intimated, for the gamblers themselves. Not that they complained of the exaction of a license fee; that, they were willing to pay cheerfully. It was the ruinous competition in business which it brought about that constituted the ground of their dissatisfaction. The “old-timers” found themselves injured, not only in pocket but also in reputation, by the horde of confidence men, “steerers”, sharpers and “skin” gamblers, who had swept down upon New Orleans like vultures upon a carcass. The license law had proved a boomerang.

The influx of strangers had been so great that the demand for licences to keep gaming houses had grown to such proportions that New Orleans seemed destined to absorb and monopolize all the gambling of the entire country. A conference of those “to the manor born” was held, which was attended by Bush, Taylor, Harrison and others, at which, after a full interchange of views, it was determined that the wiser policy was to return 464to the old system and get rid of the new comers at any cost. They were strong enough, politically, to get what they wanted from the legislature, and the obnoxious law was repealed, and the auditor directed to return to the gamblers the fees paid for the new year.

The abolition of the license system, however, did not put an end to gambling. Some of the more recent arrivals departed for Texas, Long Branch, Washington, and other promising points, but the “old timers”, to the number of 100 to 110, continued to do business in the same way as usual, paying bribes into the pockets of the police instead of a license fee into the State treasury. As, however, the law prohibited gambling, some sort of a pretence was made at secrecy, although the houses were all well known, and one could hear in the street below the rattle of chips and the droning call of the dealer.

During the next ten years the gamblers did a fair business, notwithstanding the fact that they were freely blackmailed by the police. They recouped themselves, however, for this outlay by taking their revenge upon the police, and particularly upon strangers. Bunko flourished and “steerers” abounded, while some of the best known confidence men now traveling about the country acquired their first knowledge of the business at New Orleans during this period.

In 1880, yet another plan of indirectly regulating gaming was introduced. The new system was neither the imposition of license fees nor the secret extortion of “hush-money”, and was essentially different from that followed in any other city of the world up to that time. While gambling had been unlawful it had also been notorious. Not less than ninety houses spread their nets for victims, and over a thousand persons were employed in the nefarious calling. Bribery and corruption had taken the place of legal license, and through political influence the gambling fraternity had enjoyed comparative immunity.

In the year last mentioned, Mr. ShakspeareShakspeare who had just been elected Mayor, determined to accomplish indirectly what had been forbidden by State law—the license of the houses. He looked upon this as the only available means of controlling and regulating a business which, however, reprehensible, seemed destined to “go on forever.”

He favored the license system as the best practical solution of the problem, inasmuch as under it the city would receive a share of the profits of the business while there might, at the same time, be police supervision of the establishments.

A newspaper reporter was employed to visit the various gambling houses, inspect the games played there, and report to the Mayor on the subject.

After the latter had secured all the information he needed, he laid it before the council, together with his plan for licensing gambling and 465asked for its consideration and discussion. He proposed that a “forced loan” be collected from the gamblers—the city to charge each gaming saloon $150 a month or $1,800 a year for the privilege of carrying on business. They were to conduct only “square” games, to employ no “runners” or “cappers” to drum up business for them, and to content themselves with such profits as they might legitimately (?) derive from the unsolicited visits of occasional players. No minors were to be permitted to play and houses were to be confined within certain prescribed boundaries in the business section of the city, while the proprietors were to agree to preserve peace and order in the establishments, and to be always subject to the inspection and control of the police.

In consideration of the making of this forced loan, the city was to undertake that the houses entering into the arrangement, so long as they complied with the requirements exacted, should not be raided or otherwise molested by the police. Moreover, those saloons which accepted the proposition were to be protected from undue and unlicensed competition, the city promising to close all places which did not “pay up” or were guilty of irregularities.

When these propositions, which had been already submitted to the gamblers and approved by them, were laid before the council, that body authorized the executive to make the experiment, although the city fathers cautiously refused to share the responsibility for any consequences which might ensue. At first, the revenue thus received was paid directly to the city treasurer, but that official, being unwilling to accept it, it was turned over to the mayor’s private secretary, to be expended as the mayor ordered.

At the time of the inauguration of the “Shakespeare system” of exacting this forced loan there were eighty-two gambling resorts running in New Orleans. Half of these closed at once rather than pay the licenses. From the remainder some $6,000 was received as the first month’s instalment, which was set aside as a special fund for the erection of an alms house, or an institution, which was greatly needed in a city which had failed to make any provision for the support of paupers. Later the receipts from this source were turned over to the charity hospital or devoted to alleviating the condition of those confined in the jails. From this source (the gambler’s contributions) enough money was obtained to erect a large brick building named “The Shakespeare Almshouse” in honor of the mayor, and to support and care for two hundred paupers and incurables. A number of prominent citizens consented to act as directors of the institution, accepting the money turned over to them by the mayor for its maintenance, although well knowing the source from which it was derived.

466At first, the anomalous system appeared to be a success. There were some complaints from the religious element of the community, but the general public raised no objection, while the press approved. The fund was exclusively under the control of the mayor, who accounted to no one, and was wholly free from responsibility in the matter and was at liberty to use the money as he saw fit. It occurred to him that the most effectual means of silencing his critics would be to devote it to public charity.

An account of the fund was kept in a book open to all, with each payment received from the gamblers, together with the sums turned over to the directors of the almshouse.

The supporters of the mayor pointed to his administration of the fund and the practical results of the system as a triumphant vindication of his policy. In the course of a year the number of gambling houses had been reduced from eighty-two, running at all seasons, to sixteen in summer and thirty-two in winter. This diminution, too, had been accomplished without police raids, while there had been no public scandals.

The mayor exacted literal compliance with his requirements. One of the leading saloons, run by “Billy Johnson,” a well known gambler about town, was closed early in the day because of some irregularities, and when the old trick was tried of re-opening it at the same place but under a new name, the mayor promptly suppressed it. “Any place,” he said, “once closed for ‘bunkoing’ was closed for ever.”

The loudest complaints about the system came from some of the gamblers themselves, who declared that the city was getting more out of the business than they were, and several attempts were made to persuade the mayor to reduce the amount of tribute. But to all such remonstrances he persistently turned a deaf ear, his stereotyped reply being, “If you can’t make enough from gambling to pay the city $150 a month for the privilege, you had better go into some other and better paying business.”

Mayor Skakspeare was succeeded by Gen. W. H. Bebian, who, so far as gambling was concerned, followed in the footsteps of his predecessor. Following him came Gillette. The latter regularly collected the tax, but instead of devoting it solely to purposes of charity, diverted a portion of it to meeting the exigencies of the political situation. From the fund were defrayed the expenses of entertainments ordered by the council, while it was also used to meet the pay-roll of the mayor’s special police, as well as for other objects of a distinctively political character. This line of action induced scandal, and the circumstance that no account of the disbursement of the fund was rendered, considered in connection with the fact that the almshouse—for which it had been created—was left without income, brought the system into disfavor and disrepute, and a 467revulsion of public sentiment occurred. Several grand juries presented reports condemning the fund as having been exacted in direct violation of the State constitution and the laws framed thereunder. The result of this agitation of the question was that during the incumbency of Mayor Gillette, the system was abandoned.

Since then, gambling in New Orleans has been conducted under the system of semi-toleration, which prevails in most American cities. The law against “banking games,” was enforced for a few weeks during 1888, when, as has been said, the prosecuting attorney arrested the gamblers and for a short time brought public gaming to an abrupt (though temporary) cessation; but although there were several convictions, the spasm of virtue soon passed; raids came to an end; and matters soon drifted back to their former position.

The law against gambling still adorned the pages of the statute book, but for many years no attempt whatever had been made to enforce it. The police knew the location of every gambling saloon in the city, as did also the district attorney, whose duty it was to enforce the law, but not an indictment was found against any of them.

To-day, there are some thirty gaming resorts in New Orleans, half of which, however, are mainly patronized by negroes. They are visited by the police in a supervisory sort of way, from time to time. When anything wrong is reported, the proprietor is arrested, and in the great majority of cases willingly consents to make good the complainant’s losses rather than to face exposure. If he proves recalcitrant, his house is closed. Only one place was closed in 1889, however, on this ground.

Two years ago, “keno” became the favorite game in New Orleans. It proved especially seductive to youths and those of small means, because of the small stakes required to play it. It proved particularly harmful for this very reason, its patrons being largely drawn from the ranks of those who could not afford to lose anything. The better class of gamblers themselves did not favor it, for the reason that it afforded no chances for the “bank,” which had to content itself with its “percentage.” Nevertheless, the “demand” for this sort of amusement resulted in an abundant supply, and for several blocks on two of the principal streets of the city, the ear of the passing pedestrian was saluted with the cries of “forty-eight,” “sixteen” and “keno,” which were wafted down to the street from the open windows of the keno rooms, which occupied the second floors of nearly every building. The majority of the players were clerks, under 25 years of age, mechanics and laborers; and to losses at keno may be attributed the numerous embezzlements which brought such unenviable notoriety upon New Orleans for several years.

The negroes, sunny children of nature, content if their immediate wants are satisfied, and taking no thought for the future, all gamble—certainly 468nine in ten of them gamble at the saloons on Dauphin and Franklin Streets, among themselves at “craps” or “chuck-a-luck,” or at “policy,” the latter being the favorite for women. These colored saloons are probably the worst in the world; rude unfurnished rooms, with nothing but gambling tables and chairs in them, lighted by flickering, ill-smelling lamps. Here congregate the roustabouts, longshoremen and deck hands, who drift into New Orleans during “the season,” or when crops are gathered, and here they and their mistresses play until the last dollar of their earnings is spent, and they once more enter upon their toilsome labor. Here, too, all the negro criminals of New Orleans, the colored ex-convicts, who number several thousand sneak thieves, burglars, etc., resort. The negro gambling saloons often prove of service to the police when prosecuting a search for colored criminals. There is no necessity to hunt for them all over the city. The owners of these gambling dens are anxious to be on good terms with the officers of the law, and act as spies for them. If a murderer or a burglar is needed, they are furnished with a description of him, and within a very short time comes the information that “Dago Dick,” or “Big Sam” is at such-and-such a saloon. These dives frequently stand the police in good stead, saving the officers no little trouble in searching for notorious negro criminals.

It cannot be said that, on the whole, the gamblers of New Orleans have made much out of their business. Very few have accumulated money through their original calling, although some have acquired their first start at the card table and have since achieved a competence in other and legitimate pursuits. Probably the most striking illustration of the truth of this statement has been already mentioned in referring to the case of McGrath, who has made a fortune through his stock farm and on the the turf. Another Crescent City sport invested his winnings at the faro table in the hotel business, at which he succeeded even beyond his expectations. Perhaps ten or a dozen in all, who have renounced the green cloth have honestly earned a competence, although a few have grown rich.

Perhaps one reason why gambling has not proved more remunerativeremunerative since the war is that comparatively few of those engaged in the business at the South, have had the large capital necessary to conduct a thoroughly first-class establishment. Besides this, the gamester is by nature a spendthrift, whose motto is always “easy come, easy go.” His instincts are all arrayed on the side of prodigal expenditure, as against thrift.

At the present time, the houses are under fair control. That is to say, they are not tolerated on the ground floor, minors are not allowed to enter them, and “skin” gambling is perhaps less practiced than in other metropolitan cities. The fraternity complain bitterly of “hard times,” and declare that their business is entirely broken up. Of what are euphoniously 469characterized as “respectable” houses, there are scarcely half a dozen, and even these reap their richest harvest from strangers, during the carnival season. The local patronage is not profitable.

In 1889, the whirligig of time again elevated Mr. Joseph Shakspeare to the Mayor’s chair. He made no secret of his disposition to return to the system of indirect license which he had himself inaugurated. The council, however, proved less complaisant, and refused either to sanction or to disapprove the plan of the executive. Meanwhile, public sentiment in the city was about equally divided in reference to the question. A very large element of the community was bitterly hostile to countenancing the vice, even indirectly. On the other hand, there were not wanting those who regarded gaming as a necessary evil, which would find its votaries under any and all circumstances, and from the practice of which the city would do well to derive some revenue.

Among the latter half of the community were, of course, included those who were themselves fond of patronizing the public tables.

Speculation in stocks, bonds and produce was unknown in New Orleans previous to 1880. To its introduction may, perhaps, be measurably attributed the decline in the volume of gambling in the hells. Once introduced, it rapidly grew in favor with many of those who had been accustomed to look for that excitement which they regarded as their highest recreation in gambling upon the turn of a card. Whether the introduction into the city of the speculative mania and the decadence of the gambling saloons stood to each other in the relation of cause and effect it might be difficult to say; they certainly occurred about the same time. At first, speculation was chiefly confined to cotton, which bore the same relative position to New Orleans that wheat sustains to Chicago. Gradually, however, mining stocks and gold grew in favor of those who were disposed to venture their money upon options, as affording even greater fluctuationsfluctuations in value.

When trading in future deliveries was first suggested upon the floor of the New Orleans Cotton Exchange, it aroused violent opposition. Its opponents pointed out that the city already lacked sufficient capital to handle the cotton crop, of which New Orleans was the distributing centre, even in a legitimate way; they showed that a vicious element would be imparted to values; and called attention to the disastrous effect which such business might have upon the price of cotton. In reply to these arguments, it was urged that New York was already doing a gambling business in cotton futures, amounting to 25,000,000 bales per year, which was four or five times as much as the entire cotton crop of the whole country; that New Orleans was sending a great deal of money to the Atlantic seaboard to be invested in futures; and that unless dealing in speculative deliveries was sanctioned in what ought to be the greatest 470cotton mart of the world, a large proportion of the city business would be diverted to New York, even if the latter point did not absorb a great deal of the “spot” trade.

The result of the discussion was a triumph for the advocates of speculation, and in February, 1880, gambling in cotton futures began upon the floor of the New Orleans Cotton Exchange. At first, it did not seem to commend itself rapidly to public favor. Only 2,083,100 bales were sold during the first year. The rapidity in which it grew in favor is shown by the sudden increase in transactions in futures. In 1881, 10,115,800 bales were sold, which figures increased in 1882 to 16,171,000, which was fully double the amount of cotton the city received. The advocates of stock gambling pointed to this increased volume of business as the triumphant vindication of the position which they had assumed. New Orleans, they said, had in less than three years built up as large a gambling business as that which was carried on in New York. But experience proved that speculation in cotton futures reached its highest point in 1882, from which period it began to decline. At that time, however, it was practically universal. Clerks, samplers and weighers of cotton were among the most numerous patrons of the speculative market. Men of this class appeared to believe that because they have some business relations with cotton, they were thoroughly conversant with the market and that their casual handling, sampling or classifying of bales rendered them competent judges as to the future course of events. New Orleans speculators proved to be but pigmies, as compared with those of New York. In fact, the Southern market was so generally wrong that it became a common saying in the “country” that if one wished to bet right on the course of the cotton market, he should always bet against the combined wisdom of New Orleans. It may have been because the Eastern city had more capital, but the tangible result was thatwas that in the single year, 1882, New York was estimated to have relieved the metropolis of the Southwest of $4,000,000, of her surplus cash. The loss fell chiefly upon those who were less able to bear it. The employes of the warehouses had ventured heavily. Even the janitor or porter bought his little “jag” of a hundred bales.

The withdrawal of such a large quantity of money during a single year resulted in bringing about a financial stringency in New Orleans, and the tightness of money operated as a check upon speculative gambling, which has never since blossomed out in the same magnificent luxuries. Among those who had been particularly pronounced in their advocacy of the sale of futures upon the Cotton Exchange, not less than fifty went to the wall, and for a time the more conservative element managed things in its own way. Some idea of the extent to which this species of gambling mania had pervaded all classes of citizens may be gathered from the statement—which cannot be controverted—that during the crop year of 1881-82, 471fully 15,000 people bought cotton futures at one time or another, and that at least one man in four in New Orleans was accustomed, now and then,then, to “take a little flyer.”

In 1883, the volume of transactions of this character declined to 12,041,900 bales; in 1884, to 9,588,300; in 1885, 8,037,100; and in 1886, to 7,474,900 bales, or less than half what it had been. MoreoverMoreover the business was confined chiefly to the larger dealers, the “small fry” letting the market religiously and severely alone, and since 1886, transactions have fluctuated in quantity. In 1887, sales of future deliveries aggregated some 11,239,000 bales; 1888, 8,947,800; and in 1889, 6,575,000 bales. Since the introduction of this description of gambling in New Orleans, about 92,223,900 bales of future cotton have been sold in that city, upon which margins of $276,671,700 have been put up, allowing a liberal commission to the brokers who managed the business; these figures represent a payment, virtually upon a wager of $73,409,933 by the losers to the winners. But no matter whether the hotly contested battle was decided in favor of the bulls or whether the bears were triumphant, some way or other New York always contrived to come out ahead, and it is a generally conceded that the thrifty manipulators of the latter market succeeded in extracting from the pockets of their New Orleans brethren a sum variously estimated at from $12,000,000 to $20,000,000.

Several attempts were made to prohibit this species of gambling by law, but the dealers in futures proved too strong. Neither did public sentiment condemn this sort of gambling, and many persons who would have scorned to enter a faro bank, bought options in cotton without compunction. Speculative craze during this period reached its maximum, and was not confined to cotton alone. Three or four “bucket shops” were started at which one could buy almost anything—wheat, or railroad and mining stocks. With the general decline of their business, the “bucket shops” also went by the board.

At present, however, the business is confined chiefly to a few operators and brokers. The general public views the situation with little interest, being indifferent as to whether A wins from B to-day and B recovers his losses to-morrow, or vice-versa.

Speculation in stocks has always been far less active than in cotton. Far removed from the commercial centre of the country, New Orleans has gambled but little in the general list of stocks, the greater portion of the business done on the Stock Exchange being confined to transactions in State and City bonds, a few local stocks, and—of late years—in mining shares. Nevertheless of the $160,000,000 worth of bonds and other securities dealt in during the past ten years, it is estimated that fully four-fifths were bought and sold on speculative account. The frequency with which the Louisiana law-makers have legislated in reference to State 472debentures have caused the latter to fluctuate violently. Large fortunes have been rapidly made and quickly lost, the case of the Confederate Commander, Gen. J. B. Hood, affording a striking illustration of the truth of the latter statement.

Legislative action in reference to the State debt in 1879, when the interest was reduced, and again in 1884, regarding what is known as the “interest amendment” gave rise to heavy speculations. Again in 1887, a mania for gambling in land and mining stocks broke out, which continued until 1889. In the latter year, the Mexican Lottery attracted much interest, and winnings and losses were alike numerous.

The amount of money lost on speculation in New Orleans in ten years is estimated at $82,000,000,—almost as much as the property valuation—and some commercial concerns regarded as among the most solvent in the city have been dragged down to bankruptcy.

Perhaps the most seductive and dangerous form of gambling in New Orleans to-day is the mania for buying tickets in the Louisiana lottery, with its attendant evil, “policy playing.” Lottery playing has always prevailed in New Orleans. Lotteries innumerable existed in the old days, and even the churches—notably Christ Church, the first Protestant church in Louisiana, and to this day, the largest and most fashionable—were built by means of lotteries.

The lotteries of the “olden times,” however, were small concerns, yet they stimulated the desire and whetted the appetite for this sort of excitement. They prepared the way for the extraordinary success which, as has been already said, attended the introduction of the sale of Havana lottery tickets into the Crescent City.

After the war, the Kentucky State Lottery Company sold some of its tickets in New Orleans, but that concern never became so popular among the people at large as was the Havana Lottery.

The considerations which induced the State Legislature to incorporate the Louisiana Company have been already set forth. Too much money was going to Cuba, and it was thought that the public treasury might as well be enriched by a portion of the profits, which were known to be numerous. All attempts to enforce the payment of a percentage on the sale of Havana tickets have proved lamentable failures.

The act of incorporation of the Louisiana State Lottery was passed in 1868. Under its terms the company was granted a lease of life for a period of twenty-five years. Under the constitution of 1880, its grip upon the state was confirmed until the expiration of the year 1892. As has been pointed out, in consideration of the payment by the company into the state treasury of $40,000 per annum, the concern was to be secured in a monopoly of the sale of lottery tickets within the state. At first, however, this provision of the law was not enforced, Havana tickets being 473freely sold upon the streets. But gradually the more attractive offers of the home company and its growing popularity attracted more and more business to its coffers, until, little by little it virtually had a field to itself.

Of the $40,000 yearly tax, one-half was set apart for the maintenance of the Charity Hospital—the largest free hospital in America—while the remainder was devoted to the public service fund.

Originally the business of the company was very largely confined to daily drawings and policy playing, and at one time there were not less than 180 places within the corporate limits at which policy might be played. At this time the sale of tickets was confined exclusively to Louisiana and mainly to New Orleans. As time went by, however, the company changed its schedule of drawings and gradually extended its operations until they included the entire country. The result of these various new departures was to enhance the importance of the monthly drawings to such an extent that the daily distributions and the attendant policy playing sunk into comparative insignificance. Little by little, the value of the prizes and the price of tickets have been doubled, until a whole ticket in a monthly drawing costs $20, while a similar chance in the semi-annual distribution of prizes is held at $40. Fully nine-tenths of the tickets are sold outside of Louisiana, the largest buyers being Texas, California, New York, Washington and Chicago.

The existing schedule of drawing is as follows: Two grand semi-annual drawings; ten monthly drawings; three hundred and thirteen daily drawings (with policy playing ad libitum); making a grand total of three hundred and twenty-five drawings during the year.

The following table shows the number of each description of drawings, the number of tickets printed, the price paid for a whole chance, the value of the tickets sold, the amount of cash prizes distributed, and the sum paid out in salary commissions.

Year by year the business of the company has increased and its financial standing has advanced in an equal ratio. Since its incorporation in 1868, it has sold tickets to the value of $168,000,000, paid prizes amounting to $92,400,000, and expended in commissions to dealers in New Orleans and elsewhere $16,000,000.

Its stock has, for some time past, paid an annual dividend of 85 per cent. on its par value, and is quoted on the market at 900.

475In New Orleans, lottery playing is universal. It is safe to say that 50,000 fractional parts of tickets are purchased monthly, the smallest fraction of a chance sold in a monthly drawing being one-twentieth, and in the semi annual distribution one-fortieth. Among the purchasers there is no distinction of sex, age, color, social position or occupation. Men, women, whites, blacks, Mongolians, Mexicans, the old, the young, leaders of society and the “bums,” one and all buy, the crowd of these deluded speculators being swelled even by recruits from the ranks of the clergy.

The friends of the lottery adduce many arguments in its support. They claim that it is the least objectionable form of gambling; that it is conducted “on the dead square;” that as the larger drawings take place but once a month, and the price of the ticket is low (the usual ticket one-twentieth or one-fortieth costs $1.00), one can at most lose but $12.00 a year, even if he “plays lottery” every month and invariably loses; that there have been no scandals growing out of the monthly drawings, nor any instance of a man who has sunk his fortune, or resorted to embezzlement to play. As regards the daily drawings, it is pointed out that as that the ordinary purchaser only risks twenty-five cents and the prizes stand to the tickets in the ratio of one to three, it is impossible that much financial harm can be done.

These arguments, of course, utterly failed to take into consideration the powerful incitement and stimulus which this sort of gambling imparts to the vice in general. While the immediate effects of investing in lottery tickets may not be sudden and pronounced financial ruin, the consequences are apt to be far-reaching. Neither do the advocates of the lottery take into account what is essentially the very worst feature of the whole business—policy playing. While the aggregate amount of money lost through this means may be insignificant as compared with that squandered upon the monthly and semi-annual drawings, the ultimate results flowing from this description of gambling are, perhaps, worse than those attendant upon any other. Policy is played by the very poorest classes—and particularly by the negroes—who cannot afford to lose a solitary cent. The amount of suffering entailed upon the families of the poor through this agency is so large as hardly to be susceptible of computation.

At present there are some eighty policy shops in New Orleans, the business of all of which is based upon the daily drawings of the Louisiana Lottery. The keepers of these places sell, on an average eighty slips each day, making the total sale in the city about sixty-four hundred every twenty-four hours, or two million three thousand two hundred per annum. The low prices at which these “slips” (or fractional part of the tickets) are sold—twenty-five and fifty cents, places them within the reach of all. 476There are probably two thousand or three thousand regular policy players who buy tickets every day and who have a system of combinations which they believe is certainly bound to win in the end. In addition, there are about twenty-five thousand others who make a similar venture about once a week. All these have made policy playing a profound study, and understand all its intricacies and know all about “horses”, “saddles”, “gigs”, “all day”, “first place”, etc. They are firm believers in “luck”. In fact, nowhere are so many “fortune telling” and “dream” books sold as in New Orleans, principally for the purpose of interpreting dreams which the buyers believe indicate numbers which they should play. Clairvoyants and fortune tellers abound and prosper; and there are men whose only means of obtaining a fair support is travelling the streets with cages of trained canaries or parroquets, which for the trifling consideration of five cents, will select from a case an envelope containing a number supposed to be a “sure winner.” Blindness is regarded with reverence, for the reason that a blind man is supposed to be invariably lucky. “Age cannot wither nor custom stalestale” the folly of these inveterate policy players. Their infatuation and superstition know no limit. They are constantly looking for “signs”. If you should say to one of them that you expected to be thirty-six years old on the sixth of December, the chances are that he would rush off around the corner to play the combination 6-12-36. They are perpetually looking for numbers by day and dreaming of them by night, and their first act on arising in the morning is to consult their “dream-books”, to ascertain what they shall play that day. The negro house servants are among the best patrons of the policy shops, often squeezing a quarter or half dollar from the market or grocery money, to place it on a “gig” or “saddle”.

The aggregate amount thus squandered is, as has been said, enormous. Yet it is usually spent in small sums and leads to no graver crime than petty pilfering, which, however, is bad enough. Still, occasionally a “plunger” tries this form of gambling, and once in a while a dishonest clerk who has been systematically robbing his employer for years will seek to arouse sympathy by attributing his entire peculation to the insidious fascination of daily drawings.

The following table may prove of interest to the reader, as showing the amount and character of the gambling practiced in New Orleans during the past ten years. It has been carefully prepared from the most authentic sources available and it is believed to be a very close approximation to the exact facts:

From the foregoing sketch of gambling in New Orleans, it will be apparent to the reader that there has never been any determined effort put forth for its suppression. This fact may be ascribed to two operative causes. First, the absence of any pronounced public sentiment against gaming; secondly, the powerful political influence wielded by the gamblers. The latter have always been active ward politicians, and have exercised great influence upon local elections, in fact, they have usually had one or more of their representatives; indeed, at one time, the Chief of Police, the officer on whom devolved the duty of enforcing the law against gambling, was himself an ex-professional. At other times, gamblers who were actively engaged in the business have been members of the city council, tax collectors or supervisors of registration, besides filling numerous other State and City offices. Of the four men who, as ward “bosses,” virtually controlled the politics of the city from 1876 to 1888, one was an active gambler.

The “sports” had become politicianspoliticians, and ten or a dozen of them were recognized as active “workers,” whose support was valuable to the “bosses.” In consequence legislation adverse to gambling was well nigh impossible, and the enforcement of the laws already on the statute book had become dilatory and half-hearted. So weak was the sentiment in the legislature againstagainst gaming that that body, at its last session, had refused to pass a law requiring saloons where private gambling was conducted, to place a screen behind their front doors.

At the present time, gambling in the city is comparatively at a standstill. Many of those who have been prominently identified with the business in the past have sought other pursuits, which, although of a kindred character, have proved more profitable, such as the keeping of “turf exchanges,” “book making,” etc.

The city council having refused to indorse the suggestion of Mayor Shakspeare, that the indirect system of licensing be revived, finally mustered up courage to instruct the executive to close all houses. While the order cannot be said to have been literally and fully obeyed, its passage and the official action following the same have proved a deadly blow to public gambling.

478Two striking instances may be mentioned, which serve to show not only the immediate effect of a sudden reversal of public policy in this regard, but also to illustrate the deep hold which this pernicious vice obtains upon its victims.

On October 3, 1889, Joseph M. Marcus, a young merchant and a partner in a large tobacco concern, lodged a bullet in his brain while standing near the main entrance of one of the parish prisons. Temporary abberationabberation of mind, resulting from insomnia and apprehension of financial loss was supposed to have been the cause of his rash act. Later in the day, Napoleon Bonaparte White, one of the best known of the local gambling fraternity, was found dead in his bed, in a lodging house. A vial, in which remained a few drops of a decoction of morphine was found near him, and its presence was supposed to be a sufficient explanation of the manner of his death. About the time that the executive order was being prepared—the day before his decease—while the Mayor and Chief of Police were conferring upon the subject, White appeared to be much depressed and said that he had provided a method of evading the enforcement of the law; that he had purchased a pistol which he proposed to use in case the order was enforced. White’s career had been an eventful one. An engineer by profession, he had started in life on the Mississippi steamboats. His ambition and temperament soon drew him from the engine room to the saloon of the steamboat, where he blossomed forth as a professional gambler. When Walker planned his famous expedition to Nicaragua in 1856, White was one of the first to enroll himself in the band of volunteers. After the final collapse of the expedition, he drifted back to his old haunts in New Orleans, where for many years he was one of the most familiar figures upon the streets.

Instances are numerous where men have won or lost their daily bread upon the turn of a card. There have been not a few who, having staked their all upon the same contingency and lost, have blown out their brains with the weapon of despair. The sun-kissed hill-tops and low-lying valleys that surround Monte Carlo, contain the graves of not a few devotees of gaming, who in despair have ended their wretched lives. There is no sort of emotion which the fascination of this vice has not awakened in the human breast. There are a few rare instances relative to gamblers who have fallen dead in a superabundance of sudden joy. But never before, so far as is known, have two gamblers killed themselves because they believed that they were about to be deprived of the opportunity of indulging in their favorite pastimes. These instances stand unprecedented and unparalleledunparalleled in history.

In some form or other, gambling has been known in Milwaukee ever since the advent of the first white settlers, and even on their arrival they found the IndiansIndians racing ponies on the plains for wagers.

The first regular gambling house in Milwaukee of which there is any record was a faro layout, established by Martin Curtis, in 1843, and operated by him for several years. In those days every one gambled; and as Curtis was gifted with the faculty of saving his winnings, he became quite wealthy. He erected various buildings in that city, among them a row of dwellings which yet stand on Broadway, facing the police station. Some of his grandchildren still reside in the city, and enjoy the inheritance left them by the “old man.”

In 1849, Milwaukee had grown to be a place of sufficient size to maintain two gaming establishments. Thomas Wicks opened a game which he continued to run for thirty years with varying success. He had two brothers, Curtis and Gardner Wicks, who aided him in the business, and ran the bank during the sessions of the legislature and at other times when there was any “game” in the town. All through the war the Wicks Brothers’ game was running in full blast at Milwaukee in an old yellow building which General Lucius Fairchilds had inherited from his father. The fact that General Fairchilds was Secretary of State for two years on leaving the army, and was Governor for six, did not interfere with the “tiger” having its lair in the upper part of his building, within two blocks of the handsome mansion in which his family resided. As showing the “pull” which the Wicks had on politicians and public men it may be of interest to record the fact, that although Governor Fairchilds went through four bitter political campaigns as a candidate, there never was a word said in any paper in reference to the fact that while Governor of Wisconsin he knowingly rented his property for gambling purposes.

From the time when he opened, in 1849, until some timesome time in or about 1872, John Welch was the gambling king of the State. His acquaintance with prominent men gave him immunity, both in Milwaukee and at Madison; and it was seldom that his game was made the subject of police interference. During a long period of his career, William Beck was Milwaukee’s chief of police, and as he was an inveterate gambler himself, and could generally be found in a gaming house when not engaged upon professional business, he naturally refrained from interfering with Wicks.

But the gambler met his fate at last. “Taking a flyer” is what ruined him, and since 1872 he has done very little beyond insisting that modern gamblers are all “crooked.”

On several occasions he has attempted to break up the games in Milwaukee by procuring indictments against the gamblers, but in each instance 480has ignominiouslyignominiously failed, for the reason that the younger men have been shrewd enough to induce the public to believe that the “old sport” was merely trying to extort money. Prior to his unfortunate venture in wheat, “Tom” Wicks enjoyed the friendship of a large number of wealthy and influential men who never gambled. These in a majority he has retained since his misfortune. The charge brought against him by the younger gamblers, however, that he was endeavoring to levy blackmail has caused a coolness between himself and some of his former acquaintances.

In 1876, when Alexander Mitchell took the Wisconsin delegation to St. Louis in his private car, “Tom” Wicks was made chief caterer and attended to the wants of the party; the members of which enjoyed a perpetual banquet from the moment of their departure until the hour of their return.

Just before Wicks lost his money, Mayor O’Neil closed up the gambling houses in Milwaukee and also raided Sunday dances, the result being that next year the “tough” element joined the Republicans and elected Harrison Ludington Mayor. He opened the town for those who had elected him, and, so far as gambling was concerned, it continued to run about as it pleased until a year ago, when Chief Ries, almost as a last official act before being relieved of the care of the police force, closed up the gambling houses. This left Mayor Brown and Chief Jansen the choice of keeping them closed or being abused by the friends of Ries. They chose the former alternative. As a consequence the city has been “closed up tight” for nearly a year, most of the dealers and supernumeriessupernumeries since the last election emigrating to other localities, a considerable proportion finding congenial surroundings in Chicago.

Before this compulsory hegira of the gamblers, Milwaukee was one of the most viciously “wide open” towns in the Northwest, and the business was becoming a nuisance. After the collapse of the iron boom all manner of disreputables flocked thither, and gambling, might have been said, to be running rampant. Six faro banks were constantly open, besides poker games and wheels of fortune in the back rooms of most of the saloons.

During the recent G. A. R. encampment, the authorities seemed to relax their vigilance, and allowed a little faro playing in a quiet way, but there is no guarantee that a raid may not occur at any moment. As a consequence, it is not probable that a game of any magnitude will attempt to exist, or that if it does anybody will run the risk of patronizing it. A raid was made last September and three keepers and sixty players were captured. It was generally supposed that the “haul” would have been larger had not a “tip” been secretly given.

481Last May the Chief of Police, Jansen, drafted a new ordinance relative to gambling, which he asked the council to pass. The ordinance provided that police officers armed with a properly drawn warrant might enter any place where they suspect gambling was being carried on, and that any one refusing them admission should be subject to a severe penalty. The police were empowered to use force and to batter down doors when refused admission. The ordinance also provided that the men found in charge of the gambling house should be deemed the keepers and that all gambling tools and paraphernalia captured by the police should be destroyed as soon as the police proved to the court that the said tools are gambling devices.

There was considerable opposition among the aldermen to the ordinance, on the ground that it would enable the police to break into private houses and arrest a party of gentlemen who might be enjoying a quiet game of poker.

“Any man who pretends to oppose the law on such grounds is either a fool or a knave,” said Chief Jansen. “In the first place, we can enter any man’s house now on a properly drawn warrant. It is all nonsense to suppose that the police would attempt to enter any one’s house to break up a game of cards, even if played for a consideration. Any police official who attempted it would be promptly called to account and the verdict of public opinion alone would cause him to lose his position. What we do want, however, are laws sufficiently stringent to allow us to stamp out public gambling. It costs the city hundreds of dollars to keep the gambling houses closed, and when we get a case against them they slip through with a petty fine and then the police department is subjected to the humiliation of having to return the gambling tools. The ordinances of the city are no more stringent now than when they were first passed, when the city was incorporated, in 1854. They are not up to the times. We want this new ordinance passed so that we can close and keep closed public gambling houses without being compelled to keep a detail of men on watch at all times.”

To narrate the history of gambling in Saratoga, would be almost to give an epitome of the history of the town itself from its earliest date. Its celebrity as a watering place has done much to increase the practice of the vice, but even before it obtained fame in this direction its reputation as a gambling resort was well established within the somewhat contracted radius of the circle of which it formed the centre.

The author is indebted to an old resident of the Springs, who took up his residence there, under the parental wing, in 1831, when he was a boy of but ten years of age, for the statement that as early as 1844 there existed a resort on Broadway, opposite the residence of the Chancellor, where a bowling alley and billiard room constituted the chief attractions. The fact that games were played for wagers undoubtedly rendered the resorts more attractive. In a journal published in those early days there is found a communication from a lawyer, in which the writer complains that while arguing a case before the Chancellor he had been much annoyed by the noise of the patrons of the bowling alley, and that at intervals he could hear the click of the billiard pools, and even the rolling of the roulette table. During this period there was another bowling alley, situated in a small grove near a pond in the Southern part of the village, with the then customary adjuncts of billiards and open gambling. The location of the latter resort was practically identical with the site of the Clarendon hotel. Its proprietor was Geo. W. Gale, who also owned the alley opposite the Chancellor. In 1845, Gale retired from business, to accept the position of ticket agent of the Rensselaer and Saratoga railroad, a fact which would seem to indicate that in those early days running a gambling house was not found to be particularly profitable in Saratoga.

Perhaps the explanation may be found in the fact that the resorts of similar character had multiplied to an extent considerably exceeding the demand of the population. About the year 1834 bowling alleys and other places where various games might be played for a wager were numerous in the neighborhood of the railroad depots. The business was carried on so openly that almost the first object which attracted the attention of a passenger alighting from a train was the open door of one of these resorts.

Early in the history of the Springs, and long before the war, Southern planters in great numbers, selected Saratoga as their summer resort every year. It is not too much to say that they gambled with a recklessness in comparison with which the ventures of players of later days sink into comparative insignificance. They prided themselves upon playing a “gentleman’s game,” and the stakes were practically unlimited. The 483rich Southerner of the ante-bellum days was as simple in his pride as any other spoiled child of fortune; he offered an easy prey to the rapacity of professional sharks, and he was not infrequently robbed outright. He was accustomed to associating with those who were wont to flatter his vanity, and who were fond of assuring him that “the king could do no wrong.” The result was that the gamblers found it easy to reap a rich harvest, provided that they succeeded in being permitted to “sit”“sit” in the right kind of games. As most of the gambling was done at the hotel, the chance of detection was reduced to a minimum. From what has been said, it may be inferred that it is a mistake to suppose that gambling at Saratoga had its origin at the time of the introduction of the races, although since the time that the trial of the speed of horses was added to the attractions of this world-famous watering place, the vice has developed to a larger extent than ever before. The races were started in 1863, at what was then regarded as a suburb, and known as “House Haven.” It was about this time that club rooms sprang up and were to be found in all the larger hotels, where, for that matter, they may be found to-day. Faro and other banking games were openly dealt at half a dozen places in the village.

John Morrissey, once famous as a pugilist, and later as the head and front of the sporting fraternity throughout the United States, first appeared in Saratoga in 1863, as a patron of the race course. In 1870 he built and opened, with no little parade, his magnificent club house.

Ladies and gentlemen were alike invited to become his guests, and his object was to establish upon the American continent a gaming resort which should rival Monte Carlo. Notwithstanding the fact that indignant remonstrances were made by the better class of citizens, a local newspaper of that date chronicles that his establishment received the patronage of many of the principal ladies of the village, who were received and attended during their visits by professional blacklegs. Playing at this resort has always run high, although of late years the profits of the managers have not been so large as in former days. In March, 1871, an indignation meeting of citizens was held and resolutions were adopted emphatically denouncing gambling.

Among the best known professionals of early days at Saratoga, was Benjamin C. Scribner, who arrived in the village about 1842 and opened a small place in an alley near the United States Hotel. He was supposed to be a man of considerable wealth at one time, but was ultimately very glad to accept a position from Morrissey, in whose employ he remained until he died. It was a surprise to the public that his estate was found to be worth several thousand dollars, but the surprise was somewhat dissipated when it was learned that the property had been tied up in such a way that he could not use it.

484Morrissey soon found that it was impossible to carry out his original idea of making Saratoga the Baden-Baden of the United States. The disapprobation of the citizens was so openly expressed that he became chary of admitting people into his resort. He professed to discountenance open gambling, although every one in Saratoga knew that his club house was the great head-center of the vice. Albert Spencer and Charles Reed were subsequently associated with him as partners. Reed brought his wife to Saratoga and purchased land on which he erected a handsome residence. His family regularly attended the Episcopal church, and he made some effort to gain a foot-hold in good society, but did not meet with the success which he had expected. Afterwards Mr. Reed abandoned or disposed of his interest in the club house, and is at present a stock raiser, having obtained a by no means unenviable reputation as a breeder of thorough breds. He owns a fine racing stable.

Morrissey’s career is too well known to call for any extended description in this connection. He died a poor man and his wife was left in decidedly straightened circumstances. Probably no gambler in the United States won more money than he, and certainly none enjoyed a higher reputation for fair dealing and integrity. He was liberal to folly; in fact it may be said that during the heyday of his prosperity he was princely in his generosity. While his business was said to be under reprobation, he was yet able to command an immense popularity. It is doubtful whether any professional gambler in America has done more to corrupt the morals of young men than did Morrissey through the indirect influence of his gambling. It is a lamentable commentary upon American politics that a professional gambler, even though reputed to be a “square” player, should have been able to obtain a seat in the United States Congress through the suffrage of a constituency which typified the wealth and culture of the metropolis of the New World.

One word with regard to the influence of legislation upon gambling on horse races. At the period when the Saratoga meetings were inaugurated pool selling was not prohibited and was openly conducted. Not long afterward a law was enacted forbidding this form of gambling, but so far as Saratoga was concerned it proved a dead letter; in other words it was never enforced. Some practical members of the law-making body perceived this fact and attempted to prescribe a remedy. The outcome of their efforts was the celebrated “Ives” bill, which legalizes pool selling on horse races during thirty days in each year. The practical result of the adoption of this measure was to put an end to pool selling in a “hole-and-corner” sort of way, which was brought about measurably through the efforts of those gamblers who were willing to comply with the provisions of the law.

485Not many years ago Anthony Comstock, known all over the country as an uncompromising foe of vice, visited Saratoga upon the invitation of the reputable class of citizens. As a result of his visit several places were raided, but the grand jury refused to indict the proprietors upon the complaint of Comstock and his men.

It is worthy of remark that probably there is no place in the United States in which gambling is conducted on more strictly business principles than in Saratoga. Twenty years ago play was reckless, but was prompted chiefly by a love of excitement. Then everybody gambled simply as a method of killing time. To-day gambling at this famous watering place is chiefly, if not altogether, in the hands of professionals. In other words, nowadays, everybody who gambles does so on keen business principles. In the old times, the Southern gentleman lost his slaves and his plantation upon the turn of a card. At the present time large stakes are the exception, as they were formerly the rule. Occasionally a player who has plenty of money will risk a few hundreds and lose them without a murmur, but the good old days seem to have gone forever. The dealers’ winnings, as a rule, are comparatively small.

To come down to modern times, no history of gambling at Saratoga would be complete which failed to record the inauguration and prosecution of the war against gaming houses, which was commenced by Spencer Trask, of New York, in 1889. Mr. Trask, was well and favorably known upon the New York Stock Exchange, and for some time conducted an office at Saratoga during the season where he bought and sold stocks on margins. He is (or was) a proprietor of a daily newspaper at the Springs, through the columns of which he waged vigorous war upon the gamblers. He is understood to have been one of the victims of Comstock’s first raid, and is said to have paid a fine in consequence of an indictment by the grand jury. The result of his investigations he has made known, and the author, after some pains to contest the correctness of his statements, feels justified in giving to his readers a summary of what he discovered.

At the present time, there are over twenty or thirty gaming resorts in Saratoga. Half of these cannot be said to be open games. Many of them cater for the patronage of the lowest class of society only. In the “Saratoga Union” of August 22, there was printed a list of the public houses, which may be said to have been a substantially correct re-capitulation of those actually running at that time.

To summarize the history of gambling in Saratoga—It may be said that there has been open gambling at the Springs for at least twenty years, and that gaming is still open there to-day. While there was more poker playing at the hotels twenty years ago than there is to-day the vice is more rampant now than then. At the same time, there is a more pronounced 486effort to conduct it in comparative secrecy. At that time, the officers of the law looked upon it as a necessary evil and put forth no effort toward its suppression. To-day, public sentiment compels them to take action, which, however dilatory and half-hearted, is still or more less effective.

A brief allusion has been made in a preceding paragraph to the visit of Anthony Comstock to Saratoga. From what has been said, the reader may perhaps infer that it was comparatively without result. This impression should be removed. The Secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice visited the place accompanied by several of his own detectives, all being disguised. Their primary object was to obtain evidence against some twenty-nine gamblers. They were threatened with assassination and the best people of the city met in a citizens’ assembly to voice public opinion, and to afford them the moral support which the people alone can furnish. The hells were raided, and most of those arrested waived examination; yet in spite of positive and conclusive evidence not a single indictment was found.

In August, 1879, two raids upon the gaming houses were instituted but no implements were found either time. The explanation commonly accepted by the public was that “private tips” had been given to the houses by the police. Notwithstanding this, detectives obtained sufficient evidence to hold several gamblers to await the action of the grand jury. The net result was a rather deplorable fiasco.

Despite all citizens’ meetings, it is a grave question whether public sentiment in Saratoga does not, at least indirectly, support gambling. A leading daily journal of that city, while fighting for the suppression of the vice, virtually concedes this fact. There can be no question that strong political influence is brought to bear every year upon the District Attorney of Saratoga County, not to press indictments before the grand jury, and upon members of the latter body not to find a true bill. The explanation is to be found in the fact that the gambling interests in the city and county are too strong to be overcome by the moral sentiment of a minority of tax-payers.

Owing to the large number of hotels gamblers and confidence men have found Saratoga a good place at which to locate an alibi. It is a fact no less surprising than sad that clerks at reputable hotels are willing to lend themselves to such a scheme. The modus operandi is simple. A few lines are reserved on the register under a particular date; on that day a confidence game is worked elsewhere (let us say in Boston). The sharpers repair to the hotel where the space on the register has been reserved, and enter their names as of a previous date. Should they be arrested the hotel register is an invaluable adjunct in establishing an alibi. Of course the clerk cannot distinctly remember particular guests, but—for a consideration—he believes that his register is correct.

Cincinnati at present (1890) may be said to be comparatively free from gamblers. The last gaming establishment in the city was shut up in 1886, and since that time there has not been a single place known as a resort of this character within the corporate limits. The proprietor of the last recognized house was Marshall Wooden, who is now somewhere in Arkansas. His place was closed as a result of the last battle in the long struggle between the gamblers and the authorities. Two years previous to that time gambling hells had been numerous, being protected by the existing Board of Police Commissioners, who exacted a weekly amount of blackmail from every gambling house. That board, however, which was a partisan one, was wiped out of existence, and a non-partisan board took charge of the police. A crusade against the gamblers was inaugurated, and little by little they were driven from the town. However, in Covington and Newport, Kentucky towns just across the river from Cincinnati, gamblers are allowed full sway. In Covington alone there are no less than one hundred policy shops, and Newport boasts of a large number. Faro and keno are also played in these towns, while in Newport is a resplendently gorgeous gaming palace, devoted to all kinds of play, which has been running for years. These facilities for gambling, so near at home, are so annoying to Cincinnati authorities that the latter have attempted to induce the officials on the other side of the river to act with them in suppressing the vice. But nothing has been done in the matter. It was only a short time ago that a young man, a clerk in the Bodmann tobacco warehouse in Cincinnati, began to frequent the horse races at Latonia. At first he risked only his own money, but from betting on horse pools he gradually became infatuated with other forms of gambling, and night after night found him in Newport, in the place already referred to. As a result of this love for play, and to pay his “debts of honor,” (?) he forged the name of his employers to checks to the amount of ten thousand dollars, cashed them, fled to England, was arrested, brought back, and is now serving a sentence of seven years in the Ohio penitentiary.

It was not until the beginning of the war that there was any great amount of gambling in Cincinnati. Previous to that time, poker was played regularly on the steam boats plying the Ohio and Mississippi rivers between that city and New Orleans, and occasionally there was a game on shore. But as a rule the gambler kept on the water. During the war, however, Cincinnati was the headquarters of one of the great departments of the army. It was full of officers going and coming; immense amounts of money changed hands constantly; fortunes were made readily, and, of course, adventurers of all kinds flocked to the city.

488Then it was that the first gambling establishments were opened. There was a general laxity in regard to gamblers, and they held uninterrupted sway. Gambling increased until 1877 or 1878, when it reached its height. There were pool rooms in many of the saloons; gambling houses were as open as dry goods stores; policy was openly played, and lottery tickets were apparently legitimate articles of commerce.

About 1878, however, the pool rooms were closed and lottery tickets were banished. Now and then there would be a return of officials who owed their election to the votes of the gamblers, and that element in the community which was in sympathy with them, as during the years of 1884 and 1886, but good and efficient laws and their administration by an honest police force soon succeeded in suppressing open gaming houses.

Probably Cincinnati’s most noted gambler was the late “Bolly” Lewis. He flourished during the palmy days of the war. His establishment was one of the finest in the city. One night an army paymaster dropped into his place, and before morning came the unfortunate officer had lost $40,000. This set “Bolly” to moralizing, and from that time he became a changed man. He gave up gambling, became a member of the church, and was prominent in all charitable works. He proved his penitence by restoring the $40,000 to the officer. He went into the hotel business, became part proprietor of the Gibson house, and when he died enjoyed the respect and confidence of the entire community.

Tom Mead has been one of Cincinnati’s most persistent gamblers. He was a miner and went to California in ’49. He found it, however, more profitable to stop at Panama, where the miners who went by sea were crossing in a steady stream, and opening a gambling house there, he caught them going and coming, greatly to his own profit. He returned very wealthy, shot a man in Boston, then came to Cincinnati and opened places on Vine, Longworth and Fifth streets. Personally, he is a quiet, apparently inoffensive gentleman, dressing modestly, fond of good horses and devoted to his wife. Since gambling has been stopped he has become a law-abiding citizen and lives on the rental of the many houses which he owns.

“Eph” Holland is another noted Cincinnati gambler, who once achieved some notoriety as a politician, and who now has a place in Hot Springs, Arkansas.

“Blackie” Edwards still lives in Cincinnati, where for years he ran a straight faro game. He was honest in his way and had a code of honor which was exact. He apparently has enough to live on without working.

Robert Lynn ran faro games in both Cincinnati and Washington, and when the edict went forth that drove him out of the former city he retired to the latter.

489Those named are men who have lived long in Cincinnati, some of whom have accumulated money, which they have carefully invested; but at all times the city has had homeless, temporary professional gamblers, who have come floating up from Lexington and other southern and western cities. It was from Kentucky that the business men, stock farmers and the like came, who made up the principal customers for Cincinnati’s gambling establishments. It was openly stated by the gamblers when it was proposed to drive them away, that they rarely fleeced any one who lived in the city, their profits being derived altogether from strangers, and that consequently it was really a good thing for the town to draw and keep here money from abroad.

There have never been but three really popular games among Cincinnati gamesters—poker, of the stud-horse type, faro, and keno. Keno, as a rule, has been straight, while faro has been equally crooked.

With the exception of Blackie Edwards’ place, the stranger in a gambling room in Cincinnati had nine chances in ten of being cheated. Roulette has been played to some extent, while in the old days rondeau was something of a favorite. It was played with a board furnished with pockets. You played a certain number of balls, rolling them down the board, and if an even number of them went in the pockets you won; if not, you lost. Crap shooting is played only along the levee by the darkies. Three years ago there were at least five hundred policy shops in town, but they have all been driven out. Policy is still played on a small scale, the headquarters being in Kentucky, and men go around to collect the numbers from the “friends,” as they are called.

During the war, gambling was enormously profitable. The instance of $40,000 having been lost in a single night has already been mentioned. The heads of gambling establishments would frequently take a trip to New Orleans, and would return with perhaps $5,000 and it was not unusual for the profits to be $10,000. During the later years, profits have not been so phenomenal, but still the money made has been large, as was clearly shown by the fact that gamblers were able to spend $50,000 and $60,000 a year for police protection. The business being in the hands of a few men, they were able to run pretty much as they pleased, the horde of small-fry professional gamblers being kept on the outside.

During the palmy days of the gamblers, they were an active, aggressive political force. Ephraim Holland, already mentioned, was famous as a political ward worker. He manipulated conventions to suit himself, and saw to it that the police officers were men who were friendly; and when Ephraim saw that an election was going against him, he at one time, so far forgot himself as to stuff the ballot box. This sent him to the penitentiary, and the wave of public indignation that followed his conviction, was disastrous to the gamblers. The gambling houses were kept open all 490night, being run, as a rule, in connection with a saloon, and they were hot-beds fostering criminals. They attracted to the town all sorts of unscrupulous individuals. There were frequent fights and occasionally a murder, while robbery was not uncommon. But since the closing of the gambling houses and at the same time the shutting down of the saloons at midnight, Cincinnati has really been regenerated. The number of prisoners in the jail has been reduced to almost half, while the clearing of the moral atmosphere is noticeable. The chief of detectives of Cincinnati, Col. Larry Hazen, said in speaking of the hegira of the gamblers, “I regard it as the greatest moral reform that Cincinnati has seen in my time. It removed temptation from growing boys and trusted young men, and it keeps away from our town a great number of pickpockets, as well as gamblers, who are ready to be burglars or anything else when occasion may offer.”

The Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce and Board of Trade are for strictly legitimate dealing. There is no selling on margins; all transactions must be with the real article. There are, however, three bucket shops who do business with the Chicago Board of Trade. Ten years ago there were fifteen bucket shops doing business in this way, but for the lack of patronage, they have dwindled to three. The law is exact and plain in forbidding their existence, but thus far, the courts have failed to dispose of the cases brought before them. The police are making a strenuous effort to close them up, and the next legislature promises to pass even more stringent legislation in regard to them. The volume of business done by them is small, their customers being for the most part, young men and listless individuals who have no regular employment, but who lounge around the bucket shops, spending now and then a dollar, and passing their time in watching the blackboards.

With a population estimated at 250,000, Cleveland supports a dozen public gambling houses, half a dozen private poker clubs and two policy shops. In deference to unfavorable public sentiment, which forms the basis of restrictive measures enforced by the police, all forms of gambling are of necessity conducted in an exceedingly quiet manner. As a rule, all public gaming is conducted behind locked doors and applicants for admissionadmission are subjected to close scrutiny. For thirty years but one line of policy has been pursued by the municipal authorities toward gambling houses, and in all that time public opinion has been uniformly hostile to the business. The policy of the authorities has been to restrict, rather than to abolish, gambling. They have endeavored to place the games, as far as possible, beyond the reach of uninitiated and guileless citizens who would probably prove easy victims, and to limit their patronage to those whose experience has made them more familiar with the wiles of the professional gamester.

There is not a gambling house in Cleveland conducted on the ground floor, nor is there one run with open doors. With a solitary exception, the gambling rooms, of which there are about a dozen, are located in the second story of the business blocks. The exception referred to is a Chinese “joint,” operated in connection with a Mongolian laundry in a basement.

In 1866, there were but a half dozen gambling establishments in the city, and nearly all the six opened have commenced operations within the past eight years. There have, however, been several gambling rooms opened and conducted for only a short time, whose doors were closed because of the slender resources of the “bank,” which could not sustain the loss of a few thousand dollars. Within the past few years the police have emphatically insisted that the gambling rooms be kept hidden from public gaze. The object undoubtedly has been, as before intimated, so to arrange matters that only those who were obstinately bent on play, could find a place in which to stake their earnings on the turn of a card.

It has also been a feature of police policy to make a formal raid every year. In the Police Court it has been the custom to assess nominal fines of fifty dollars and costs on the keepers of gambling houses and ten dollars and costs on the visitors. Both classes have always assented to the arrangement, and, after pleading guilty, paid their fines without protest. A great many disinterested citizens insist that such proceedings, besides being inherently farcical, partake very much of the nature of an indirect licensing of the business.

A State statute provides that, when ordered by a court of competent jurisdiction, the mayor and chief of police shall destroy the gambling 492implements captured in a raid. It has become the settled custom, however, for the court not to order the destruction of the paraphernalia, which is accordingly returned to the owners. In consequence there is a great public outcry against the business and the police order all proprietors to close their rooms. They comply for a few weeks, and then gaming is resumed, though at first on a small scale. They gradually grow bolder, until they very nearly reach the point where they conduct business with open doors. There is then another outcry,outcry, they are ordered to close and the whole process is repeated.

In all the gambling houses there is a sentinel, and unless the appearance of the applicant for admission is satisfactory he is not permitted to enter.

Probably another reason for the caution on the part of the gamblers is to be found in the stringent legislation against the vice. The law, of course, does not recognize the business as legitimate, and it is an easy matter for a loser to secure judgment for money lost, either before a petty magistrate or in a higher court. As a rule the gamblers settle before the cases are called for trial, and they have at times submitted to blackmail rather than appear in court.

Concerning the individual characteristics of Cleveland gamblers there is little to be said, few of them enjoying more than a local reputation.

Among the most prominent proprietors of gambling houses, George Randall is, perhaps, the best known, and is the nearest approach to the ideal professional gamester. He has just passed the meridian of life, and has an unusually pleasant countenance. His drooping mustache is barely tinged with gray. He is intelligent, good-natured, and of a quiet disposition. He is thoroughly “game,” and no man can lose with more nonchalance or win with an easier grace. He owns a gambling establishment in Saratoga, but has an interest in two “hells” in Cleveland. His fortune is estimated at $30,000.

As regards the extent of gambling in Cleveland, it may be said that four-fifths of the playing is done in eight establishments, in all of which the principal games are “faro,” “roulette” and “poker.” In each of those places the paraphernalia—that is, the gambling implements and furnishings—cost about $2,500. The total amount invested in the outfit of the gambling rooms is about $25,000. There are in nearly all cases two partners, three dealers, and a porter, who also acts as sentinel. The dealers receive from $20 to $30 per week; the rents range from $60 to $80 per month, and the gas bills average about $6 per week. Under the head of expenses should be included the fines assessed at the time of the annual raids, all of which are paid by the proprietors. The average expenses of the twelve gambling houses in the city may fairly be summarized as follows:

The amount of capital backing the establishments is about $80,000, of which faro has some $30,000, and roulette and poker the balance. There are about fifty employes. The profits during the past year have been, in the estimation of the best judges in the city, about $35,000. It has, however, been an unfortunate year for the fraternity, for, in addition to the losses already mentioned, one firm lost $6,000 in a month.

There are three semi-public poker clubs, of which the expenses are paid by the “rake off.” Besides these there are several private poker clubs, the members of which contribute all the money needed to maintain the rooms. A great deal of poker playing is also carried on in private rooms at various points throughout the city.

The Chinese laundrymen love to indulge in “fan-tan” and poker, and are inveterate gamesters. Many of them wear jasper rings on their left wrists “for luck.” They are in the habit of assembling in small parties in several localities, the main establishment being located at the corner of Seneca and Chaplain streets. The last mentioned place is also the headquarters of one of their secret societies. A police raid upon it, not many months ago, resulted in the capture of some twenty Celestials.

Policy playing is limited to two establishments. Each is conducted by the proprietor and one assistant, and they do a prosperous business. Their patrons are poor people, who are necessarily ignorant or they would not strive to overcome the heavy odds against their chance of winning. The patrons of the game invest about $1,500 per week in their effort to name the winning combination.

About $5,000 per month is invested in the Louisiana State Lottery. The local agent is the proprietor of a cigar store who maintains little secrecy, and even women and children figure among the patrons. The greater number of tickets are ordered by express or mail directly from New Orleans.

Gambling in stocks and grain is conducted through a few brokers who act as agents of the parties in New York and Chicago. They do a fair business, but it is not nearly so large as it was during the speculative craze a few years ago. They are understood to receive a commission of five per cent. Gamblers in Cleveland have never taken an active part in politics, their interest having been chiefly limited to wagers on the result of elections.

494Police officials all unite in saying that little or no crime has been traced to gambling. One bank cashier embezzled nearly $1,000,000, and another about $80,000 to invest in stocks and wheat, but only one or two trifling defalcations have been traced to ordinary gambling. Recently a young man $200 short in his accounts disappeared, and he probably lost the money at roulette. A trusted employe ruined a prominent book firm, misusing perhaps $20,000; but business mismanagement and possibly other weaknesses combined with his fondness for poker to bring about his downfall.

There have undoubtedly been cases of embezzlement due to cards, however, that never became public. The laws against gambling have also made the proprietors cautious, and they are careful in permitting visitors to stake large sums. The gamblers, aside from a lot of “hangers on,” known as “shoestring” or “tin horn” gamblers, do not figure in the criminal records. Most of the latter exist on the earnings of prostitutes, and steal and gamble as a matter of course.

Before the war, the slave owner with wealth at his command, with his plantations overseered by trustworthy men, with his crops cultivated by his slaves, gradually became more and more indifferent to mercantile pursuits, and indeed, to any vocation involving actual work, of either mind or body, his main anxiety being to solve the question, how should he spend his money and live. Especially was this true before the advent of the railroad, when Mobile was the principal city in the State, the most easy of access on account of its rivers, and the focus of at least two-thirds of the entire wealth of Alabama. Gaming at that time in Mobile was almost universal, the sporting element being by far more gentlemanly, better educated, and in every respect more polished than are the men of that ilk to-day. Among the patrons of the race-course were such men as Wm. R. Johnson, Col. Sprague, “Wagner” Campbell; while the gamblers numbered in their ranks, Capt. Geo. Grant and Jack Delahaunty. As long as money poured into Mobile, that city was specially noted among the gambling fraternity for the high stakes wagered on horse-racing, and the amount risked on the turn of a card. Even when “the late unpleasantness” came on, substantially the same state of affairs existed, and what diminution there was in gaming among the residents, was more than counterbalanced by the prevalence of gambling among the soldiers of both armies during the war.

495At this time a well known figure on the streets of Mobile, was Capt. Wm. H. Williamson. He was a Virginian by birth, of wealthy parents and educated as a gentleman. Early in life he settled in Alabama. He was exceedingly fond of horses, and generally devoted to sporting and was a frequenter of the races in Mobile, even up to a date within the last few years. He was one of the California “Forty-niners” and one of the witnesses of the famous Broderick-Terry duel, the story of which has recently been revived by the shooting of Judge Terry. Capt. Williamson was elected Chief of Police for two terms, holding that office during six years. It is fairness of play and unfailing courtesy rendered him popular, and he was one of the best types of the gamblers who, before the war, made Mobile their headquarters.

During the ante-bellum days “brace” games were either exceptional or not desirable. In fact they may be said to have been comparatively unknown in Mobile until after the occupancy of the city by the federal forces, when an army, estimated at 60,000, occupied the city and its immediate vicinity. With the advent of the camp followers, came sharp practices, and gambling revived in its most pernicious form.

From 1865 to 1872 this state of affairs continued. In the year 1873, Mobile having, like every other city in the Union, undergone the ordeal of a financial panic, which at that time swept over the country at large, was not a particularly favorable spot for the operations of gamblers. The laws of the State enacted about that time, moreover, were decidedly hostile to gambling. However, keno rooms and lotteries began to flourish, at the expense of poker, faro and roulette. Each successive legislature passed more stringent laws against gaming than had its predecessor, and public gambling almost ceased to exist. Simultaneously, however, with the advent of each new administration, some of the sporting fraternity, more venturesome than others, attempted to run keno, faro and poker rooms. Yet the popular demand for the enforcement of the laws was so loud, and the sentences of the court so severe, that at present gambling in Mobile is conducted with the utmost secrecy, and every precaution is taken to avoid police interference.

During the decade between 1870 and 1880 lotteries flourished. A test case was made up against A. J. Moses, and its determination temporarily put a stop to them all. At present lottery tickets are exposed for sale with great caution, the grand jury presenting a true bill against the venders, so far as the latter can be ascertained, two or three times a year, notwithstanding the fact that they usually turn their wheels in some place outside the city limits.

It was during the period between 1875 and 1880 that “Bud” Reneau, who has since figured so prominently in sporting circles, particularly 496as one of the managers of the Sullivan-Kilrain fight, began to attract attention as a member of local sporting clubs. His handsome figure and courtly manners always made him a favorite wherever he went. He has retained for his native place an affection which years of absence have not lessened, and his purse has always been open to the needy of his own city.

The sporting element has repeatedly essayed to influence elections in Mobile, but it cannot be said that their efforts have been rewarded with success, the policy of each municipal administration having been uniformly against gambling.

Among the negroes, “craps” is greatly in vogue, and there are but few terms of the courts in which indictments for “crap shooting” are not more numerous than for almost any other violation of the gambling laws. This description of gaming is almost exclusively confined to the colored population, and the prosecution of the offense is perhaps not retarded by the fact that the solicitor receives $150 for each conviction, as against $37.50 for other classes of misdemeanors.

The court enjoys the discretion in the case of conviction under the gambling laws, of either inflicting a fine, or sentencing the offender to the coal mines or both. As a rule, the sentence in the case of managers of lotteries has been a fine of $100 and solicitors fees $150 and costs of court which has resulted in the collection for the city of nearly ten thousand dollars per year from this source. At present, between the laws against gambling and the perseverance of the solicitor in keeping an eye on all the resorts of the gamblers it may be said that gambling is at the lowest possible ebb in Mobile. The enforcement of the laws by the grand juries has made things so unpleasant for the blacklegs that gradually they have been compelled to leave the city, either to avoid trials by the courts or to seek more profitable fields.

Early in 1877 the “Pool Room” or “Turf Exchange” made its appearance in Mobile. Undoubtedly this has proved the most pernicious of all forms of gambling. It grew rapidly in favor and lured many young men to destruction and dishonor. The evil was so great that a few citizens appealed to the Legislature in the spring of 1889 for the passage of a bill prohibiting pool selling which, up to that time, had not been covered by the State laws against gambling. The new bill had the novel feature in it that it compelled the municipal authorities of the various cities of the State to execute this law, and gave them jurisdiction, for that purpose, for five miles outside the corporate limits. The law was so carefully framed that the “Turf Exchange” men surrendered without a fight, and quit the State in a body.

McMaster, in his “History of the People of the United States” quoting from the historian Ramsay, and several European travelers, says: “Betting and gambling were, with drunkenness and a passion for dueling and running in debt, the chief sins of the Carolina Gentleman.” This was about 1791. Charleston was then and for many years afterwards as much South Carolina as Paris is France. “Already the city was a great commercial centre. At its wharves might have been seen, almost any day, scores of vessels laden with every article of luxury or use Great Britain could supply. In the hands of her subjects was all the trade and all the commerce of the State. To own a ship, to keep a shop, to do any of those things done by merchants and traders, was in the opinion of a Carolina planter, degrading. The master spent his time in the enjoyment of such festivities as Charleston could afford. There he lived in a fine house, gave fine dinners, went to the theatre to see Mrs. Rawson, or to the circus to see Mr. Ricketts; subscribed to the assembly, joined the Hell-fire club or the Ugly club, or the Mount Zion Society, and rode his favorite horse at the races.”

Irving’s history of the turf in South Carolina, shows that the Jockey Club in Charleston was probably the oldest in the Union, and while at its annual meetings betting was not as common or as heavy as elsewhere, and the prizes were more frequently plate than money, yet the early popularity of horse racing indicates of necessity a passion for betting as well as for its alleged object, the improvement of the breeds of horses.

The early narratives give two notes of interest to the student of gambling, one before, and the other after, the Revolution, neither of which is cited by McMaster.

Johnson in his “Traditions of the Revolution” tells of the visit of Lord Anson, the well known British naval commander, to Charleston, about the year 1733. He was hospitably received by the citizens, among them, Thomas Gadsen, the King’s collector for the province. Lord Anson’s passion for gaming was such that he had been censured for even winning money from his humble midshipmen. Mr. Gadsen (who had formerly been a Lieutenant in the British Navy) played with his lordship, lost a large sum of money, and paid the debt of honor by giving him titles for all those lands which to this day (1840) bear the designation of Ansonborough. It was that portion of Charleston between Boundary and Laurens Street, extending eastwardly from Anson street to the channel of Cooper River. These valuable lands which now constitute a large section of the city were afterwards purchased from Lord Anson by General Christopher Gadsen, the distinguished soldier and statesman of the Revolution, and a son of the King’s collector, Thomas Gadsen, the unlucky gamester.

The other reference to the gambling habits of the time is that of the Duke de La Rochefaucault Liancourt, who visited Charleston about 1798. He says: “The French planters and commanders of the privateers differ widely in their political opinions, but the love of gaming reconciles them all, and in the French gaming houses, which are very numerous in Charleston, aristocracy and sans culottes mix in friendly intercourse and indiscriminately surround the tables. It is asserted that they play very high.” From which it appears that the gambling table was then, as now, a great leveler.

Newspaper advertisements and a few traditions are all that exist to show the history of the gaming table from the times of La Rochefaucault to the present day. Rich planters still kept up and encouraged horse racing at the courses in Charleston and throughout the state, as the records of the Jockey club show, though, as intimated before, the improvement of horse-flesh rather than betting was the main object. Faro banks undoubtedly existed in Charleston, but they were not so numerous nor as well patronized as they are to-day. Undoubtedly there was considerable private gambling, chiefly poker, and there are stories of large and valuable plantations changing hands over a card table in a single night.

The most widespread and approved gambling was the lottery. We read that in the year 1800 Denmark Vesey, the notorious mulatto 499who planned, organized, and almost brought to a successful condition, the great negro insurrection of 1822, bought his freedom with $600 of a $1,500 prize won in the “East Bay (local) Lottery,” and the newspapers of Charleston about 1814 show three lottery advertisements, one to build a college in Beaufort, another to build a Presbyterian and another to build an Episcopal church in Charleston.

In 1844 the lottery craze was at its height, and as much as thirty thousand dollars was occasionally drawn at the weekly drawings of the South Carolina Lottery which were held at the City Hall. The City and State levied no license and it appears that the community favored the enterprise. J. S. Gregory & Co. of Baltimore, the great lottery managers, employed agents in this city, and their agents, Messrs. Gatewood & Cochran, were highly esteemed citizens, whose reputation and social standing were not in the least affected by their occupations.

The foregoing clipping from the Charleston Courier of April 13, 1844, will give some idea of the “schemes” and of the extent of the business.

The most notorious case of ante-bellum losing, at a sitting, took place at the old Charleston Club House. The parties were Motte A. Pringle of an old aristocratic family, and Mr. Bunch the British Consul at Charleston. Mr. Bunch, who was a good deal of a sharper, professed to know nothing of the game of “grab,” and Pringle offered to teach him the game. When they arose from the table Pringle owed Bunch $10,000. Pringle told his father (who was a prominent business man in the city) the next morning, and the old gentleman recognizing it as a debt of honor, gave him the money, and it was promptly paid over to Bunch the next day. At the Charleston Club, frequented by professional men and cotton merchants, there are two sets of poker players, with limits of $50 and $200 respectively. The proportion of poker playing members is not large and I have never heard of but one man squandering all his means (almost $30,000) there. This was a present member of the Charleston bar, and it took him almost ten years to do it. The other club is the Queen City Club, which is more of a poker club than anything else and where men occasionally lose and win as much as $2,000 in a night. No professional is allowed there, but it is the favorite resort of the non-professional poker player of the city.

The Otranto Club (chiefly lawyers) owns a beautiful villa about sixteen miles from the city, where they have six or eight meetings a year, and I understand play a pretty stiff game of poker. Hunting and good eating are, however, the main delight at Otranto.

There are in Charleston a Merchants’ Exchange, consisting mainly of wholesale grocers and produce brokers; a Cotton Exchange; a Phosphate Miners’ Exchange and a Chamber of Commerce.

500At the opening of the Cotton Exchange, about twelve years ago, one hundred bales of cotton futures were sold from the floor. This is the only transaction of the kind that has ever taken place in this city. About ninety per cent. of the cotton shippers of Charleston sell futures in New York against their shipments to the United Kingdom and the continent. There are two gentlemen, Lee Howard and E. H. Priolean, who, as agents for New York firms, sell futures in cotton, but their business has decreased very much in late years, and amounts to very little.

There never have been any futures sold at the Merchants’ Exchange, though some of its members occasionally speculate a little in grain and pork futures in the Chicago market. The Phosphate Exchange is little more than a pool among phosphate rock miners, and does no “future” selling or buying.

The Chamber of Commerce, the oldest commercial body in the South, does no business whatever in “futures.”

The Legislature of South Carolina in 1883 passed an act “to declare unlawful contracts for the sale of articles for future delivery made under certain circumstances and to provide the remedy in such cases.” No case has ever come to the State Supreme Court under this act, and it is considered merely as declarative of the common law.

There are at present five “policy” offices, with agents or “vendors” scattered throughout the city, the large majority of the vendors being negroes.

The business was first started here about 1871, when Horbach, a gambler and bar-keeper, Willoughby, a corrupt politician, and others obtained a charter, under the title of “The Charleston Charitable Association,” and did a large and lucrative “policy” business until March, 1875, when the act was repealed.

The present five “companies” are modeled after the Charleston Charitable Association, though they do business on a far less scale, as they are prohibited by law. The drawings are conducted squarely, the chances in favor of the gambler being tremendous, and one of the managers is authority for the statement that the net profits amount to 33 per cent. of the gross receipts. The system is probably the same as elsewhere. Seventy-eight numbers are put into a wheel, and twelve are withdrawn by a little negro, blindfolded. Drawings take place at two and six o’clock every day, except Sunday, and are held at the main offices, three of which are in Market Street. Some few negroes are allowed in the room during the drawing, which is always conducted behind a screen, or door ajar, for the noise of a crowd would necessarily attract the attention of the police, who wink at the proceedings. The policy 501shops, like faro banks, are seldom pulled; the only instance in the last three years being the raiding of Syke Thorne’s den on Market Street, two months ago; and this would not have happened had not Thorne run a dance hall, bar-room and “chuck-a-luck” in connection with his policy shop. Negroes compose fully 70 per cent. of the patrons of the policy shops. Their general play is for five or ten cents, and their winnings never exceed $50 on a single ticket, though the limit of all the policy companies is $500. A few white printers, clerks and occasionally a gentleman with a passion for gambling will invest two or three dollars in a single drawing, and buy to the limit. The companies have never had any very great losses since the closing up of the Charleston Charitable Association, which was sometimes ‘struck’ for large amounts. The combinations played are as follows:

The following are two policy tickets bought a few day ago. The size and form of the other policy tickets in this city are very nearly similar, and these will give an idea of what they are all like. They cost ten cents 502each and were bought of a vendor who has a desk in a large old paper and rag store in the rear of, and about 30 feet from the door of the U. S. Post-office in Charleston.

James F. Walsh is a wholesale liquor dealer. He has never kept a gambling house; is rated by Dunn or Bradstreet at $40,000 to $75,000; credit high; takes an active but silent part in politics; occasionally goes 503to a political convention, but has never run for office; is on the official bonds of the Probate Judge, Recorder of Mesne Conveyance, County Treasurer and (probably) Coroner of Charleston County. Though apparently of mild manner and address, he has killed two men; one a mulatto, for which murder he was tried and convicted, but soon bought a pardon from Moses, the robber Governor of South Carolina; the other was the killing of a brother Irishman, for which he was tried and acquitted with a verdict of self defense, which verdict created great talk in the city, it being in the opinion of the general public a clear case of manslaughter.

J. C. Jaudon is a bar-keeper near the S. C. Railway depot, worth with his brothers about $5,000; not rated in the commercial agencies—has only started “policy” this year. Syke Thorne is the most notorious mulatto gambler in the State. He has a bar-room, dancing hall patronized by abandoned women, “policy shops,” and several “chuck-a-luck” and small “faro” tables on Market Street, between King and Archdale Streets. He was “pulled” by the police recently, but though “lying low,” is again in the business. He is probably worth $5,000. In person he is good looking, dresses well, and is quiet mannered. He has never taken any prominent part in politics.

Finley and Brown, 78 Meeting Street; faro, roulette and poker; dealers Dowling and Neisz. Elegantly furnished.

Charles F. Levy; faro, roulette, mustang and poker; dealers Conners and Levy. Although the finest rooms in town, they are temporarily closed for want of funds. Powers (M. W.) a well-known young Irish contractor and builder, holds the bank bill roll.

John Munro and Israel; roulette and faro; Munro and Israel, dealers. Neat but not gaudy appointments.

W. J. O’Dell and a partner; two faro tables, roulette and poker. Handsomely furnished.

A. M. Flynn, assisted by a woman who joins in the poker game, and occasionally deals faro.

Syke Thorne, with several negro assistants. Very small game at very mean tables.

As to whether the games are “skin” or “square” it may be said that any one of the Charleston dealers will put up a game on a drunken man with a large bank roll; but there are probably two of those dealers who will try to “skin” any and everybody.

Finley and Brown is probably the strongest backed house in the city, and it is not improbable that F. & B. back O’Dell, as he is not known to have much money of his own, and he deals at Brown’s old stand and in 504his building. Levy and Connor got temporarily to the end of their financial rope some months ago and have not resumed business yet. Munro and Israel do not play a very heavy game and would probably shut down after a loss of $400. They have no backers unless since very recently. Thomas Finley, the king of the gamblers, was a tinner by trade and took to the green cloth and occasional horse racing about 1858. He owns considerable real estate and is generally supposed to be worth between $30,000 and $50,000. He is the ideal gambler as far as liberality goes, and is exceedingly popular. He is generous and open-hearted and for ten years furnished all the coal for the use of the Seamdies Church; is not particularly smart except at his business; and has never been known to have had anything to do with politics, except to contribute to the campaign fund. He very rarely, if ever, deals faro, but plays considerable poker for small stakes. He is said to have won $15,000 betting on a recent Congressional election.

W. K. Brown is a butcher by trade and still continues at the business. He dealt faro for many years while running his stall in the market, but is seldom seen now in a gambling room and is very close and shrewd. His partner in the meat business is a very prominent Republican politicianpolitician and is now U. S. Marshal for South Carolina. Brown has never run for office and is probably too close to spend money for his friends’ political aspirations. He is married and has several very handsome children. Is supposed to be worth $50,000, which he inherited from relatives in England two years ago.

John Munro is the oldest gambler in the city and is about as honest as a gambler can be; is now poor, having been ruined by a reckless partner in Savannah some years ago. Has had several fortunes and spent almost as many years and dollars in ’Frisco as he has in Charleston.

The other dealers whose names are mentioned are all young men and Charlestonians, except Neisz, who is an Alsatian Jew. They have not made much money or reputation as yet. The most notorious of them is Charles F. Levy, the enfant perdu of a very respectable Jewish family. He shot a man in a bar-room brawl some years ago, and Levy’s neck was in considerable danger, but the man eventually recovered. Levy has squandered about $15,000, left him by his grandfather, in about three years. He is utterly without principle and is one of the best rifle shots in Charleston.

In conclusion, it may be said that gambling has been on the decrease for the last thirteen years in Charleston, except, possibly, in the small matter of “policy” buying among the negroes. Plenty of money was in the hands of the very class of men who would spend it over the faro and poker table during the years of misrule—1868 to 1876. One of the 505judges of the State at that time is reported to have been an ex-faro bank dealer and was certainly a great devotee of the game.game.

The only great business defalcation publicly known to have been caused by the passion for gaming was that of Bentham R. Caldwell, of a highly respectable family of the city, who in the year 1879 misappropriated $75,000, and expended it over the faro tables of Finley and Brown. Suit was brought and the case was carried to the Supreme Court qui-tam action brought by the plaintiff as a common informer to recover the penalty under sections 6 and 7 of the 79th chapter of the Revised Statutes of South Carolina, but the gamblers ruled the roast, as may be seen by referring to the case of Augustus S. Trumbo vs. Finley and Brown, as reported in the 18th (or possibly 20th) S. C. Law Reports (Strand’s), which probably can be found in any large law library.

Gambling is alarmingly prevalent in the capital of Texas. From the foundation of the city (in 1843) until 1870, Austin was a frontier town, where all the vices incident to places of that sort abounded and flourished, gaming being one of the chief. Since the year last named, while gambling may be said to have increased rather than diminished, it has not been so flagrantly open as in the earlier days of the city’s history. The introduction of “modern improvements” would seem to have stimulated rather than repressed the growth of the vice. The electric lights, which have replaced the “dip” candle of more primitive times, have served to render the “hells” more attractive to the young men who are to shape the destiny of Austin in the future. One of the most deplorable features of the existing situation in that city is the constant growth of the damning practice among the youth. The sons of the most influential and respected families are habitual frequenters of the gaming saloons and are rapidly becoming devotees of the soul-destroying habit.

The resorts are numerous enough and of sufficiently varied character to meet the requirements of all players of whatever class. The respectable (?) houses are three, of which two are devoted to “banking” and “short” games, and one to keno. These establishments are located in the center of the business portion of the city and on one of the principal thoroughfares. They are fully equal, in point of equipment and furnishing, to those which may be found in any Southern city of the same size. Besides these there are four or five “dives” in the lower and more 506degraded part of town, where “brace,” as distinguished from so-called “square” games, are at the very zenith of that fleeting success which accrues to the “skin” gambler when unmolested by the authorities. In addition to these public resorts, there are several semi-private poker games, nightly running, which are patronized almost exclusively by the upper classes.

With the exception of the keno game, all these houses are open day and night, from the first day of January until midnight on the thirty-first of December in each year. The keno house opens its doors two or three evenings each week, as the demands of its patrons and the prospects of business seem to justify. Saturday night, however, constitutes the great gala festival of this resort. Then it is that the room is crowded almost to suffocation with a motley throng of clerks, mechanics and day-laborers. It is on Saturday night, also, that the “dives” garner their richest harvest. In these dens of iniquity there gather on Saturday night, at certain seasons, the negroes from the cotton fields, whose earnings for an entire season, accumulated at a cost of toil, privation and suffering, which might well appal stouter hearts than theirs, are swept into the coffers of men in comparison with whom the tiger is merciful. These unreflecting children of nature never perceive that they have been victimized. To the last they believe that they have been given an equal chance of winning, and should the shark who had won their last cent offer them five dollars as a gratuity, they would be first and loudest in singing his praises.

In almost all the houses—whatever their class—faro is the game most in favor. In those which revel in the reputation of being “square,” the “chances” (sic) of success sometimes fluctuate, but the preponderance, in the long run, is always in favor of the bank. The “square” element in each instance is a variable quantity. In other words, if a player is reasonably conversant with “fake-boxes,” “strippers,” and all the other subterfuges which are to the professional dealer as his A, B, C, he may hope to be accorded something like an even chance. If, on the other hand, he is susceptible, verdant and gullible, his chances are correspondingly reduced.

A game somewhat similar to faro, known as “Mexican monte,” also flourishes in Austin. Perhaps its popularity is due to the propinquity of the city to the Mexican frontier. Forty-four cards are employed, the nine and ten spots being discarded. “Chips” are “barred,” and the players stake cash or its negotiable equivalent. The bank, too, is exposed, and is placed in the center of the table, and contains from $250 to $500 in silver, arranged in stacks of $20 each. The game is very fascinating, counting its devotees by scores, and a great deal of money is bet on it. The dealer deals from his hand as in poker, and it is supposed to be exceedingly difficult for him to “put up” a game, a belief that adds not 507a little to its popularity. There are from four to six “monte” games run in the fashionable Austin resorts.

As has been said, the private poker games are patronized almost exclusively by the elite.elite. In the public houses all classes may be found around the table—Americans, of high and low degree, Mexicans, and even Chinese. In fact, poker in Austin may be said to be a “fad,” a “craze.” Even ladies of the highest social standing may be found to whom the terms “ante,” “jack pot” and “bob-tail flush” are as familiar as household words. It is hard to overestimate the deplorable influence which this condition of public morals is exercising upon the young. From playing poker in the parlor to gambling in a “hell” is but a step, and a short one at that; and more than one family in the Texan capital to-day laments the downfall of one of its members through the love of gambling acquired by indulgence in “five-cent ante” under the refined surroundings of the higher circles of social life.

The proprietors of the gambling houses, as well as the dealers therein, are a power at the polls and particularly at municipal elections. In some of the wards they absolutely dictate who shall be councilmen. At every election they use money freely. Sometimes they become candidates themselves, as, for instance, three years ago when one of the proprietors of one of the largest gambling rooms and himself a faro dealer sat among the ten elected law-makers of the city. No policeman or other peace officer dares to enter these haunts without the permission of the proprietors; and even crimes of violence—short of murder—are not regarded as sufficient justification for a raid.

To say that gambling is the city’s curse is to state the situation mildly. Innumerable instances of blighted lives might be mentioned, the fundamental cause for which is to be found in the abandonment of the victims to this vice, pernicious as it is insidious. Within the comparatively short space of four years, five embezzlements by trusted employes have surprised the community. All the culprits were men of previously unblemished reputations. Five young men of the best families, two of them married, have been convicted of forgery and theft during the past two years, and are now serving their time in the penitentiary, all because of the gambling hells in the city. Three of these men held responsible positions. One was clerk of the United States District Court; one was in the postal money order department; another in the money department of the Pacific Express Company; another in the distributing department of the post-office. Young men visiting the city from neighboring towns and from the country are inveigled into the hells by “steerers” and lose large sums. Not long since a young man, a tax collector of an adjoining county, came to the capital to pay taxes due to the State. He was induced to visit one of the first class houses. He was drugged, and in a 508brace game lost not only his own money, but also that of the State. He returned home and blew out his brains.

It is among the working classes that the gambling mania is working irreparable injury and wrong to innocent women and children. Scores of laboring men, many of them of the better class, waste their earnings on Saturday nights in the keno rooms. Wages are gambled away and women and children go in rags and suffer for the want of food while the gamblers adorn their well-fed, well-dressed persons with diamonds.

There is a law against gambling in Texas, the penalty being a fine of $10 to $100. Three or four times a year the gamblers go into court, plead guilty and pay $10 and costs, amounting to about $37.50, and then continue their games. Two years ago the law was amended by adding imprisonment for from 30 to 60 days for exhibiting or dealing games; but only a few convictions have been had under it, and then the guilty parties were permitted to hire substitutes while the principals returned to their rooms and reopened their games.

In 1849 there was published in Hartford a book entitled, “The History of the Green Family.” It was an expose of the night side (and the worst side) of Hartford life at that time. Its quaint title page describes it as a work “wherein the citizens of Hartford are raked over from Lord’s Hill to Ferry Street.” Incidents, names, dates and localities are mentioned with an attention to detail as surprising as it is pitiless. A vigorous effort was made by the “good people” of the city whose peccadilloes were thus mercilessly exposed to suppress the volume, and at the present time there are only one or two copies in existence. The writer, however, has been permitted to examine one of these, and accorded the privilege of making notes.

Gambling, as a profession, was not at that time carried on to nearly so great an extent as in later years. But the gamester, the blackleg, the men who lived by their wits and fleeced unsophisticated victims were even then known and described. The “Climax,” a locally celebrated gaming house, then flourished on Ferry Street and was kept by “Nels” Hulburt, is mentioned. A bowling alley and a bar were connected with it. All the ordinary games of cards were played, “old sledge” being an especial favorite. “Nels,” or his partner, Weeks, generally took a hand and the “house” did a prosperous business. This resort divided 509with the Clinton House the patronage of nearly all the players, both professional and occasional, among whom are mentioned Caruthers, a man named Judd, and a confidence operator known as Dan Osburn. “Nels” also had a place on Mulbury Street.

Gambling steadily increased in Hartford, attaining the culmination of its popularity during and just after the war. Names and dates can be obtained only through a long and tedious search through court and police records, but the following general statements are made on the authority of a veteran officer, who for more than a score of years has been connected with the Hartford police. From about 1862 till 1877, gaming ran riot. Houses in which large capital was invested were conducted with scarcely a pretense of secrecy, and the profits of the proprietors were enormous. Almost any one who wanted to “do” the city by night could visit in the course of an evening half a dozen places where roulette was in active operation and twice as many where poker and faro were being played. The famous gambler, Pat Sheedy, was a native of Hartford. A perfect gentleman in manners and dress, yet a most reckless player, he was apparently equally content to win or lose a fortune in an evening. His “management” of John L. Sullivan is fresh in the memory of the public, as is also the story of his large winnings at roulette in a Saratoga resort less than a year ago. He occasionally appears in Hartford, and his goings and comings are duly noted in the local press.

But to return to the history. A single incident will show something of the magnitude of the gaming operations in the sixties and early seventies.

A large fire on Temple Street, almost within a stone’s throw of the Police station, during the winter of 1872, burned out an extensive gamblinggambling establishment. The “lay-outs” for faro and roulette were flung out of the window. All the tables, dice boxes, counters, chips, the roulette wheel, etc., were of the most costly description, The police gathered up the debris, and a conservative estimate affixed the value of the property thus sacrificed at $3,000.

From that time the police were more active. Raids became the rule rather than the exception, especially from 1879 to 1886. Two years ago, one of the last important visits by the officers was made, under supervision of Lieutenant Ryan, on a gaming house on Gold Street, kept by a man named McLean, who originally came from Meriden. He was running an extensive faro bank, with a gambling outfit worth about $600.

Not long afterwards a raid was made by the police upon a Chinese opium joint and gambling house on south Main Street, in the Buckingham block. About a dozen of the celestials were arrested, arraigned and convicted of gambling, and two were found guilty of keeping a gaming house. The game in progress at the time was played with dice and was 510a peculiar one. The player deposited any amount of money with the dealer, who gave him a receipt therefor. The game then went on until the bettor’s money was exhausted, or until he had won a stipulated amount, when he was at liberty to withdraw. Slips of cardboard were substituted for chips. There were found three Fan-Tan tables and six opium layouts in this place.

Poker has always been and still is played in Hartford; but not to nearly so great an extent at present as it was a few years ago. For years a game was running in the Times building. A dark, heavily mustached man who called himself Dr. Longley, kept the room. The police got after him and he was obliged to leave rather hastily. The game is played largely in what are popularly known as “club rooms.” However, even those are not doing a very brisk business just now. One can also easily get into a game in several of the fashionable billiard and bar rooms, such as “Mattie” Hewins’, or Dwight Mitchell’s on Main Street; or Frank Avary’s on State Street. Probably the heaviest poker playing in Hartford, however, is carried on at the Hartford Club House, on Prospect Street. This is where the older, wealthier and more aristocratic men play. The organization is a rather select one, and its roll of members includes some of the richest and best known men in town. It is in no sense a gambling house, yet at the same time there is a great deal of heavy betting across the social card tables.

So far as is known there is no roulette played in Hartford at present. The police have been too watchful for these gentlemen to prosper and they have sought other fields.

“Policy” is played to a large extent in the city, and seemingly with but little fear of the law. The head-quarters for this form of gambling is in a little room, opening off the side walk on Front Street. Anyone passing can see through the open door, the black-board on which are posted the numbers at every drawing. James Waldron, formerly of New York, a short, thick-set man, about 40 years of age, is at the head of the operations in Hartford. Besides the place on Front Street, he has another on Gold Street, and yet a third on Asylum Street. In the Front Street place is kept a large flat book, in which is recorded every drawing for the entire year. This is open to the inspection of all players who are permitted to trace in its pages the history of any number throughout the year—i. e. ascertain how many drawings have occurred since it last come first, etc. The numbers are received twice a day by cypher dispatches. Apparently everything is “square,” but the chances are enormously against the player. This is the most popular of all games with the colored population. It would seem as though every member of that race in Hartford played policy. There is also a considerable class of superstitious 511whites who firmly believe in “lucky” numbers. Once in a while some one “strikes” a lucky number, but no considerable amount is ever made.

Charter Oak Park, just outside the city limits, is the scene of the fall race meetings in the grand circuit. Roulette is played on the grounds on these occasions, without the slightest restraint and in full view of the police. The games do an immense business through “race week,” not less than two wheels and five tables were in full blast at a recent meeting.

There is a stock exchange in the city and some speculative operations are carried on, but not to any great extent. Hartford is too near New York to permit of the business being profitable.

On the whole, it may be said, that as compared with fifteen or even ten years ago, there is very little gambling in the city. Professional gamestersgamesters have to “lie low” and keep extremely quiet in Hartford. At the same time, there is, as has been said, considerable poker playing, while probably there are two or three faro banks still in operation. There are no municipal ordinances against gambling, all actions are brought under the State Statutes.

Quebec being a city of only some 60,000 souls, the vice of public gambling has never been able to obtain any very firm foothold. A large amount of money changes hands here every year at games of chance, and amongst the most confirmed gamesters are many of the most prominent citizens. Yet so thoroughly does everybody know his neighbor’s business that no attempt has been made of late years to open and maintain a public gambling resort. Much of the playing for stakes in Quebec takes place in private residences, or in rooms secured for the purpose in the principal hotels and restaurants. In the principal club—the Garrison—gambling of every kind is strictly prohibited and nothing but whist is played.

Banking games are not popular, and faro, roulette and hazard are not played at all. Poker is the prevailing game and of late years, and has taken a strong hold upon the French-Canadian population, who evince an unusual aptitude for it. So long as they have in reserve a fair supply of “chips,” French-Canadian poker players excel at the game of “bluff.” They possess in a remarkable degree the effrontryeffrontry and cool “cheek” necessary to successful poker playing for which they manifest a predilection almost from childhood. Professionals and merchants alike gamble at night at their clubs or at each others residences, and students and clerks, imitating the practices of their employers and elders, assemble for the same purpose in each other’s rooms.other’s rooms. A well-known Canadian politician, confided to the writer that at the early age of ten years he had become 512so infatuated with poker that he used to steal money from his father’s pockets with which to play. The ruin of numerous bank clerks and others formerly occupying respectable positions in the city, may be distinctly traced to this cause.

The principal center of gambling in Quebec is undoubtedly the “Quebec Whist Club,” an institution occupying comfortable quarters over Rogers’ drug store,—the Medical Hall on Fabrique Street. It has been in existence for nearly twenty years past, but has several times removed its location. There is nothing “professional,” however, about this organization. Its name is, of course, simply a cloak for the real object of its existence. It is controlled on a sort of mutual plan by the resident frequenters of the place, and strangers and visitors are only admitted after introduction by a member. The game almost universally played is poker, and the stakes may be either unlimited or for a limit varying from two to five dollars. The game played here is usually “straight,” in the ordinary acceptation of the term, but the older habitues of the place, some of whom have no other visible means of support, are such adepts at the game, and, in the particular species of mind and character reading so essential to a successful player, that unless struck by a particularly hard strain of bad luck, they seldom rise from the table losers at the game should such a misfortune by any chance overtake them. They know only too well, by long experience, that the winners of their money will quickly return to lose it again.again. There are not wanting those who claim to believe that the more experienced of these frequenters of the “club” never play against each other except as a “blind,” but combine to “raise” strangers out of the game and divide their profits. Many well-to-do business men frequent the club, including newspaper proprietors, importers, wholesale merchants, hotel men, piano dealers and jewelers. Few of these, however, continue to play at the resort for year after year, unless in a very occasional way, for the amount of loss eventually sustained by them would either seriously impair their business standing or compel them to abandon the game until they can again legitimately afford to risk further means in playing it.

The number of men who have been wholly or partially ruined by poker in Quebec is large. An ex-member of parliament, formerly a resident of that city, but at present of Montreal, has lost a fortune at the game, frequently dropping as much as $1,500 a night. The continual harvest reaped by the habitual frequenters of the club above mentioned is maintained by the infusion of new blood through the introduction of new members, who are generally selected from among those who are known to be possessed of some means, and of speculative, if not gaming proclivities. If such are not known to be poker players they are, perhaps, invited to the rooms in the first instance, by a friend, for the nominal purpose of 513partaking of refreshments, to which may be added the prospect of enjoying a rubber of whist. The excitement, glitter and attraction of the poker tables are counted upon, and generally correctly, to prove a sufficient temptation to green players to risk a few dollars upon a small limit game, “just for amusement.” The downward course of the visitor, like the descent of Avernus, is thenceforward comparatively easy. Half a dozen members of parliament and as many members of the city council have been counted in these apartments at the same time. Quebec does not by any means supply all the victims. A sharp lookout is kept for visitors with money and gambling tendencies, though occasionally the habitues “catch a tartar,” and get “hoist by their own petard,” through occasionally admitting an unknown blackleg. This does not very often happen, however, as may be easily supposed, in view of the long experience of the older members. They are usually careful, moreover, in admitting only men of prominence or of recognized standing in professions, political or commercial circles, or who are personally known to some of the regular members of the club.

Acquaintances of members who may be guests at the hotels are often visited in the evening and invited to the club, and now quite a number of prominent business and professional men and politicians of Montreal and other cities are frequent visitors when in town. Commercial travelers fall an easy prey and have been repeatedly introduced to the rooms by their Quebec customers. From time to time scores of these young men have been ruined here, rendered desperate by their losses, and stranded “high and dry,” after losing all their own available means, and very often a good deal of which was not theirs as well.

One of the worst features of this club is the large amount of drinking that goes on during the games, spirituous liquors being provided in abundance and to be had for the taking.

An immense amount of money has been lost in Quebec on exchange gambling of various kinds. For some few years past, bucket shop gambling has been a popular pastime with people of wealth, and, unfortunately, often many not possessing the necessary means of their own. So far has this business been run into the ground for some time past, however, that many of the bucket shops have been closed in consequence of the small amount of trade offerings, most of their clients having been entirely ruined. Four or five years ago, fully five times as much fictitious and illegitimate business was done on the Quebec Exchange as of real and bona fide transactions. Even now, a good deal of speculation akin to gambling goes on, such as buying and selling,—going long and short on bank and other shares, corn, wheat, pork, oil, etc.,—all on margins. The volume of such business transacted in the city at present is about equal to that of legitimate dealings.

There have been no public gaming houses in Kansas City since 1882, when the Missouri legislature passed a bill commonly known as the “Johnson Law,” from the fact that ex-Governor Charles P. Johnson was its author. This statute made the keeping of a gaming establishment a felony. The effect of the law was to drive the professional gamblers of Kansas City, Mo., into the adjoining burg of Kansas City, Kas., where they remained unmolested until a comparatively recent date.

The town on the west bank of the river soon became the recognized “haven” for members of the fraternity. The faro banks were clustered together just a few steps across the State line, where they received a liberal patronage from the residents of the Missouri town, who had become as it were, thoroughly saturated with the instincts and habits of the gamester.

The proprietors of the packing houses objected to the location of such establishments within the precincts of their business, because of the convenience of such locations to their employes, who constituted a considerable proportion of the patrons of these “hells.” Among those who remonstrated were the representatives of Armour & Co., who were quick to perceive the disastrous effects which the running of the game was producing upon their business interest. For some years a bitter fight was waged upon this issue. It soon, however, became apparent that the gamblers exercised a controlling influence upon the action of the city and county officers, and the packers abandoned what promised to be a profitless warfare.

The laws of Kansas make the keeping of a gaming house a misdemeanor, and the proprietors were regularly fined—even without the formality of an arrest—a large revenue being thus realized by the city. For many years it was an open secret that the chief of police and prosecuting attorney of Kansas City, Kas., received a regular stipend from the gamblers, the money being paid and accepted in consideration of an uncertain guarantee of immunity.

Public sentiment, however, at length became aroused, and at the municipal election held a few years ago, officers were chosen who were pledged to enforce the laws against gaming.

Before the passage of the Johnson law to which reference has been already made, Kansas City was a veritable Mecca for sporting men. Along in the 70’s—in the palmy days of gambling—when the “wide open,” “everything goes,” policy prevailed there were eleven gaming establishments in the town, all of which were doing a most prosperous business. Stakes were high, and the gain or loss of $10,000 at a single sitting called forth little comment among the sporting fraternity.

515The Johnson law, however, gave the signal for a hegira of gamblers to the western side of the State line, and its enforcement on the Missouri side of the border has been so perfect that openly there has not been a card run from a box, or a turn called since its passage.

In the halcyon days of gambling in Kansas City, the place was filled with men who had rapidly acquired fortunes in the mines of Old and New Mexico, and Colorado, and in the raising and herding of cattle on the plains. Such men flocked here to gamble, and the “professionals” from the far west came and made this town their headquarters in consequence of the number of dupes who had gathered here. The “capitalists” who made Kansas City their headquarters were allured thither by the prospects of “beating” the “banks,” the number of which steadily increased by the constant accession to the ranks of the players.

At the time of the exodus of the gamblers across the State line there were eleven establishments in the city, at three of which “brace” games were played. Faro was the favorite, but “poker,” of the “stud” variety, “roulette,” and “chuck-a-luckchuck-a-luck,” were not neglected. About fifty men were employed in these houses, and each “bank” was supposed to possess a “roll” of about $5,000. At times the game ran high, and $2,000 and $3,000 were often won or lost by a single player.

There are now, just across the State line, seven gambling houses, two of them owned by Clayton L. Maltby, one by Frazier & Baughman, one by Cotton & Kennedy, one by Gus Galbaugh, one by Joe. Bassett, and one by Tom Wallace. These houses are all conducted on the “square” principle, and besides faro, have all the “side” games—roulette, hazard, craps, stud and draw poker. The games open at eight o’clock A. M., and often run until daylight the next morning. They are well patronized, and Saturday and Monday nights the rooms are crowded, Saturday and Monday being pay days at the packing houses, manufactories, and other establishments that pay their men weekly. To give the reader an idea of the amount of money these houses have a chance to win, or rather steal, per month, a statement by C. L. Maltby, the principal “banker” of Kansas City may be mentioned. Mr. Maltby has two houses, and is of a calculating and methodical turn. He desired to know exactly what money was exchanged for checks and played against the faro game at one of his houses within a given time. He employed a man to set at the table, from the time the game opened until it closed for the night, and keep an accurate account of the amount paid in for checks. This was kept up for one month, and the grand total amounted to $63,843.75. This money was mainly “changed in” in small amounts, the purchases ranging from $1 to $50, and one individual, at one time, buying $100 worth of checks. Of course Maltby’s game did not win all this money, 516but the greater part of it found its way into the drawer, and went to swell the bank account of the proprietor.

Among the crowds that throng these rooms you will find the gentleman, the tough, the “Rounder,” and the “Macer.”

The plan pursued by the Kansas City, Kas., authorities to “suppress gambling” is thus described in a daily paper, under date of August 2, 1889:

“Three gambling houses in Kansas City, Kansas, were ‘raided’ by the police last night in the periodical Wyandotte style. The Chief of Police, accompanied by several officers, went to C. Maltby’s place and found thirty or more men gambling. Their names were taken down and the proprietor was required to deposit $10 apiece for his visitors and $100 for himself as security for their appearance in the police court to-day. The police then went away and the gambling was immediately resumed.resumed. At G. F. Frazier’s twenty-six men were playing and the proprietor paid $300 to the officers. This morning Frazier, Galbaugh and Maltby appeared in the police court and were formally fined the amounts they deposited. This is the manner in which gambling houses are, to all intents and purposes, licensed in Kansas City, Kas.”

Although public gaming has been checked in Kansas City, Mo., the amount of private gambling is enormous. At the Midland hotel, the best in the city, where wealthy stock men from the far west make their head-quarters, draw poker is a favorite amusement. It is played, however, with the utmost secrecy, but generally for high stakes. At the rooms of the Kansas City club, and other similar organizations, the same game is indulged in, although the stakes are as a rule comparatively moderate. Perhaps the most deplorable feature of the situation, however, is the alarming extent to which the game of draw poker is played in private houses—even those belonging to the most fashionable and exclusive social circles. It is asserted by those who are competent to speak upon the subject, that the love of play has permeated almost every stratum of society.

Apropos of gambling in Kansas City, the following story of one of the clubs in that place, is told: An Eastern merchant (rumor says that he came from Boston) once found himself a guest at a leading hostelry in that city of dust, hills, and grip cars. Being inclined to play a “little poker,” he inquired of the urbane hotel clerk where he could find a “gentleman’s game.” In due time he was introduced into a private “club room,” where the proclivities of the poker-player might be gratified by a “no limit” game. Of course the frequenters were all “gentlemen;” gentlemen, however, of that peculiarly whole-souled variety who would throw a drowning “sucker” a bar of lead as a life preserver. The man from the “hub” played for several hours, and rose from the table a loser to the amount of about two thousand dollars. He was 517exceedingly wroth, and was fully persuaded that he had been cheated, although he was not able to tell exactly how it had been done. He discharged this Parthian arrow, however, at the crowd, before taking his departure. “Gentlemen,” said he, as he stood before them, hat in hand, “I was assured that I should find this a ‘gentleman’s’ game. You are all gentlemen, and I know it. I appreciate the way in which I have been treated, I appreciate it thoroughly. I’ve got a few dollars left, and if some one of you will be kind enough to tell me where I can sit in a horse-thief’s game, I believe I’ll go around there.”

Buffalo has not been cursed with such a growth of the gambling mania as have some other cities of similar commercial importance and whose floating population has been so transient and so varied. It has never received the implied sanction of public sentiment, as in New Orleans; the gaming resorts of the city lack the luxurious elegance of some of the gilded hells of New York; nor have the blacklegs ever dominated the municipal government to the same extent as in Chicago. Yet the history of the practice of the vice is not destitute of interest, presenting, as it does, a varied succession of alternating ups and downs.

During the decade between 1850 and 1860, Buffalo was known all over the country as a “tough town.” Situated as it was at the Southern point of the chain of great lakes and being the terminus of the Erie canal, it was the natural rallying point of thousands of men belonging to the “rough and ready” class, from which the dens of those drew a majority of their patrons. In those days it was as little condemned by the easy-going citizens as it was interfered with by the authorities. Along the wharves and at the sailors’sailors’ boarding houses, games of chance constituted the principal pastime, among them “penny-ante” (i. e. poker for small stakes) being a prime favorite. Sometimes higher stakes were wagered, and occasionally a faro “lay-out” was improvised.

At present gambling in Buffalo is trivial when compared with the early days of the city’s history, when the lake traffic was the principal source of its growth and the vast fleet of small craft brought hundreds of sailors from the West to compare experiences with canal boatmen from the East. In those early days, Buffalo was full of sporting men of all classes. It was the chosen rendezvous of prize fighters and its proximity to the Canadian border rendered it attractive to that class which for various causes, did not feel safe on American soil.

Such being the state of affairs it is not surprising that gaming rooms multiplied only too rapidly. To use the expression of an old resident, 518“faro rooms, keno rooms, poker rooms, and general gaming rooms, were as thick as sand flies, and ran in all their glory, in full blast day and night, without the slightest attempt being made to put the least check on this fascinating occupation by the authorities, many of whom were as deeply interested in it as the professionals themselves.” Fortunes were made and lost in a day at that time. Money was plentiful and wages good, and Buffalo soon acquired an unenviable reputation, which brought hundreds of unwelcome visitors to the city. That notorious highway, Canal Street, was then in the zenith of its prosperity and debauchery ran riot.

It was just before the war that gambling received a new impetus and the “palmy days” of which old gamblers are fond of speaking, were from 1859 to 1866, when the sports held high carnival. The public pulse was at fever heat, and the excitement which pervaded all classes of the community found a vent in seeking the alluring fascination of the green cloth. Buffalo might boast of several professional gamblers, who were then or subsequently became celebrities of various degrees. Gambling houses were numerous and open.

But as the number of railroads centering in the city increased and a better class of people became residents, public sentiment gradually became aroused, and the blacklegs soon found that the political influence which had formed their chief reliance was beginning to wane. Gamblers came to be looked upon as social outcasts, and the hells were vigorously denounced by the press and from the pulpit. Nevertheless the laws respecting public gaming remained unenforced, and rascals continued to fatten upon the credulity of their victims.

In 1866 the first effective blow was struck at the vice, and it proved the first of a series which finally brought about almost the total extermination of gambling in Buffalo. The Niagara frontier police was organized that year, under a State law, and the loud cry of the better element of the community that the law be enforced was at last heeded. All gaming rooms were ordered closed, and those resorts whose proprietors refused or neglected to comply were promptly raided and the offenders punished. As the police perceived that their efforts were endorsed by public opinion and commended by the press, they grew more and more severe, and gambling entered upon a period of rapid and steady decline. The most stubborn resistance encountered by the authorities was during the annual races, when the city was filled with men who “lived by their wits.”

While the Frontier Police, however, did excellent service in the cause of law and order, they appeared to lack the knowledge necessary to enable them to achieve entire success. Besides this drawback the municipal ordinances applicable to gaming were carelessly drawn, and many of 519the prominent gamblers, through the aid of superior legal advice and the aid of local politicians, were able to evade the penalties meted out to the “smaller fry.”

In 1870, when the Niagara Frontier Police passed out of existence and the Buffalo City Police was organized to replace the constables who had previously done duty, a rigorous policy toward gambling-houses was adopted. Even pool selling at the races was checked, although it was found impossible to put a stop to it altogether, owing to technical imperfections of the law, which afforded loop-holes for escape.

From 1872 to 1878, the city authorities seemed to be determined in their resolutions to suppress the vice. During these half dozen years, the houses were very few; and the proprietors did not dare to openly solicit patronage. The owners were men who enjoyed—for men of that class—a good reputation; that is to say, that as far as a professional blackleg can be “square,” they enjoyed that reputation.

The immediate cause for this renewal of activity on the part of the authorities was to be found in the fact that the gamblers were not only permitting, but even encouraged, young men, clerks, students and even schoolboys to frequent their rooms. Public sentiment was clamorous in its condemnation, and the city government was, in a measure, forced to take the bull by the horns. The practical results of the agitation may be thus summarized: The number of the houses was reduced, only the more respectable professionals were permitted to carry on business; “steerers,” like Othello, found their “occupation gone;” and only avowed gamblers or men who were popularly supposed to be able to lose were permitted to play. In a certain degree, the rooms were under the supervision of the police.

With each change in the city administration, however, came the inauguration of a new policy. Thus, in 1879, the gamblers’ dens were more liberally treated and their business improved, while from 1880 to 1882 the laws were more stringently enforced. In 1883 gambling again enjoyed a “boom,” and for a time threatened to regain its foothold and flourish as in the days of yore. The local government put forth no effort to prevent gaming, and numerous rooms were re-opened. Faro and poker enjoyed a steady patronage, which, however, during the racing season they had to divide with an occasional keno game. The gamblers were encouraged, and openly predicted that gaming was again about to become popular. Public opinion, however, spurred by the perpetration of several embezzlements and minor crimes which were traceable to gambling, brought about a change. Gradually the sporting element found Buffalo a less and less attractive field of operations, until at the present time there is not a faro game in the city, although faro is occasionally dealt outside the city limits at a road resort in the town of Cheektowaga, while gamblers of the 520“skin” variety are said to hold full sway in the town of Tonawanda, about fourteen miles distant.

Poker is still popular in Buffalo, but the men who were the “shining lights” of the fraternity in former years, have either sought “fresh fields and pastures new,” or retired from business to enjoy life. Of the latter class, however, there are but few.

There is, however, a very considerable amount of gambling yet going on which no effort is made to suppress. In the fashionable club houses into whose sacred precincts no agent of the police would ever think of entering, poker is a favorite pastime, and at times stakes run high. The members of these organizations usually belong to the wealthier classes, merchants and professional men predominating. The presence of unintroduced strangers is not permitted, far less, desired. In consequence, to obtain legal evidence of gambling in these houses is difficult, if not well-nigh impossible.

One case, however, was brought to public notice some years ago, which opened the eyes of the public and confirmed a previous suspicion that all was not known of the inner workings of these club houses. The case referred to was that of a reputed millionaire, a manufacturer and a bank president. So far as could be learned, he did not commence gaming until he had reached mature years, but—as in the case of men who do not commence drinking liquor until after they are 30—the infatuation of the habit seizedseized upon him with irresistible force. He yielded to the allurements and was a nightly visitor at the club rooms. What games were played by which this man was ruined, can be better imagined than described, but his losses were heavy and so frequent that in spite of his almost unlimited wealth, the final crash came which nearly ruined the bank of which he was president, and his clothing business was completely wrecked. He was burdened with an extravagant family; his wife was notorious for her weakness in this respect; his sons and daughters were allowed freedom in money matters which made a terrible drain on his income. He was naturally a generous man, genial in disposition and always ready to excuse the failings of others. His generosity was proverbial, owing perhaps to the general opinion held of his class (Hebrews), who are seldom troubled in this way. He was born in this country and became rich by his own efforts. He was of a nervous disposition, and in conversing with him a close observer would notice quick movements which are peculiar to all gamblers. After his financial ruin he became insane and died a physical and mental wreck.

To mention any other names of men of this class might be to do them an injustice, but there are doubtless fifty or sixty “young bloods” who frequent club-house gaming tables. Who they are, no definite idea 521could be arrived at without long and constant watching of these houses, and even then the innocent might suffer with the guilty.

The experience of gambling with municipal authorities is outlined above. Public opinion as a whole, always has opposed gambling in Buffalo, and that it flourished was mainly due to the fact that public opinion is slow to exert itself here, and consequently, careless officials, in the past, were not held accountable for their neglect to suppress the evil. It is hard to say if the gamblers have ever been protected through the bribery of the police or other officials, but one thing is certain that in thethe history of gambling, money has never been demanded from gamblers by officials, except in two or three alleged instances; proof of which, however, was never forthcoming.

The list of Buffalo’s gamblers numbers men who, in the “good old days” of gambling were famous throughout the country and who acquired wide reputations, principally for skill as gamblers or for their character or peculiarities. Among the pioneers of gambling in Buffalo, was William Carney, better known as “Gentleman Bill,” or plain “Bill.” Carney was a Buffalonian of good family, who began his career as a gambler when quite young. At the age of 20 he was known as one of the most expert dealers of faro in the country, and all his life he was noted for his suave manners and nerve under all circumstances. Carney made a fortune and, like many of his fellows, died poor. For 40 years or more he ran the principal gambling den in Buffalo, and his rooms were the resort for the most noted gamblers in America. Faro was the game most played, and among Carney’s customers were men who 30, 20, or 15 years ago, were looked upon as Buffalo’s foremost citizens and prominent business men. Judges, lawyers and city officials are said to have frequented Carney’s rooms and he often related that, when gambling was at its zenith, he threw away the key of the door and “everything went.” Carney was a thorough gentleman in manners, a fascinating story teller and a great lover of prize-fighting and other sports. He was a professional gambler and not until a few years ago did he condescend to play poker to any extent; faro was his game and both the single and double box were used in his rooms. The writer knew Carney intimately for several years, and can testify to his good qualities. He was generous, and no man ever asked him for aid who did not get it, if he was worthy. Carney’s greatest enemy was himself, and of late years, his passion for liquor, coupled with the reckless conduct of his two sons, gradually brought about his ruin. His health failed and rheumatism and dissipation caused his death a few months ago.

522The name of Timothy Glassford stands among the foremost of professional gamblers in the United States. He was, excepting Carney, probably the oldest professional gambler worthy the title in Buffalo. For 40 years or more he maintained an elegantly furnished house and dealt faro to the city’s “best and most prominent citizens,” as they were recognized by the general public. Glassford was the only gambler who was at any time a power in politics and he is credited with having exerted considerable influence not only in local but in State politics. Glassford made a fortune which at one time was estimated at $200,000 (about 1867). He died a few years ago leaving an estate worth $80,000, which includes three stores on Main and Eagle Streets. This estate, or the larger portion of it will go to a son. Glassford was well educated, spoke several languages and is said to have prospered because he was an ardent student of human nature. His reputation is that of an expert at faro dealing, a great bluffer at poker, and his games are said to have been square.

“Oat” Forrester, is another of Buffalo’s old-time gamblers. In his day he was the dude of the fraternity and took great pride in being faultlessly but neatly dressed. At times he wore diamonds worth $30,000, and he seldom paid less than $75 for a suit of clothes. He kept a faro room which was much frequented by young bloods. As a rule his games were square though the brace game was played at intervals, especially during race week. ForresterForrester about 20 years ago was worth probably $25,000. His health failed and he bought a house at Fort Erie, Ontario, where he lived until about four years ago, when he removed to Chicago, and is now said to be living with a daughter, financially ruined and dependent upon others.

“Pige” or “Judge” Darling was another Buffalo faro player of note. He was a distinguished-looking man at middle age, and a brilliant conversationalist. He played at various rooms, was a large winner but a spendthrift.

James McCormick is another who some years ago was one of Buffalo’s notables. Naturally a gambler he was for several years successful in “hitting” faro. Finally with a few hundred dollars he drifted West and then to Chicago and New York. To-day he is known throughout the country as owner of one of the celebrated strings of trotting horses, which yearly win for him considerable money. It is said that McCormick gambles occasionally.

Adam Clark, an English Jew, was a noted gambler. He owned a large tract of land on Main Street, until recently run as a pleasure resort and known as “Spring Abbey.” There is a brick dwelling there, in which he used to preside over faro and poker games. It is said that Clark catered only to the rich and that a “brace” or dishonest game was never played in his rooms. In 1860, Clark probably was worth $100,000, but 523through illness, his affairs were neglected and at his death his estate was so involved that lawyers got the lion’s share. Curiously the property, for years the home of the gambler, is now the “Home for the Friendless.” Clark’s credit among gamblers, bankers and merchants was good and he could borrow thousands, giving only his oral promise to pay. A Buffalo ex-gambler states that Clark never failed to pay a debt and that several times he was loaned $5,000 or $10,000, and on one occasion $15,000 for which his note was not asked—his simple word of honor being sufficient security. Clark was charitable and it is said that he gave to needy institutions, etc., on an average $2,000 a year.

There lives in Buffalo a man who was and is to-day in knowledge and skill one of the most expert gamblers in America. His early life was devoted to gambling. An elegant home was his gaming den, and his guests enjoyed substantial and costly luncheons and the best of wines as a part of his entertainment.entertainment. An iron will, always cool and quiet, winning manners, with skill at cards such as is only acquired by one possessing great mathematical talent, made him an expert and won him a national reputation. He retired several years ago, and is now engaged in real estate transactions. It is estimated that he is worth from $250,000 to $300,000.

Reed Brockway was also famous. He began his gambling career in Buffalo, lived there until a few years ago when he went West, it is believed to Chicago. He played faro well, was a “dressy” gambler, and a man of high intellectual qualities. It is said that he could keep the run of cards in faro better than any gambler who ever played in America, and picked out and played heavy sums on winning cards with remarkable success. It is related that in 1867, with but six cards in the box, he played $1,500 on a king, naming it as the last winning card, and made a side bet of $500 that his calculation was correct. He won $2,000 in about four minutes, and half an hour later had spent $200 for wine and cigars.

Oliver, or “Ol” Westcott, another Buffalo gambler, was famous as a “plunger.” He played to win all or lose all. If the “bank” would permit he frequently played from $1,000 to $5,000 on a single card. He is credited with winning $60,000 in two months, after which event the dealers throughout the country placed a limit not higher than $5,000 on games in which Westcott played. He amassed a fortune aggregating about $75,000, but when last heard of, ten years ago, he had taken to liquor, lost nearly all of his wealth, and was running a small game in Colorado.

Of a semi-professional class little need be said. They have been generally poker players who played wherever and whenever there was a dollar to be made. Their history and characteristics may be expressed in few words—unscrupulous; but two or three with any degree of character or amount of money, and all “skin” gamblers.

524From the inception of gambling in Buffalo to the present time the largest amount invested in a gambling den, in the “bank,” and exclusive of building and furniture, has been $25,000. It is estimated that in the best days the capital directly invested by gamblers aggregated not over $125,000, while indirectly they had at command from other gamblers or merchant friends probably $100,000 more. Glassford, Clark and Carney ran the most expensive houses. During the war time their running expenses ranged from $1,500 to $3,500 per week. It is stated that Carney once paid James McCormick $1,000 and a percentage for dealing faro. The profits, as a rule, were varied, ranging from $5,000 to $20,000 a week during 1860-65 and falling to an average of $1,500 in 1869-70, and to from $500 to $1,000 from 1870 to 1873.

The relation of gambling to the criminal and political history of the city has been comparatively unimportant. The effect has been contrary to that experienced in other large cities. A search of police records and careful inquiry of old gamblers fails to show that a murder, or very serious assault, ever occurred in a professional gaming house. Small rows in poker rooms, or in saloons connected with gambling rooms, and raids of gamblers, constitute the affairs chargeable directly or indirectly to gambling rooms—a remarkable record.

One of the earliest forms of gambling in Buffalo, and one which it seems almost impossible for the authorities to reach, and which is indulged in by hundreds daily, is policy playing. Old gamblers tell of policy shops existing thirty years ago and, as a general rule they were then patronized by the same class of men identical with those of to-day; that is, chiefly barbers, colored coachmen, and small storekeepers. Mingled with these are a number of small salaried clerks. There are two policy companies who have agents in Buffalo. One is known as the Frankfort company and the other the Kentucky company. Both companies are old and wealthy, their headquarters being in the State of Kentucky, one in Louisville and the other in Frankfort. They have two daily drawings, one in the morning and the other in the afternoon, and the results are telegraphed all over the country to their agents. The attitude of the law and the police toward this mode of gambling is just as severe as in any other kind of gambling, and if a shop is located it is instantly raided, and the offenders are taken before the police magistrate. Here the police work ends, and sad to relate, ends almost in a fizzle. The present police magistrate is a declared friend to the policy players, and when it is possible the offenders get off free. When the evidence is too strong against them to admit of such a move, a light fine is imposed, invariably the minimum the law allows, which is $5.00. This fine is paid by the policy company in whose employ the agent is at the time of his arrest. If it should be a regulation shop keeper he pays the minimum fine of $25, and with 525but few exceptions this fine never goes above that figure. Public sentiment seems to condemn it and there is now a growing cry against it which will sooner or later make matters mend.

Policy as now run is anything but a square deal with its victims. There are 75 numbers issued each day by the head office. They are sent to the agents here, who are either barbers or saloon keepers. Some have small rooms in unfrequented alleys or lanes, but of the latter class there are very few now. The policy buyer chooses his numbers in many different ways. Some who have been inveterate followers of this mode of gambling rely on dreams, others depend on some little incident by which certain numbers are brought to their mind, some shake dice, and there are a thousand different ways in which the policy gambler guesses the lucky number. When he pays for them he pays anywhere from five cents to ten dollars a number, as his pocket money will allow; it makes no difference to the agent. When the result of the drawings are made known the lucky numbers are printed on the slips of paper, and if any one of the numbers held by the buyer appears three times in the list he wins ten times the amount he pays for his number. Policy agents of this city are few, but what are termed “bookmakers,” or solicitors are about thirty in number. These men are virtually sub-agents, and are salaried. It is estimated that about $600 a day is spent in Buffalo in this game. One of the principal agents here is a colored man named Frank Prince, a man well along in years who has a small room on Center street. He has been arrested and fined at least twice a month during the year 1889, but his fine of $25 is always promptly paid, and he has never pleaded anything but guilty to the charge when arraigned in the police court. Prince is a lower type of the negro race, of a burly figure and rough in manner.

There have been about one hundred cases of policy in the police court during the nine months of the year 1889, and fines averaged $10 in each case. Winners in policy are few and far between, but there seems to be a sort of mania for it among a certain class, which grows stronger the longer they deal in it. With some business men it becomes a hobby, which they fall into in a quiet and almost unconscious manner, but it is seldom played by any but men of small means, in fact, it is impossible to learn of a single case where a wealthy man has been known to buy policy tickets. Bookmakers can generally be found in saloons and concert halls, and around theater entrances. The regular buyer is quick to discover his business, and his purchase is made quietly and almost secretly. Detectives are constantly on the watch for these transactions, and should any mysterious movement be made by two men on the street, which would give rise to the suspicion that they were policy men, they are carefully shadowed until caught. After once being caught they are interviewed 526by the officials, and ever after made objects for surveillance. Thus in a certain measure they are fugitivesfugitives and outcasts from all society. Still, their calling is a lucrative one, often netting the bookmaker $15 a day the year around, and they become wealthy in time. Bookmakers are generally heavy buyers themselves. As a class of men they are of a roving disposition, and high livers. Nearly all have a hang-dog expression on their faces. They take their arrest coolly, and seem indifferent to the whole matter. They are seldom hard drinkers, their calling requiring them to be constantly on the alert, and exceedingly cautious in all their dealings.

The Louisiana Lottery has thousands of victims in Buffalo. Within the past two years three large prizes have been drawn by Buffalonians and these winnings have stimulated and doubled the sale of tickets. Information obtained from some of the 12 agents of the lottery in Buffalo and the representatives of the express companies indicates that from 10,000 to 15,000 tickets are sold in Buffalo every month, representing the investment of from $10,000 to $12,000.

The church fair is a frequent occurrence in Buffalo. Recently a fair was held for one week, the proceeds of which have been devoted to paying the floating debt on Music Hall. There were offered 1,500 prizes, the bait consisting of $1,000, $500 and $100 in gold, an $800 piano, and the rest of the prizes being pictures, barrels of flour and cement, etc. The entertainments offered were upon the drawing of prizes, and drew a crowd of 40,000 and upward nightly. The tickets sold for $1, and entitled the buyer to three admissions to the hall and a chance—one in nearly 50,000—to draw a prize. About 48,000 tickets were sold and the fair netted $46,000. Since then, say the lottery agents, their sale of tickets has largely increased.

It seems strange—or rather, it would seem strange were it not so common an experience—that citizens who profess to be, and no doubt are, sincerely opposed to lotteries on principle, should indirectly give them moral and material aid and support by lending their countenance to schemes of this nature. The support of church and other raffles, gotten up in aid of charity or of gift enterprises, undertaken for any purpose, however worthy, can be justified only by a species of moral casuistry. The altar does not “sanctify the gift,” and the line of moral demarcation between the lottery for benevolence and the lottery for gain, is rather shadowy. The inherent scruple as to buying chances having been removed, it is but one step farther, and that a short one, to the lottery office and the policy shop.

Before the war there was comparatively little public gaming at St. Paul. The city was occasionally visited by professionals, but the latter usually considered that the then infant metropolis was hardly worth the expenditure of much time or money. Once in a while one of the guild would accompany a victim to the Minnesota capital, in order that he might “pluck” him at his leisure. As a rule, however, the Mississippi steamboats formed the chief theatre of their operations, it was a rare occurrence that they penetrated so far into the Northwest. On the boats the play was universal, from the elegantly attired gamester whose diamond stud flashed prismatic colors, which were reflected from the lights of the chandeliers of the cabin, to the flannel-shirted individual who contented himself with fleecing the crew and second-class passengers upon the main deck. The river craft proved a much more remunerative field for sharpers, and, as has been said, the citizens of St. Paul enjoyed immunity from their presence.

The inborn love for gaming which seems to be found in nearly every human breast, found its gratification in the back-rooms of saloons and in a few club-rooms, entrance to which was denied to all but members. The “shining lights” of the profession were absent, and games were played for only small stakes, although even in those days there were a few local gamblers who gained some little notoriety during the early years of the war. But after 1865, they seemed to have disappeared from public view, some of them becoming retail liquor dealers, others farmers, and yet others migrating to remote localities. Some of them, however, are still residents of St. Paul, and are fairly well-to-do. Their former sins have been forgotten and their past record is known only to a few pioneer settlers, the result being that they are looked upon to-day as respectable members of society.

After the war public gaming began to flourish, and soon increased to such an extent that between 1872-4 there were lively times in and around the capitol. The Union Pacific had been completed and the Northern Pacific commenced. Thousands of laborers of all nationalities who had been thrown out of employment along the line of the Union Pacific flocked to the Northwest where the contractors for Henry Villard’s Transcontinental Line were glad to avail themselves of their services. With these laborers came a horde of hungry, desperate gamblers, men with the instincts and ferocity of wild beasts, having no regard for the sanctity of human life, who set law and order absolutely at defiance. The desperadoes did not stay long at St. Paul; turning their faces Westward they advanced along the line of the Northern Pacific, their march keeping pace with the run of the rails along the highway of commerce. Among the best known were Cole Martin, Jack O’Neill, Dave Mullin, “Shank” 528Stanfield and Dan Shumway. They made their headquarters at a saloon kept by one Dave Crummy. They have entirely disappeared from view, and it is probable that most of them have “passed in their last checks.” They fought with each other as readily as with their victims, and, one after another have been killed off.

The circumstances of the killing of Dan Shumway by “Shank” Stanfield at Moorhead in 1872 illustrates the character of these gamblers. Bad blood had existed between them for some time, and a shooting had been expected at any moment. Stanfield had been playing all night, and was about to take an early morning drink in a bar-room, when Shumway came in, drunk and quarrelsome. Instantly, Stanfield started from the saloon to procure a pistol. As he was passing through the door he was fired upon by his enemy. He quickly made his way to his own apartment and soon returned with a revolver in each hand. Then the two began shooting at each other with great rapidity. Stanfield took his position behind a pile of packing boxes within easy range, and Shumway soon fell with one bullet in his hip and another in his side. Wounded as he was, he dragged himself painfully along the ground toward his adversary, leaving a bloody trail behind him and firing as he proceeded. But before the miserable wretch could reach Stanfield a bullet had found lodgement in a vital spot and the dying desperado rolled over, clenching his weapon in his hand with all the rigidity of a death grasp. The other gambler was badly wounded but, perhaps unfortunately for the community at large, recovered.

Such were the men who made a hell upon earth of Brainerd, Moorhead, Irontown, and a dozen other points along the line of the Northern Pacific railway. Only one of the horde appears to have returned, and to-day few would recognize in Guy Salisbury, the Evangelist, one of the band who maintained a reign of terror at Irontown.

With the extermination of this class, gambling became more orderly and violence was of less frequent occurrence. The law-abiding element in St. Paul gradually compelled the fraternity to adopt quiet methods of running their games and to seek the seclusion of private rooms. Still, at the present time, gambling is extensively carried on in the city, although it seldom appears upon the surface, except in a few instances which will be mentioned below. At the same time it is a notorious fact that, unless in the cases of a few misguided interlopers who have neglected to “square” themselves with the “powers that be,” no gambler is ever arrested or a gaming resort raided by the city police. There are ten or a dozen regular hells located in the very heart of the city, a description of some of which may prove of interest.

The most prominent and prosperous is the “Turf Exchange,” run by a well-known sporting man named Frank N. Shaw. Associated with 529him in the conduct of this establishment are generally believed to be several citizens who occupy good positions in society, and pose as respectable members of the community. One or two of the suspected parties hold positions of trust under the city government and if they did their duty would suppress the place instead of abetting it. The “Turf Exchange” is known as a pooling room. Pools are sold there on horse races, boat races, ball games, prize fights, elections, and any and all other turnings which offer a chance for a wager. The patrons of the establishment are for the most part clerks from stores and offices, mechanics, and others who work for stipulated wages. Bets are accepted for any sum from $1.00 upward. A favorite method of losing money here is that known as “making combinations.” That is, naming the winners in three horse races, or other sporting events which occur on one and the same day. If a man is lucky enough to hit upon precisely the winning combination, the proprietor pays him heavy odds, but it is readily seen that his chances for so doing are disproportionately small. During the base ball season this resort is crowded by day and night, and a considerable force of telegraph operators is employed in receiving the reports which come in over the wires, and the services of a large staff of assistants is needed in checking up the results on the boards, in selling pools, and keeping the books. The yearly net profits of the Exchange are said to exceed $40,000.

It is only the initiated, however, who are aware that immediately above the pool rooms a gambling hell is in full blast. The up-stairs den is well furnished and the games played include faro, roulette, poker, the wheel of fortune, dice, etc. Not many months ago two fast young men of St. Paul claimed to have lost $1,500 and $1,800, respectively, in this place. They brought suit against Shaw to recover the money. As nothing has been heard of the proceedings since their institution, rumor says that the action has been quietly settled out of court.

Little more than a year ago the pool room was victimized by some adroit sharpers who tapped the telegraph wires, and by withholding messages for a few minutes were enabled to make bets which proved disastrous to the proprietors of the institution. The Western Union was suspected of complicity in the scheme, but a careful watch failed to reveal any crookedness on their part. The tapped wire was finally located, and the plan was found to have been originated by a man whose reputation as a professional “crook” has earned for him the insertion of his photograph in a prominent position in every rogues’ gallery in the country. Strange as it may seem, the sufferers made no effort to bring the sharper to justice. They even shielded him at the time, and are supposed to have protected him from arrest upon a requisition from the governor of Indiana, by giving him secret information. Of course such information could be obtained only from an official source, and one of the city officers who is believed to 530have an interest in the pool room stands very close to the quarter from which the knowledge might have been had.

Next to the pool room, the gambling establishment which enjoys the largest patronage is that known as Sherwin’s rooms, situated over a saloon on East Seventh Street. Not many years ago one of the proprietors of this place found it convenient to absent himself from St. Paul, owing to his alleged connection with a brawl in which a man lost his life. When public indignation had cooled down, through some mysterious influence brought to bear on the authorities, the genial gamester was allowed to return, and is at present plying his former vocation without molestation.

Not many months since, a desperate affray occurred in those rooms in which a white man was dangerously stabbed. The affair was brought to the notice of the authorities, but no steps were taken to punish the assailant or to close the place. The injured man was an employee of the city, and, in the slang of the streets, “stood in with the gang.” He was easily persuaded not to prosecute the negro, for the reason that such a step on his part would call public attention to the existence of the gambling hell and compel the police to take some action, “for when the ball is once set rolling, you cannot tell when it will stop, you know.” Nearly all the ordinary games of chance are played at Sherwin’s.

In connection with the establishment, refreshments are sold, and if a player should win any considerable sum he is at once surrounded by the harpies, male and female, who urge him to expend his winnings in wine and liquors, and make “a good fellow” of himself. In this way a large percentage of the money lost at the tables is again taken in by the proprietors over the bar.

Another well-known gambling hell is Banigh’s European Hotel, where the usual games are carried on.

Besides the places already mentioned, there are a number of dives of a low character, scattered about the city. Nearly every central thoroughfare contains at least one. Their location is known to every man about town, and it is idle to suppose that the police are ignorant of their existence. On Minnesota Street gambling dens of the lowest description flourish, for the accommodation of the colored population, and where “crap shooting” is the favorite amusement. The police have recently found it necessary to close one of the most disreputable of these resorts, because of the frequency of dangerous brawls which occurred there.

If the category of the gaming resorts above given comprised the whole story of gambling in St. Paul, the tale would not materially differ from that which might be related of nearly every large city. But places of the character described do not constitute one-tenth part of the number of gaming resorts in the city. Out of all the hotels in St. Paul, there are only one or two where gambling is prohibited, and in which the proprietors do 531not knowingly rent rooms for gaming purposes. These rooms are usually occupied by professionals, who are guests at the hotels, but whose character is well known. Faro and poker are the games most commonly played, and sometimes stakes run up to a considerable amount.

The saloons swell the list of places where this vice is practiced. The bar room which does not permit card playing for money in its back room is a rarity, and sometimes games of no little magnitude are played at these places. When the police are questioned as to the existence of gambling in the city, they invariably reply that they are not aware of its existence within the corporate limits. And while there is no evidence to prove that they do actually know that practices of the sort described are being carried on, to believe that they are ignorant is too severe a strain upon the credulity of the average citizen.

In private clubs there is much gaming and the stakes are often high. It appears, however, to be beyond the police powers conferred by the existing laws to put a stop to this species of gaming. The mania seems to have infected every grade of society from the highest to the lowest. “All sorts and conditions of men” gamble. Young merchants, confidential clerks, trusted book-keepers, wage workers of all descriptions, and even school boys. Men of religious professions form no exception, and a church member is by no means a rara avis at the tables.

No form of gambling is so universally popular or so widely patronized as the Louisiana State Lottery. The head quarters for the State of Minnesota are located in St. Paul. The manager employs a fair sized clerical force to assist him in the distribution of tickets, which are scattered broad-cast wherever it is believed that there is a possibility of their sale. Almost every saloon has a lottery agent, and these men are allowed from 2½ to 7 per cent on their sales. A large proportion of the people who buy these tickets are regular purchasers, and make an investment (usually a permanent one) of from $1.00 to $10.00 every month. Bona fide instances of winning through this species of gambling are exceedingly rare.

The institution, like the gambling dens which curse the city, is also run under cover of the official mantle. About a year ago, an effort was made to break up the business through the indictment of the manager and his assistants by the grand jury of Ramsey County. A number of witnesses were subpoened, but when they were called upon to testify it was discovered that they had been conveniently got out of the way. In consequence, the investigation dropped and anyone who wished to waste his money in a vain attempt to secure a capital prize finds no difficulty in purchasing the ticket which he may select.

The “bucket shop,” pure and simple, is unknown in St. Paul. There is more or less speculative trade in “futures and combinations,” 532but the total amount is insignificant as compared with the volume of legitimate business—probably at a rough estimate, not exceeding $2,000,000 annually.

Minnesota is not dissimilar to other States of the Union in respect to gambling, but, unlike other Western States and territories, it has achieved an enviable reputation. This is due to two causes, the character of its population, and the nature of its resources and industries. Census statistics show that the greater proportion of the inhabitants are either of Scandinavian or New England descent, neither race of which has, at any time, shown any pronounced disposition to gamble. Possibly this may be accounted for by considerations of climate and geographical location, inducing conditions of life that inculcate lessons of rigid economy and teach the true value of money.

Minnesota being essentially an agricultural State, those incentives to gamble have been lacking which seemed part and parcel of the development of other Western States where mining and “flush times” went hand in hand; where money came easily and went rapidly.

Minneapolis, one of the two chief cities of the State, has always been and yet is the “head centre” of whatever gambling is done in the commonwealth. There, it has always been conducted more on the plan of a regular business enterprise than in the majority of cities throughout the United States; in fact, it has been and is now a complete monopoly, a trust on a small scale, and, like other trusts, it trusts nobody.

Minneapolis is a young town. Its phenomenal growth in the last decade has been marvelous, and one is not surprised to learn that the gambler of Minneapolis, the village, is the gambler of Minneapolis, the thriving city. Gaming has existed under both Democratic and Republican administrations, and politics can be said to have cut little figure in the calculations of the gamblers. It was merely a question whether it should be conducted openly or behind closed doors; whether the general public, or only certain persons, be permitted to cross the threshold and enter the apartments sacred to the use of King Faro, his aids and satellites. The answer to this question has been generally given in accordance with the personal sympathies or political obligations of the city executive.

As previously mentioned, gambling in Minneapolis has always been a monopoly. This monopoly has been known, in the parlance of the town, as the “combination.” This nomenclature saves time and the bother of mentioning the gamblers by name, every one knowing who are meant.

This combination started some years ago and first consisted of Pat Sullivan, an old soldier, and John Flanagan. A little later on, these were joined by Frank Shaw, Mike Shelley, and William Tanner, better known as “Col.” Bill Tanner. Shaw, however, only remained a member a few months. Before the forming of the combination, Flanagan and 534Sullivan conducted establishments which embraced all known gambling games and devices, and were believed to be conducted strictly “on the square.” This was during the administration of Mayor John De Laittre. That official had spasmodic fits of morality, sporadic attacks as it were, in consequence whereof, Messrs. Sullivan and Flanagan ran the place very quietly, though every now and then the police authorities would make a raid, the tangible result of which was to show that portion of the population which would otherwise have remained ignorant that gambling still existed in Minneapolis, and could be only suppressed or exterminated through the efforts of a zealous mayor, backed by a marvellously acute force of police and detectives.

Mayor Rand allowed the games to be conducted quietly, and did not interfere as long as no complaint of “brace” playing was made.

Under the rule of Mayor A. A. Ames, a fanatic on the question of personal liberty and the right of a man to do as he pleased, irrespective of the rights of the remainder of the community, gambling was conducted “wide open,” with no restrictions save those placed upon it by the gamblers themselves. It was too wide open to suit the majority of the conservative voters and that large element which, though liberal-minded, had some respect for decency and some regard for outward appearances; and at the next election, Mr. George S. Pillsbury, a member of the famous firm of millers and brother of the Governor, was elected mayor, defeating Mayor Ames by a decisive majority.

Under his rule a complete transformation took place. It was from one extreme to the other; the difference between Cimmerian darkness and the bright glare of the noonday sun, could not be more marked than the revolution that occurred in the administration of municipal affairs, and the city was governed on the plan of a small New England village. Square gambling was prohibited, but a notorious brace game was in full blast during the entire Pillsbury administration.

Mr. Pillsbury was a candidate for re-election on the strength of the record made in the cause of pure morals, but he was ignominiously beaten by Dr. Ames. Upon the election of the latter, the change resembled the oscillation of the pendulum from one extremity of its arc, to the other. It was one extreme to the other. Ames proceeded again to enforce his peculiar views on personal liberty. His previous administration had been peculiarly objectionable to the orderly and law abiding citizens, who set about devising methods to check the scheme of “throwing the town wide open.”

Right here a word of explanation concerning the power and authority of the mayor, is essential in order that a proper understanding of the matter may be reached. Under every administration down to the last one of Dr. Ames, the mayor was the head of the municipal government, 535possessing supreme authority over the police officials, whom he could appoint and dismiss at his own sweet will, without let or hindrance. It can be easily perceived how this privilege might be abused and the power perverted, if not prostituted to unlawful ends. Thus the whole machinery of the law was under the control of one man, resulting in a veritable despotism on a small scale, under which one person, the mayor, was the important factor for good or for evil in the city.

Gamblers, saloon-keepers, and the sporting classes generally, welcomed his election with one accord. City ordinances regulating liquor selling, were to be calmlycalmly and quietly, but no less surely ignored. And they were. The result was a saturnalia of crime. Saloons ran all night if so minded and customers demanded it. The gambling houses were in full blast, and the city swarmed with thieves, fakirs and blacklegs of every description, from smooth adventurers of the Traylor and Post pattern, down to the petty shell worker and flimflam fellow. It was time to call a halt.

As it so happened the state legislature was in session, and it was determined by good citizens, irrespective of political affiliations, to go before that body and pray for relief. After much consultation, a bill providing for the appointment of a police commission, consisting of two members from each dominant party, with the mayor as ex-officio member, was formulated. The bill was passed by both houses, and became a law through the Governor’s signature. Under its provisions the appointing power was conferred upon the council, and well-known citizens received the honor of serving as members. This act left the mayor shorn of power and authority. The police commission ruled and decided whether city ordinances should be enforced or not; the same body controlled the police, and decency once more ruled. At a recent session, the legislature amended the bill by reducing the number of the police commissioners to two, outside of the mayor, who still remained an ex-officio member. Nevertheless gambling has existed, and still exists, no matter what the political complexion of the city administration may have happened to be.

With this brief introduction it is only necessary to give a condensed history of the games and devices that have flourished in Minneapolis, the object of whose proprietors has been to lure money from those, who, it must be admitted, would have liked to acquire wealth by means far removed from honest toil and labor.

At all the houses here have run the usual games ordinarily conducted in so-called first-class gambling rooms; that is to say, faro bank, roulette, stud poker, and hazard, with various short card games. Faro bank is king. Its legitimate percentage in favor of the bank is of course responsible for its large following of devotees, and the great majority of players make their way to that table immediately upon entering the halls. 536A “tenderfoot,” who was playing against a brace game out West, chanced to inquire what limit would be given him. The reply was “from John Smith’s green cloth to the blue sky of heaven.” This limit it may be remarked en passant, was somewhat liberal, but in view of the kind of game that was being dealt the proprietor could afford to let a man place his money freely. In Minneapolis it has been slightly different, the limit being generally placed at fifty to doubles, and twenty-five to cases. Occasionally a well-known player who was known to be possessed of plenty of funds has been allowed two hundred and a hundred. This, however, may be called the exception rather than the rule. The play against faro bank has always been fairly steady, with the houses winning in the long run. Comparatively few heavy losses or winnings have ever occurred in Minneapolis. Dink Davis, Pat Sheedy, and other celebrated high rollers have rarely visited the city. The only heavy loss suffered was in the old house at 205 Nicollet Avenue, when Frank Shaw, Flanagan and Sullivan were the main proprietors in 1887. This may scarcely be called a legitimate losing, but rather the result of what some gamblers would call a bit of sharp practice. The house had only been running in full blast for a few months. Everything was wide open, in the heyday of Mayor Ames’ administration. Among the dealers employed was Mr. Harrington, a very good all around gambler, and withal a first-class artist. Harrington was well liked by his employers, who thought highly of his capabilities, and had perfect confidence in his honesty, so far at least as they were concerned. But as events proved they were mistaken. Mr. Harrington had a particular friend, one Mr. Hayes, who gambled on the outside strictly, and was known as a hard faro bank player. These two smooth gentlemen, it is said, put their heads together and concocted a plot, which was in brief that Harrington should “throw off” the game to Hayes. The scheme worked to a charm, and Mr. Hayes’ luck became proverbial among those that were leading the gay life of a sport. Matters ran along for some little time, and it was not until the game was some $10,000 loser that the house management began to suspect that there might possibly be something wrong, or in gamblers’ parlance “an African in the woodpile.” A quiet investigation ensued, and it was not long before the chair that knew Mr. Harrington, knew him no more, forever. Then it was that the erstwhile familiar faces of Messrs. Harrington and Hayes became as shadows of the past, though ever and anon their forms would rise like Banquo’s ghost to haunt the Macbethian forms of the combination that had heard that there was honor among gamblers. But Harrington has paid for his duplicity in this instance, as the better class of gamblers utterly refuse to have anything to do with him, and he stands a fair chance of being forced to earn an honest livelihood by working at his trade—that of a compositor.

537Next to faro bank, in point of attraction, is roulette. Watching the ball go round has a certain grim fascination for a great many people—and then it is quick action for your money; nervous people are not compelled to wait in suspense to know whether they lose or win. A simple twist of the wrist, the little ivory is whirling around and around until it stops in one of the many compartments—red or black, or in the fatal zeros that sweep the board. But still the number of devotees at its altar is not large. In fact, in the whole town there are not half a dozen men who prefer roulette to faro, provided that they have any considerable amount of money. Those with only a few dollars in their possession play it in order to get a stake to play faro. A journalist here, and part proprietor of one of the daily papers, is the only individual that has achieved any notoriety in this direction. It was no unusual thing for him to win or lose a thousand dollars at a sitting. This sort of play is, however, exceptional, the majority of players against the wheel scarcely having funds enough to buy a stack of white checks.

Next in order of popularity come hazard and stud poker. The former is chiefly patronized by beginners, and the latter by that numerous class of men who consider themselves a little wiser than their fellows. Neither the greenhorn nor the player who is wise in his own conceit takes into consideration the enormous odds in the one game, or the large “rake off” in the other, regulated only by the conscience (?) of the dealer, and his knowledge of just what the players will stand. Therefore the harvest is ripe and is quickly garnered. Hazard has never been much of a favorite, the play being scarcely extensive enough to meet expenses; while on the other hand, the stud poker tables have always been well patronized. The short card games in these public rooms were usually played by professional gamblers for the sake of whiling away a few hours, with just a sufficient monetary consideration to vary the tedium and monotony.

The above statements apply to every gambling house that has been ever run in the city, conducted strictly on the square. But, asas in all other trades and professions, there are grades. The habitues and customersand customers of one establishment seldom visited any of the others, and in the most exclusive resort, that at 219 Hennepin Avenue, the common crowd were refused admittance by the colored servitor that guarded the door. At least good clothes and the appearance of a gentleman were necessary to effect an entrance into this particular lair of the tiger.

But passing mention must be made of one establishment that flourished under the highly moral Pillsbury administration, and was permitted to continue unmolested, while other houses were compelled either to close up or run in such a furtive way that a search warrant was almost a necessity in order to find the haunts of the animal. This place was and is known to all sports, thieves, confidence men, and blacklegs generally, 538throughout the length and width of the United States. It is designated as the “Elite,” and is located on Nicollet Avenue! To the uninitiated and the casual observer it is simply a saloon, and a very good saloon at that. But up-stairs was a complete gambling outfit of the most crooked description. It was commonly believed to be a notorious brace house, and many a man was there “skinned” out of hundreds of dollars. It was given out that it was the only place in town where a man with a penchant for faro bank would be accommodated, and he was accommodated with a vengeance. “Steerers”“Steerers” were numerous in those days, and embraced such shining lights in that particular line of industry as “Sammy” Barrett, “Jerry” Desmond and “Charlie” Dean, while distinguished confidence men, such as William Traynor and George Post, did not disdain occasionally to introduce a wealthy fly into the spider’s web.

At this time the place was reputed to be owned by Col. Wm. Tanner and Bill Munday. Tanner is a cool-headed man, who has never been known to let an opportunity of “getting the best of it” go by. He has always prospered and is worth several thousand dollars in cash, besides some rather valuable real estate. Munday, on the other hand, was somewhat of a handicap and a dead weight on the institution. His personal habits were most objectionable; he was irritable, quarrelsome, and a general nuisance. Finally, in sheer desperation, Col. Tanner purchased his interest, and Munday retired to his native heath at Burlington, Iowa, where at last accounts he was engaged in defying the prohibitory law.

This “brace” house flourished like the proverbial green bay tree, until the advent of Mayor Ames, when the regular houses were permitted to open. Strong pressure was brought to bear, and Tanner, after removing from the “Elite” to a place on Washington Avenue north, finally effected a compromise, abandoned his game and became a partner with Sullivan and Flanagan.

In the meantime, Frank Shaw announced his intention of defying Sullivan and Flanagan and opening up whether they liked it or not, and he too was admitted into partnership. Then Sawyer, who with “Bob” Potee used to run the famous No. 3 Missouri Avenue in Kansas City, appeared on the scene, and declared his intention of corrallingcorralling some of the large profits that rumor said were going into the pockets of the combination. He was permitted to open, paying the combination a certain percentage of the profits. However the screws were gradually put on, and ultimately he was forced out of business in Minneapolis and went to the Pacific coast. Sawyer was anything but popular with either his associates or patrons. He was cold with the former and supercilious toward the latter. Within the last year or so Mike Shelley, a native of Minneapolis 539and a local sport and saloon-keeper, has become identified with the gambling interests, taking the place of John Flanagan, who has retired on a moderate competence, amassed by a strict attention to business, and the practice of careful domestic economy.

At the present writing, in the year of grace, 1889, gambling is nominally confined to one club, which, however, is really open to the world at large and all mankind. In fact, gaming is just as general as it ever was, except that the combination, instead of running two or three establishments in open defiance of the better class of citizens, now quietly runs but one house and only caters to the moneyed men and clerks, the “dinner-pail brigade” not being considered desirable customers.

Such is a succinct account of gambling in Minneapolis, as the term gambling is generally understood. But other forms of the vice flourish unchecked and unmolested by the authorities. Bucket shops, under the guise of produce exchanges, the “clock,” policy playing, “crap” games, and the sale of lottery tickets run on as though there were no let or hindrance imposed by State law or municipal ordinances. All these enjoy an excellent amount of patronage.

The bucket shops naturally get the largest play, that is to say the heaviest. The immense amount of wheat daily received at the city for consumption by the mills, has made Minneapolis a great grain receiving port, and this fact has doubtless given an impetus to this form of gambling or speculation, as it is more politely termed. The Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce resembles the Chicago Board of Trade, and it is there that the “big guns” try to rob one another on the turn of the market, just as one card sharp tries to fleece another, or a greenhorn, on the turn of a card. Those outside the pale must perforce be satisfied to stake their money in the bucket shops against the Chicago quotations. In the opinion of many reflecting men this is the most pernicious form of the vice, because a large number of eminently respectable people persist in not regarding it as gambling, but consider it as merely a speculation. This delusion blinds many victims who would not for the universe enter a gambling house and put down their money on a fair layout, or bet on the whirl of the roulette wheel. The play against the bucket shops is steady, and it is a cause for wonder where all the money comes from. Margins are continually being wiped out of existence, but the speculators exhibit a recuperative power that is truly astonishing, since after being “knocked out” in one round, they continue to “come up smiling” in the next, and, strange to relate, no instances have been made public of employes who have stolen in order to continue a wild career of speculation, that ultimately ended in flight, prison, or suicide. Either fickle fortune must distribute her favors with comparative impartiality, or speculation does not run riot with that exuberant luxuriance known in many of the large 540cities. The chief establishment in Minneapolis, that of Pressey, Wheeler & Co., failed about a year ago, not from lack of business, however, but because it was not content with a steady income from the commissions received and became imbued with the idea that it was within the realm of possibility to beat the Chicago Board of Trade. It was a costly experiment; the firm went under, but its business reputation was such that plenty of financial backing was easily secured, and they are now doing business at the old stand, with a third party interested. The minor establishments of this character pursue the even tenor of their way, apparently satisfied with the assured prospect of a comfortable living.

The “clock,” a device worked automatically, which at intervals of half a minute threw out two cards, which were supposed to represent stock or bonds, the lower one showing that the stock fell a certain notch below the previous quotation, and the upper card a like increase, has had a checkered career, but on the whole cannot be said to have made an abundance of money for its owners. In its fundamental principle it resembled the faro bank, but it was a little more trouble to play the game, and its patrons were never very numerous, after the novelty of the thing had worn off. It was beaten out of almost a thousand dollars one day through collusion between a player and the man whose duty it was to place the cards in the clock at the beginning of the day’s work. But this trick has never been repeated, one experience of the sort having rendered the managers cautious in the extreme.

Policy has always been considered the colored man’s game, and 4-11-44 has a familiar sound to thousands of people who have not the faintest conception of the meaning of “saddles” and “gigs.” Its patrons in Minneapolis are confined mainly to negroes, although occasionally a Caucasian will hire a dark-skinned waiter or barber to play a few numbers for him, just to tempt the fickle goddess. It is a difficult matter to get the facts in this particular instance, for the reason that the policy vendors are almost constantly under police surveillance, and a raid is by no means infrequent. This may be attributed to a lack of political influence, and the small proportion of colored people to the entire population.

Craps, a dice game, always a favorite with the colored man and brother and the street gamin, is being introduced into the more aristocratic circles, and has become quite popular as a game of chance. The quaint expressions of “come seven, come eleven,” “where’s my point,” “little Joe,” “big Dick from Boston,” and the like, are now frequently heard from the lips of the high-toned white gamblers as they carelessly toss the dice in the early morning hours, after the regular games are closed. The play at times runs high among the white votaries, but in their hands it lacks the sauce piquante with which the game is flavored by the lowly descendant of Ham.

541Minneapolis can boast of a full-fledged pool-room, owned and controlled by Frank Shaw. Since the inauguration of winter racing at New Orleans and the tracks at Guttenburg and Clifton, the place runs during the entire twelve months of the year. The establishment purports to give track odds, but in many instances shortens them materially. The proprietors have decidedly the best of it, for the play is constant, and as it is for small amounts there is but little chance for the house to make any considerable losing on any one book. The bookmakers are very cautious, and refuse big bets on “short horses” for fear they may be worsted through some sort of crookedness. In the books as low a wager as fifty cents is recorded, and in the combination and Paris mutual pools the small sum of twenty-five cents is thankfully accepted. It can be easily seen that the temptation is great to invest a quarter or a half with a bare possibility of having it returned tenfold in the brief space that elapses between the time the shout that “now they’re off,” and the moment when the announcement of the winners is made in the dulcet tones of the telegraph operator. One glance at the habitues of the pool-room shows plainly the folly of attempting to beat the races. The majority of them are poorly dressed, unkempt and frowsy. Every dollar that finds its way into their possession goes straight into the hands of the bookmakers, and hope gradually changes into passive despair, as the names of the leaders of the race are announced, and as the quarters are recorded by the “tick-tick” of the electric instrument. Those, and there are many of them, that have crossed the last ditch and are unable to raise a cent, spend their time in “touting” and importune each newcomer to buy this or that horse, confidently assuring the victim that it would be impossible for him to lose. In the event of their prediction being realized, they get a dollar or so, and proceed to back some “short” horse, on the improbable chance of “making a scratch” and winning several times the paltry amount which they have staked. This lost, the same old process is repeated. It is lose, lose, lose. The bookmaker is a veritable Minotaur, who must be appeased by frequent sacrifices. Honor, friendship, truth and reputation, all go in the futile attempt to gain money without the proper equivalent of hard work. It is pitiful, yet still the law does not interfere, and the work of destruction goes on, fresh recruits being constantly received into the ranks, only to find that instead of being generals, they rapidly degenerate into very ordinary privates, to whom the shelter of the guard-house is a boon. The rarity of Christian charity is amply exemplified daily in this pool-room. No matter how much money a victim may have spent, he would not be given enough to buy a loaf of bread, and he knows this only too well. The owner and employes grow fat and prosper, while the victim dresses in rags, and oft times goes hungry after investing his last 542half dollar or quarter in a vain endeavor to win back the money that has gone before.

Although the sale of lottery tickets is prohibited by law, and papers are forbidden to print advertisements of lotteries, the statutory provisions are openly violated, at least so far as the sale of tickets is concerned. There is no avowed agent, as is the case in several other cities, but people who wish to invest have no difficulty in securing the tickets without going through the formality of sending their money to New Orleans. There are several saloons whose proprietors are really the representatives of the lottery companies, and would-be purchasers, who are well known, experience no trouble. The drawings are posted in a conspicuous place, so that it is extremely easy to ascertain just how near you have come to drawing the capital prize.prize. This once fell to two Minneapolis citizens who had invested a dollar apiece, and in return received $15,000, less the cost of collection. Numerous small prizes have been drawn at various times, yet the greater portion of the money spent for lottery tickets never comes back in the form of prizes, at least to Minneapolis. But as a well-known Chicago gambler once sagely remarked, “A sucker is born every minute,” and there is no lack of people to buy in the vain effort to get something for nothing.

On the whole, it may be said that while Minneapolis is not so bad as some other cities that might be named, there is nevertheless a wide field for a law and order society that would not be afraid to promote and aid, by all proper methods, the rigid enforcement of the laws against gaming.

In what has been said above, no reference has been made to private gambling. Its constant increase, however, is a fact as certain as it is deplorable. Gentlemen gamble at their clubs and teach the mysteries of poker to their wives, their sisters and their daughters, by their own firesides. Ladies of recognized social position may be found who are as familiar with “jack pots” and “bob tail flushes” as they are with the etiquette of the drawing room. Herein lies the most dangerous menace to the future of the young men of the city. Men who are willing to subscribe liberally toward a fund to be used in the suppression of public gaming seem to be cursed with such an obliquity of moral vision that they are able to see nothing objectionable in playing a “social game for trifling stakes” amid the more refined surroundings of home. If they could but have their eyes opened to the possible consequences of such infatuation, they would hesitate long before they ran the risk of transforming the “home” into a stepping stone in the path to the “hell.”

For more than thirty years public gaming in Peoria has been practically under the control of a syndicate, the members of which all belong to the same family. For a considerable period but one establishment was in operation, which was conducted by three brothers. Of late years, however, three other houses have come into existence, but it is asserted that they do business only by the grace of the brothers in question. Of the latter it may be said that they are known no less for their liberality than for their calling. While they have made money rapidly, they have spent it freely, and the coarse notes which they have gathered in across the green cloth have gone into circulation without delay. A member of this same family, now well advanced in years, after having “sown his wild oats,” entered politics and was elected mayor of the city. As to the general character of his administration the author is not in a position to speak. The fraternity generally, however, have been under the impression that the suppression of gambling was not one of the ends which he set before himself as the goal of his ambition. In fact, rumor (which, not being particularly well founded, it would be charitable to disbelieve), has it that a rather near relative more than once appealed to the chief executive of the city for protection when hard pressed by men who claimed to have been victimized in his house.

Outside of the select circle already referred to, Peoria has never proved a particularly profitable locality for sporting men. In itself, it presents not a few inherent attractions to men of this stamp. It is the focus of several lines of railroad, the seat of a populous and wealthy county, and, above all, the centre of the enormous whisky trade of the West. Its floating population is at times very large, and it is not to be wondered at that the favored few who have enjoyed a monopoly in gambling have found it easy to accumulate large sums. These considerations have lured other professionals to the spot, but only to find that for them to attempt to make headway against an impregnable combination was like endeavoring to fight against fate.

Confidence men have always been apt to regard Peoria as a favorable field in which to look for “suckers.” At times a moderate degree of success has attended their efforts in this direction, especially on occasions when a particularly large crowd was present in the city, as, e. g., during the holding of State fairs and of political and other combinations. But on the whole, the city has been comparatively free from the incursions of this class of swindlers. Perhaps it may have been the abundance and cheapness of the “golden corn juice” which interfered with their operations. Either the sharpers or their dupes may have found the indulgence of one vicious appetite so easy as to interfere with the gratification of 544another. However this may be the fact remains that the city has never proved a specially remunerative theater for this description of thieves.

The best known proprietors of banking houses in Peoria have been the Warner brothers, Becker, Hale and Christy. Most of them are understood to have succeeded fairly well in their chosen calling, and this circumstance is undoubtedly due in a great measure to the character of trade for which Peoria is noted. The distillers spend money freely and the circulation of bank notes is brisk. Moreover, the customers of these gentlemen are generally men who are not averse to seeking recreation in an attempt to break the bank.

In fact, it is a matter worthy of comment that intemperance and gaming usually go hand in hand. Like twin monsters they stalk through the land with giant strides, leaving despair and ruin in their track. They supplement each other in the work of destruction. Liquor inflames the passions, stimulates the imagination, blunts the moral sense, and impairs the reasoning powers of the mind. The natural result is that the victim of the alcohol habit is easily incited to patronize the gaming hell. On the other hand gaming always induces excitement, and leaves either fictitious exhilaration or profound mental depression. In either case the gamester has resort to stimulants; it may be to heighten the exuberance of his joy; possibly to drown the recollection of his troubles or stifle the voice of conscience.

It is not the intent of the author to imply that Peoria differs from other cities of its size in this regard, nor would he say that the presence of a distillery in any town tends directly to promote and foster gambling.gambling. Yet any great center of the liquor traffic naturally draws thither a class of men who can see nothing specially wrong in gaming, and who, finding such resorts in active operation at any given point, are apt to extend to them an active patronage.

So far as lottery gambling is concerned, there cannot be said to be much of it at Peoria. The negro population—to whom “4-11-44” appeals more closely—is by no means so large as in various other cities in the State. Nevertheless, tickets in the Louisiana lottery, and even “eighths” are purchasable at these resorts where young men “do most congregate.” “The fangs of the serpent are far-reaching,” nor does there seem to be any way of limiting the number of victims unless the snake be “scotched” as soon as it raises its head. All honor to the State, which, although well-nigh hopelessly in debt, declined to surrender its moral freedom to the grasp of the anaconda. All honor to the National Administration whose executive head has called attention to the best remedy for removing this blot upon the civilization of the nineteenth century. All shame to the truculent spirit (not to say venality) which rampantly raises its head not only to defeat public policy but also to debauch public morals.

From time immemorial, the capital of Hoosierdom has been recognized among sporting men as a poor locality in which to attempt to conduct a gambling house. Not so much because of the higher morality of the inhabitants, nor on account of the rigid enforcement of the laws against gaming, as for the reason that the authorities, from the patrolmen on the “beat” up to officials of high rank, have been wont to levy such heavy assessments upon keepers of resorts of this character that the business has, as a rule, proved unprofitable. It is a common saying among “crooks” that at Indianapolis “arrangements may be made” for committing any offense, from picking a pocket to “cracking” a safe or “sand-bagging” a man, but such privileges “come high.”

Still, gambling hells have existed in the capital of Indiana since a date considerably antecedent to the war, and it is probable that it will always be possible for men who wish to seek their own ruin through this channel to find the means at hand. A demand has never yet failed to create a supply. Before and during the war the principal resorts were those of Basey, Noe, Reynolds, Dunn, Russell and Mortland. These men were old residents and enjoyed more privileges than were accorded to parties from abroad who came later, such as Snow, Barnes, O’Neill, Martin, Steiger, Williamson, Warner, Swift and others, who did business from time to time at subsequent periods. Mortland prospered, and invested his winnings in real estate, erecting a fine block on Illinois Street nearly opposite the Bates House. A certain portion of the building was especially designed for the purposes of a gambling house. Howard Barnes opened the “Maison Doree,”—an elegant resort, where faro, poker and keno were played, and having elegantly furnished rooms for the accommodation of private parties. The establishment enjoyed a large patronage, as did also the “House of Lords” and the “Dollar Store.” But the rooms most favored by gamblers of the higher social classes, and where the play was heaviest, were those of O’Neill, situated at number ten Canal Street. The proprietor also opened a keno room, but considering the demands of the authorities extortionate, refused to comply with them, and war upon him was declared at once. His houses were raided night after night, and he himself repeatedly indicted. The result was that he found his business destroyed and left Indianapolis for the more congenial latitude of Washington City.

“Brace” faro kept even pace with the “square” game, but was always conducted on a cheap scale and by men who, as a rule, made little money. Among the best known faro dealers, who were said to belong to this class, were Jake Fidler, Charley Young, “Sock” RileyRiley, Fred White, Clift Dougherty, “Little Walter” Ellworthy and George Slaughter.

546While the officials were able, however, to keep the banking games in check, poker never could be wholly suppressed. For twenty years there has been a game at the Bates House, at which many members of the Legislature have taken a hand while in attendance at the Capital. Among the players have been numbered some of Indiana’s “favorite sons”, men who attained distinction at the bar and in public life, the names of some of them being as familiar as household words to the great body of the American people. Other games of poker were played at rooms conducted by Ridgeway, Forbes, Stark, Baker, McCarthy, Richardson and Sim Coy.

Owing to the fact that Indianapolis is a great railroad centre, the Union Depot in that city has always been a favorite stamping ground for confidence men, who have reaped a golden harvest from the verdancy of their dupes. They have varied their operations at the depot proper by “working” the trains running into and out of the city. “French” Joe, “Big” Kendricks, “Sock” Riley, Lou Houck and George Duvall, each with a mob of confederates at his heels, have at various times made Indianapolis their headquarters.

At present, the city is known to the fraternity as “closed”, and the only gambling worth mentioning is the poker game at the Bates House, to which reference has been already made; and another game played over the English Opera House. Both these are commonly regarded as “swell” resorts, and at times high stakes change hands across the table.

What has become of the notorious characters who, as has been said, formerly pursued their nefarious calling here? A few of them have found other employment in the same city, while others have betaken themselves to new fields. Snow died of consumption. Ridgeway was found dead in his bed. Mortland was thrown out of his buggy and killed. Basey committed suicide by jumping from the window of the Occidental Hotel. His son-in-law, Major Russell, once known as the genial man about town, witty, well informed, and a universal favorite, poisoned himself. Ben Law, Jr., is serving a life sentence for murder. Ben Law, Sr., is awaiting trial on a charge of having killed his hired man while asleep in bed, being instigated thereto by jealousy. George Leggett, a businessman and gambler, and Ed. Brown (sometimes known as “scar-faced” Brown) a notorious character from Lexington, Kentucky, induced a man named John Acky, a good-natured, clever fellow, but too fond of liquor, to enter into a partnership with him in the conduct of a gambling house. Acky had just received the last installment of his inheritance from his father’s estate. Brown was to be the dealer for the establishment. The game was opened, and Acky was easily led away from the room and freely plied with liquor. When he became sober and returned to the place, he was told that the bank was broken, some unknown man 547having “won the roll”. This story appeared to Acky to be rather flimsy, and on inquiry he soon satisfied himself that he had been swindled. He went to Leggett and, telling him what he believed, asked for a loan of twenty-five dollars. Upon being refused, he procured a pistol, and, after taking several drinks, went in search of Leggett and Brown. He found them in a billiard hall and shot Leggett, killing him instantly. He was convicted of murder and hanged. Brown subsequently came to a miserable end, being killed in a brawl at a mining camp at Leadville. “Verily, the way of the transgressor is hard.”

The defalcation of Wm. E. Denny, Assistant Postmaster at Evansville, is too fresh in the public mind to call for repetition here. His confession showed that he had lost the money embezzled across the green cloth.

Such instances as these are by no means exceptional in the history of gambling and gamblers. A great poet is authority for the assertion that “man never is, but always to be blest.” Practical experience teaches that man who have become infatuated with the gaming habit always defers reformation until the “morrow,” which never comes. The philosopher who seeks for illustrations of the truth of this statement need not confine his researches to the City of Indianapolis or the State of Indiana. The defalcations of trusted employees—whether in the employ of the government, of private corporations, or of individual firms—are too plentiful to call for enumeration. The hard-earned accumulations of the poor, stored—dollar by dollar—in the vaults of savings banks, go to swell the revenue of the professional blackleg, dissipated through the peculations of a dishonest official. Trust funds, the sole support of widow and orphan—are sunk in the pitiless insatiate maw of the “tiger,” and the man whose death bed was rendered an easy couch because of his confidence in the honor of the friend in whom he trusted, is powerless to arise in defence of those who were dearer to him than his life. O, the cursed maelstrom, in whose dark eddies, fortune, truth, honor, find a common grave! Would God that my feeble voice might arrest the man, who, playing on the outer edges of the whirlpool, is destined to be sucked into its vortex. Of a truth, the path to the gaming resort is one “whose steps take hold on hell.hell.”

A single remark may be made as to the interference of the Indianapolis authorities with public gaming. While, as has been said, the city is, in gambler’s parlance, “closed,” the outrageously flagrant manner in which the gullible stranger is fleeced at the Union Depot has brought the name of the town into disrepute. Gaming resorts are few, but confidence men reap a golden harvest from travelers, and the municipal government lifts not a finger in their protection.

The city of Springfield—one of the most beautiful of its size in all the West—being at once the capital of the State and an important railroad centre, could be hardly expected to be free from the incursions of professional gamblers. While public sentiment among the better class of citizens is outspoken in condemnation of the vice, there has never been any determined effort on the part of the authorities to suppress it. This may be ascribed partly to the weighty political influence in municipal affairs wielded by the “tougher” elements of society, and in part to the fact that only occasionally do the gamblers so far outrage public decency as to flaunt their business before the eye of the public. The practical result of this state of affairs has been that a sort of tacit truce exists between the law-abiding citizens and this class of law-breakers.

The locations of the public gaming-houses, some half dozen in number, are nearly as well known as are those of the public buildings; and while they cannot be said to be “wide open,” it is by no means difficult for a player to gain admission. They derive their revenue from all classes, and they number among their patrons even men who are openly loud-voiced in denouncing them. More than one wife and mother in Springfield (and of what city cannot the same assertion be made?) sheds, in secret, bitter, scalding tears over the ruin—financial and moral—which these plague spots, these veritable pest-houses, have wrought in homes which were once the abodes of comfort, happiness and peace. But the hells reap their richest harvest during the biennial sessions of the General Assembly, when members vie with lobbyists for places around the tables. More than one law-maker has lost, at a single sitting, in such houses as Brewer’s or Manning’s, more than his per diem and mileage for the entire session.

Another prolific source of revenue is found in the vast numbers who flock to Springfield from the rural districts, either to interview their representatives in the legislature, or to inspect the State House and view the other lions of the capital. Strangers of this description are promptly marked by the “ropers” and “steerers” as their own peculiar prey, and woe betide the luckless wight who listens to their blandishments.

The Springfield gambling houses are not, as a rule, models of elegance in their appointments, nor are they—if the prevalent impression is well founded—above resorting to chicanery when it appears probable that tortuous devices may be safely and profitably employed. For many years “Tom” Brewer (who later transferred his residence to Chicago) was the acknowledged “king of the games.” He was recognized as a good dealer and was a “high roller” at other houses, his impassive countenance betraying no emotion in the moment of either loss or triumph. Of 549irascible temper, however, and fond of the “flowing bowl,” he was continually involved in brawls. At such moments he cared for neither “God, man, nor the devil;” and was quite as likely to select the Governor of the State as a victim on whom to empty the vials of his wrath as anyone else. Legislators and tramps, clergymen and “bums” all stood on one common level. Other members of the local fraternity wondered at his temerity, admired his daring, and followed his lead, yet at the same time his personal popularity was never very great.

Not all the gambling at the Illinois capital, however, is carried on at public resorts. Private poker clubs were formerly numerous. For years, certain young bloods about town were wont to gather at the Leland Hotel for a friendly game of “draw.” In another, yet not remote, quarter of the city assembled professional men and men of letters, the roll of members comprising some of the brightest minds of Central Illinois, for purposes of relaxation and social intercourse. Here poker constituted one of the chief diversions, and play, although, it is said, never high, was constant. In private houses, also, the same mania finds its devotees. “Facilis descensus Averni;” and it is but a step—and a comparatively short one—from “five cent ante,” in the drawing room, to poker in the gambling hell, that portal through which so many thousands have entered on the path whose end is the felon’s cell or the outcast’s grave.

To the credit of the young and middle aged men of Springfield, however, be it said, that at present poker clubs are by no means so flourishing in Springfield as they were a few years ago. The reason unquestionably is that some of those who in former days, were among the chief patrons of the game have had their eyes opened to the dangers that lurk in “social gambling.” During the palmy days of the “clubs,” professional gamblers sometimes succeeded in securing admission to a game as visitors. “Once upon a time,” as the children’s chroniclers say, a polished stranger “from the East” appeared at the leading hostelry. His dress was faultless; his manners frank and engaging. He was introduced into the “club,” where he soon rose in general esteem. He played freely, and at first with varyingvarying success. Gradually the “fickle goddess” selected his chair as her permanent resting place and it was not long before his extraordinary “luck” had pretty well “cleaned out” the habitues of the rooms. Play fell off, and the stranger’s “business” having been accomplished he bid his late friends adieu and disappeared from public view. Suspicion did not then rest upon him, but subsequent developments proved conclusively that he was a professional “pigeon plucker,” and an accomplished expert at every form of card-sharping.

Of all the evils connected or associated with games of chance in this country, perhaps the most vicious are those which surround the race-courses of the land—not only those extensive parks which are recognized as having a legitimate existence, but as well the country tracks where racing events are casual and sporadic. The “turf,” as we are popularly accustomed to term the race course with reference to its gambling features, implies not only the element of chance as manipulated by systematic knavery, and which will be found elsewhere fully explained, but also what is termed the legitimate sport of gentlemen, conducted as honestly as it may be and with every disposition on the part of managers and judges to give a fair test of the speed and endurance of the competing horses. Even in the latter case, it is a notorious fact that race tracks that are conducted in their official management under the highest auspices and by the most responsible individuals, are not in their actual surroundings, influences and results, less pernicious nor injurious than those which are openly in the charge of recognized swindlers and scoundrels. Even as to the great “events” which in this country are recognized and patronized, to the great misfortune of public morals, by the press and by society, governed though they may be by honorable men, and with every concerted determination for a fair and proper exhibition of honest results, it is notorious and undisputed, that these exhibitions are the harvest fields of systematized vice, and that while the judge in the stand may be immaculate, the seller of pools, the bookmaker, the touter, the tip-givers, the turf prophets and all the others who camp upon the trail of the credulous and unwary with schemes that, by methods of certainty, enrich the gambler without risk on his part, are one and all dishonest and designing scoundrels to whom the sense of honor is unknown, and whose infamous and insidious influence is one of the gravest dangers to which the morality and uprightness of the youth of our country are exposed.

The origin of horse-racing, as with that of our modern athletic sports, comes from the classic ages; but in the contests of equine speed and in the competition of personal skill or valor in the “brave days of old” there is no record of the thimble-rigging propensities which these latter days have developed. The competitions of those times were for public honor and prizes, for the encouragement of features which were essential to the public welfare and safety. In that period all free men were warriors, 554upon whom depended the security of life, property and national existence. The cultivation of ambition to excel in personal strength and swiftness had, therefore, a patriotic and commendable foundation; and the same as regarded the trials of speed by horses, which were for the improvement of the qualities upon which the warriors had to rely in these their main coadjutors upon the field of battle. All this had nothing in common with the turf as we recognize and realize it to-day. For this we have to look back to our mother, England, from whom it was an inheritance of shame whose evil influence has expanded like the upas tree ever since it first took a root in our land. In England, while it has been customary for turf enthusiasts to trace the history of their trade from about the reign of Charles I., the fact is that it was not really till the reign of George II. that the “turf,” as property understood, became a recognized entity. Prior to that time there had been plenty of horse-racing, in which gentlemen rode their own horses, and which was almost entirely free from the vicious concomitants which have later surrounded, characterized and dominated the race track. The leading meetings in England are the Newmarket, Epsom, Ascot, York, Doncaster and Goodwood. It is at Epsom that “the Derby,” an event of interest to the whole sporting world, is run. This is known as the Cockneys’ Holiday, and has been the subject of many an exemplification of the highest attainments of the art of word painting. Indeed the interest attaching to the vast and heterogeneous throng is to many greater than that which belongs to the race itself, every element between the palace and the poor-house being there represented. Ascot is favored frequently by the presence of royalty, and is on this account always the scene of a brilliant display by the aristocracy. Goodwood is also an aristocratic meeting, representative of the south of England and distinguished by the great value of the prizes offered for competition. The distinguishing feature at Doncaster is the race for the St. Leger stakes, which rivals the Derby in sporting importance; and it has been claimed that upon these two events not less than twenty-five per cent. of the whole English population are bettors, either risking their money on the tracks or at the pool rooms, which in every town throughout the country sell chances upon the results.

It is a somewhat remarkable fact that of late years while, in England, the most energetic efforts have been made, and with good success, to keep the thimble-riggers and blacklegs off the track, this fraternity, outside the track, in the adjacent hotels, and in other outside towns where interest in the result centers, carries on its audacious trade with increasing extent and profit, while to-day, throughout Great Britain, the mania for gambling upon the results of contests upon the turf is more wide-spread and deep-rooted than ever before. The harm resulting to public morals is incalculable, and will possibly more than offset the efforts for good of the 555ministers of religion. There is not a race meeting after which we do not hear of the downfall of some “plunger,” who in “legitimate” betting has risked his all upon the “wrong horse,” bringing ruin and disgrace too often upon the innocent wife and family, and opening up the alternative of crime, dishonor or suicide. Yet these are but the least of the injurious influences of gambling upon these race meetings. They are only heard of by reason of the conspicuous extent of the individual losses, or the prominence of the persons thus involved in the ruinous consequences of the national vice. Far more serious, more deplorable and more demoralizing are the results upon the infinite number of the “smaller fry,” who submit themselves as easy victims to the skillful swindler who runs the “speculation list” or the pool-room, whose specious but delusive allurements send the honest hand of many a youth surreptitiously into his employer’s cash-drawer, to be drawn forth forever tainted with dishonor; and merely in order that the ill-gotten gains of the experienced swindler may be enlarged. Round about all such tracks, too, may be seen the gaming devices of every description, and all the nefarious instrumentalities by means of which the honest man is deluded of his earnings for the benefit of systematic knavery. And yet the race-track is the “national sport” of England; to it, and all its contaminating, crime-producing, society-wrecking and soul-destroying influence, royalty lends its condescension, and princes and peers their active countenance and aid; bishops and churchmen, members of Parliament and professional men, participate and applaud; while even those in charge of the little children afford them special holidays in order that their young minds may be subjected to impressions which, in the years of their older youth will make them the easy prey of the agents of this monster vice. It is in the glitter and glamour of all its brilliant external attributes that England finds the pride with which she claims the turf as her peculiar national institution; it is in the ruined reputation, the blasted life, the broken heart, the wreck of happiness, the loss of honor and the headlong course to crime, which are to be traced by the tears of women and the wails of children, in the blighted homes throughout the land, that we recognize in the turf and all that pertains to it, England’s national curse, that must surely sooner or later invite and evoke a national retribution.

The details of the various rascalities practiced in connection with the “turf” being common to all countries, we shall deal with these features of the English national sport, at the close of this chapter, in a general explanation of the methods which affect the results of all race meetings, and which add strength to the steel meshes of the net in which the innocent and confiding bettor is certain to become involved.

It is to be said to the honor and credit of the Puritan and Pilgrim settlers of New England, that they had a strong antipathy to every form of vice, and in their interdict against the evils which they had left England to escape, horse-racing was especially included. On the other hand the early settlements of the Old Dominion, (which originally included Kentucky), and of Carolina, were of aristocratic stock, retired army officers, the younger sons of gentlemen, etc., and as the early conditions that prevailed precluded many of the ordinary sports, horse-racing, generally in the form of the steeple-chase, was encouraged. This was not, however, the “turf,” in America, but it was the means of affording a nursery for the splendid animals which have made the American turf famous for the wonderful achievements in time and speed of its horses. In those early days travel in the South was almost altogether by saddle horses, and hence the necessity for developing those peculiar qualities in the horses used, as made them valuable for racing purposes. The stock was recruited from the best blood, imported from England, and as it was a peculiar mark of social distinction, where all men ride, to be well mounted, great care was taken in cultivating and improving the breeding of horses. Yearly meetings for running races became the custom; but at these affairs there were no bookmakers nor blacklegs, and the betting was generally of that perfunctory character which usually exists where the competing parties are interested rather in the results than in the stakes. As the country developed, the new state of Kentucky, with its splendid climate, its crystal streams and its unequalled grasses, became distinctively the home of fine horses, which up to the present day even, she has continued to supply to the racing world.

The trotting race had its origin in New York and took its peculiarity from the general use of the light wagon for road traveling. In this way the only possible method of testing speed was the “pace” or “trot,” and for many years in the Northeastern States the trotting meeting was the recognized form of sport, the practice becoming general and being the invariable accompaniment of every county fair. The earliest recorded organized trotting meeting of which there is any specific record is of date of 1818. The fastest time for fifty miles was recorded in favor of Spangle at Union Course, Long Island, Oct. 15, 1855. The best time for two miles under saddle was at Fashion Course, Long Island, July 1, 1863, by George M. Patchen. We mention these dates to show that as long as thirty-five years ago there were important meetings of the turf, and also to point out the fact that the public sense of humanity, growing with the increasing refinement of the country, has reduced these trials of speed generally to one-mile contests, and frequently to the half-mile.

557Trotting races began to assume an aspect of national importance shortly after the war, and the first National Trotting Association was organized in February, 1870, under the name of the “National Association for the Promotion of the Interests of the Trotting Turf,” which in 1878, at a congress of members, was changed to that of “National Trotting Association.” It is a curious fact that the origin of the National Association arose in the abuses which invariably follow the practice of racing for money or of betting on unknown results. There had been complaints all over the country of crooked work on the race tracks—of “blind” horses being entered under assumed names to gull unsuspicious victims; of jockeys who “pulled” the winner so as to make him the loser; of improper decisions by judges, and of a thousand and one things in the way of serious and petty crookedness on the leading race tracks. ItIt became generally recognized that the confidence of the public in the integrity of racing contests in America was becoming exhausted and that racing was falling into contempt as well as falling off in its profits. Organization was originally effected in response to a circular sent out by the Narragansett Park Association, of Providence, R. I., in 1869. It proposed the formation of a central body for general control, and the establishment of a code of rules and penalties for the government of all tracks as the most effective means of correcting existing abuses and elevating the standard of honor and fair play, and the character of the American Trotting Turf. The results were gratifying so far as those objects were concerned, though it is a serious question whether the country would not have been greatly the gainer had the race-courses and their attending evils been allowed to extinguish themselves by the very excesses which were at that time making them offensive and contemptible. However, the organization was effected as stated, officers elected and, a code of laws adopted, under which the chief of the evils complained of disappeared from the official protection of the tracks, though they still continue under more insidious and less offensively unscrupulous methods. The membership of this association consists of the representative of a trotting course. In order to show the extraordinary growth of this mania for speculating upon the chances of the horse-race we may state that, commencing with 51 in 1870, in 1886 there were 273 courses represented in the National Association, while now there are 317, and in the American Association 419—in all 736. The government of the National Association is effected through the medium of a Board of Appeals consisting of five District Boards and a Board of Review, each of the former being entitled to three members of the general board, giving it thus fifteen members in addition to the President and Vice-presidents who are ex-officio members. The Board of Review is composed of a chairman appointed by the President from each of the five districts, and this Board has and exercises 558supreme authority and jurisdiction, being a final court of resort which decides all appeals from the decisions of the District Boards. The objects set forth on behalf of the association are the improvement of the breed and the development of horses by promotion of the interests of the American Trotting Turf; the prevention, detection and punishment of frauds thereon, and uniformity in the government and rules of trotting and pacing.

In 1887, a number of Western tracks separated from the original body and formed the “American Trotting Association,” with objects precisely similar, and methods not materially differing. In fact, many parties are represented in both Associations, as a matter of policy, and to ensure the enforcement of rules and penalties upon all courses.

Running races have of late very largely supplanted trotting races in public favor, for the reason that they offer to the public a more vivid and intense excitement, and to bettors a speedier settlement of their concern about the result. Five persons will attend, it is said, a running race, where one will attend a trotting race.

To enumerate the “principal courses” would be a task that would take space with little profit, but we can gather some idea of the extent of opportunities that are open to the sharks that swim the sea of speculation in races throughout the Union, when we say that at the great Suburban race, Sheepshead Bay, N. Y., in 1890, there were present not less than twenty thousand persons according to gate receipts; while at Washington Park, Chicago, thirty-four thousand people have been counted on important occasions. And these, let it be remembered, do not constitute a tithe of the actual number of the eager victims of the gamblers of the turf. In all our leading cities to-day are pool-rooms, where may be seen excited crowds who by the use of the telegraph wire, on the same principle as quotations are announced on the board of trade, follow the races from start to finish with as much accuracy as if they were at the tracks, and in this way the prey of the gambler is increased without limit, and his operations made to permeate near and remotely into society that otherwise would never have sought nor had the opportunity of seeking the contact.

If reckless indulgence in games of chance of every description, in lottery enterprises, in the board of trade, and in the pool-room, can be, as it is, appropriately denominated a “national vice,” that appellation belongs with especial emphasis to the gambling of the race-track. This is true, probably, mainly because of the fatal facility with which contact is there had with the evil influence that draws men and boys, aye, even women and girls, into its deadly toils. The race-track is governed by presumably respectable 559persons. It has the convincing support of the press, universally, to sustain its claims to harmlessness. Church members and people of recognized reputable position, bankers, merchants and professional men, are openly seen “making their bets,” in the face of thousands of their fellow citizens. Women surrender to the glamour of its fascinations, and may be seen in numbers, any day on any grand stand, “backing” their favorite in the race. In the face of such example as this, then, how can we expect that the youth of the land shall escape? Already they are sufficiently imbued in their personal and business ambition with the spirit of speculation that pervades the nation, and in the feverish haste to get rich suddenly are ready to turn to any resort that may seem to offer them the opportunity of making large winnings for a small investment. True, the youth may have been warned by a pious mother or a prudent father that gambling is a vice, and one of the most dangerous and pernicious of all that threaten the interests, the welfare and even the safety of society. But when the young man sees the pillar of the church, or the refined lady leader of polite society, who mayhap occupies the front pew in the church which he attends, openly patronizing gambling, is it any cause for wonder that he concludes the good counsel which he brought from home was merely a mistake, and that there’s “no harm in it” after all? And once in the circle of that treacherous maelstrom of vice, at first imperceptibly to himself and in slow and apparently safe revolutions, he is gradually but irresistibly drawn to the fatal gulf, in which character, integrity, hope, and the best opportunities of life are remorselessly swallowed up.

Every bet that is made upon a race-course is emphatically and indisputably participation in the commonest kind of a lottery—is gambling pure and simple; and if it has been found necessary by Congress, acting upon the advice of the National Executive, to legislate against the existence of the incorporated lotteries that exist by State authority, why is it not equally the duty of Congress to declare all betting unlawful? This is not a new proposition. Under existing law the illegality of gambling by betting is recognized in the refusal of the courts to enforce debts or contracts incurred under a bet. If the principle were logically carried out, it would afford a safeguard to society which, as yet, moral sentiment appears to have been unable to extend. But what moral restraints, the teaching of parents and the exhortations of the clergy, have failed to achieve, may be accomplished by what this book contains: by tearing away the mask of harmless sport from the death’s-head that grins behind it, and exposing, in all its hideous nakedness, not the moral wrong that there is in the vice of gambling by betting, but the personal rascality toward the individual, the plain and evident object of robbery that is involved in all the schemes of the book-maker, the pool-seller, and every 560other person who makes either a profession or a systematic practice of offering bets upon the results of the race-track. While our young men may be eager to get rich by the easiest means, we have much confidence in the hard common sense that is characteristic of every American youth, before the natural acuteness of his intellect and spirit of self-preservation have been insensibly dulled by the insidious and subtle approaches of a danger that draws near him with a smiling countenance. With, however, an ample fore-knowledge of what those advances mean in reality, with pride and apprehension both on the alert, every young man will firmly refuse to allow himself to be deliberately gulled, and will turn his back in contempt upon the pickpockets of the pool-room and the race-track.

We have already alluded to the pool room as an accessory to gambling at the track. This is one of the most nefarious of all the modern instruments of evil, and ought to be summarily abolished by specific law in every State in the Union. Its worst feature, perhaps—in addition to the fact that it is a skin game played to catch “suckers,” as the gamblers term their latest dupes—is that it seeks out and offers opportunity to a class of citizens who could never be reached by these machinations in any other way. Clerks, students, apprentices, and such, would in all probability never have the time nor the means to squander in a trip from New York to Sheepshead Bay, to witness a horse race. The pool-room brings the race to him. He can visit them at his noon hour or in the idle hours of his evening rest. Here he is deluded into the belief that a small investment will bring a rich return, and is easily wheedled by a “capper” into investing his small hoard on “tips” that he is assured are certain to win. Of course he loses, and to retrieve his loss will probably go to his employers’ funds to get the means to continue his play. And so from bad to worse till exposure and ruin overtake him.

Pool rooms are conducted upon the science of exactness, not only as to the promptness and accuracy of the reports upon the blackboard, but also with regard to the certainty that the pool seller will be the only one in the room who will be a sure and solid winner each time. The pool board displays the whole course of the race, in its smallest details. It shows when the horses are “off,” which one is “in the lead;” which “second” and which “third;” how they stand at the “quarter,” the “half,” the “three quarter,” and their positions down the “stretch,” and within ten seconds after the “finish,” will display which horse was winner, and which took second and which third place. Previous to the race the board has reliable and definite information of the state of the track, whether “fast” or muddy; gives the name of the jockey who is 561to mount each horse, the weights and all information necessary to the man who governs his bets by what he considers the most reasonable chance to win.

The pool-seller works his gambling racket on what he calls the percentage principle. In all pools sold by auction, he deducts a certain sum, generally 5 to 15 per cent., from the amount in the pool, and pays the balance to the winner. The book maker arranges his book with reference to the “odds” for or against; that is, the individualindividual chances of each horse upon the information which he has available, and which if he be at all expert in the business will enable him to insure his personal success every time, except only in the case where all the patrons buy the same horse and that horse should be the winner a—contingency that is, however, not as one to one hundred, and about as liable to happen as that the sucker who has bought on a “cinch tip” will win the pot.

It may be interesting for many who have no knowledge of pool room practices, and will better illustrate the devices by which the “sucker” is snared, to have a few illustrations of actual proceedings that have transpired. Here, for instance, is what is called a “book” taken from the blackboard at the Imperial pool rooms, Chicago, June 12, 1890:

In explanation it is to be observed that the bookmaker never bets in favor of any horse. He invariably offers odds against every flyer on the programme. The first column of figures gives the odds offered; the second the weight carried by each horse, and the last the figure against which odds are offered. For instance, the first line means that the bookmaker offers twenty to one against Emma McDowell. Now, if this horse should win, the bookmaker would pay out $20, and having won all the other 562bets he would still be the winner, because he would receive $26 against the loss of $20. It will be observed that on Later On he only lays odds of two to one, and on Corticelli three to one. These are the favorites—horses which offer tolerably certain chances of being winner, and on which the book maker will take the smallest possible limit of chance. The favorite won the race and the book maker has to pay the winner $2, so that he is the winner by $25, counting out of the pool of $27, $2—$1 of which was his stake and the other that which had to be returned to the winner. If the horse Norwood had won the book maker would have been out $25. But no such contingencies are to be dreaded by the gentleman who presides over the pools. He is kept posted from sources that are always inside and unquestionable, and in offering the heavy odds knows that he runs no risk. This computation of winnings is based on the supposition that only one bet at the figure of $1 named was made, but the probability is that instead of this being the case the actual winnings may be safely estimated at $2,500 instead of $25. In this business an important figure is the “tout,” who, while actually the bookmaker’s agent, assumes the role of a gentleman who, by some means or other, has procured a “cinch tip” (meaning a sure thing), but is unfortunately short of money. “Now,” he will confidentially inform the sucker, “give me $10 to bet on Norwood, and we’ll divide the pot.” The money is produced, and, of course, goes to swell the book maker’s wad. These touts always induce their victim to bet on the “short horses”—that is, the horses against which the heaviest odds are laid, for two reasons. First, because the money more certainly goes where he is employed to steer it, and second, because in the rare and unprecedented event of the tail-ender on the blackboard becoming the winner on the track, the tout’s share of the winning will be so much larger. The tout will ply his vocation so industriously that on a board like the above he will have given a “tip” and got a bet laid on nearly every horse on the board. In this way he is almost certain to have one winner out of the lot and when the latter receives his stake the tout says, “There, didn’t I give you a straight tip!” He gets a liberal share, and his reputation for inside information is spread among the crowd, and his chances of increasing his victims in succeeding races are immensely increased. As for the losers, no one pays any attention to them. Even the tout won’t take the trouble to condole with them, and realizing that the mob of a gambling room do most heartily despise a “kicker,” they will probably sneak away to kick themselves in private. To illustrate the wisdom of the tout in always deluding his dupes to bet on the “short horse,” it may be mentioned that once in a great while, through some influence not comprehended by the book maker and his crowd of sharpers, the “short horse” will be a winner. This generally happens when the horse has been managed by some professional who, having discovered his 563qualities, has played a game on his brother gamblers, kept his pacer’s capacity a careful secret, probably has had him “pulled” by the jockey to make a bad record in a preceding race, so that he can gather in heavy odds in the event in which he intends to show his hand; and so the book maker becomes a victim in the game of “diamond cut diamond,” and the tout is made happy by a liberal share in the chance hit. We say “chance” hit because the tout never gives an honest tip, and if he really had the knowledge of the “short horse’s” prowess he would have informed his patron, the book maker, and the long odds would never have been given. As an instance of this kind of luck it may be stated that recently during a St. Louis meeting, at Roche’s pool-room in that city, a book was made in which the odds against a certain horse were laid at 100 to 1. A tout persuaded a man from North Missouri to let him have $50 to bet on the race. The tout bet 100 to 1 on the horse, and to his own astonishment, the amazement of the book maker, and of everyone else, his horse won the race, the result being that the book maker lost $5,000, while the tout received a bonus of $2,000 of the money.

This board enables you to have an opportunity to select a winner in three different races. The board is arranged as by this diagram:

We will assume that in placing the bet you put your money on Gilford or Vatel for third race, Irma B. in the fourth, and Ascoli in the 564fifth. The number of your ticket would be 58, represented by the figures 4, 3, 2, these latter numbers indicating the horses named, as numbered on the score card. If your judgment has been correct, being the only purchaser of ticket number 58, for $1 you would receive the proceeds of the sale of the other tickets, or $201, less the percentage to the bookmaker, who pockets $30.15, or 15 per cent. thereon. But as a matter of fact, Copperfield wins the third, Laura Doxey the fourth, and Elphin the fifth. These horses being “favorites,” thirty tickets were sold on them, and the bookmaker having abstracted his $30.15, each winner receives only $5.69. In this board the bookmaker relies solely upon his percentage, and if the amount set forth be amplified to correspond with the sums usually bet at the race tracks and pool rooms, it will be seen that the profit is not only a handsome one, but it is the only one on the board that has the least “possible, probable shadow” of chance in its favor. The combination on the short horses won’t win once in a thousand times, while the winner on the selling combination gets only a sixth as much as the cosy and certain profits of the book maker.

In these pools, the board is made up for each race as it transpires, and is set forth in the following manner:

565In this case, the player selects his horse for first or second place, tickets for first place being called “straight,” and those for second place, “place.” Generally only favorite horses are bought for straight, but on this board there appears to have been a large field of favorites.favorites. The buyer may purchase as many tickets as he pleases for either “straight” or “place” chances. In this event it appears that there were eighty tickets sold as “straights,” and the tickets being sold for $2 each, the amount in the pool book would be $160. The pool-seller deducts 5 per cent. of this amount, or $8, and the balance of $152 is divided between the holders of the ten tickets sold on Tom Karl, the winner. This would give to each ticket $15.20, whether held by one party or in different hands. In awarding the results in the case of the “place” in this event, the pool book exhibited 90 tickets at $2 each, or $180. The seller deducts his 5 per cent., or $9 from this, and after deducting from the remaining $171, the sum of $44, representing the amount paid in by the bettors on the winner of the race, Tom Karl, 12 tickets at $2, and on Prophecy, the winner of “place,” 10 tickets at $2, or $44 in all, he proceeds to divide the balance, $127 equally between these two winners. Thus $63.50 is divided among the ten tickets on Prophecy, giving to each $6.30, and the same amount among the holders of tickets on Tom Karl, or $5.30 to each ticket.

Let it not be supposed, however, that the book maker, or his confederates who stand in with him, are to be contented with a fifteen per cent. upon the money that passes through the pool book. On the contrary, he is the most expert and successful of all the gamblers who “play the races.” He is generally the only one of this nefarious outfit who receives a genuine and reliable “tip.” His intimate relations with the jockeys, stablemen and all the habitues of the training stables and racing grounds, are such that he is generally able to pick out a winner, and to discount the results of a race in advance. Thus assured he skillfully sends out his touts to give “tips” that will bring the most grist to his mill, that is to say, to industriously disseminate the belief that that horse will win, which he knows has no chance of success. Under this influence the amateur sport, and the average patron of the racing ground or pool-room, will generally plunge largely on the horse they imagine is to bring them a rich booty, while the pool-seller looks on complacently, knowing that all the money in the strong box belongs to him as surely as if the race had been already run.

The methods employed by these pool-room experts are of the most ingenious and daring order. For instance, at a race in St. Louis recently, the book maker had a secret wire brought into his pool-room, by which he 566received the actual result several seconds sooner than the news sent by the public wire which supplied the official record. In these few brief seconds of opportunity, and in the intense excitement always prevailing at this point, he was enabled to pocket thousands by “betting on a sure thing.” In short there is no device nor subterfuge, nor daring rascality of any description, to which he will not bend the most astute cunning and the greatest energy in order to extend his thieving operations upon the pockets of those innocent pigeons who lend themselves to be plucked under the miserable and baseless delusion that the pool-room is run “on the square” and that he is getting even a gambler’s chance in the unequal contest with the skillful and audacious knavery with which he is led to contend. Indeed, it is remarkable that men of courage, of resources, of acute perception, of tireless energy, of a self poise that never fails, and an activity of intellect equal to any emergency, as most of these successful sharpers are, should not have preferred to bring their talents to bear upon honorable and lawful occupations in which they could not fail to apply those qualities to the greatest advantage.

In every pool room, amid the conglomeration of representatives of “queer” industries always there to be found, is invariably a liberal sprinkling of “cappers” or “touts.” These are the lowest and most contemptible of all the instrumentalities employed by the turf sharp, and the most dangerous because they always do their work in the guise of pretended friendship, and under the basest kind of betrayal of confidence. The lowest kind of a bunko steerer is a gentleman by comparison with this most contemptible of all the crawling things that infest this footstool. We have given some insight into the character of his operations. Let it be remembered that every tout is in the employ of the book maker; that every man who offers another a “tip” on a race-course or at a pool room is a “tout,” beyond any peradventure, and be certain that his frank and apparently generous and off-handed advances are but in reality the means by which he intends to aid in the operation of picking your pocket. He is a liar by instinct, by choice and by occupation, and no matter how engaging his manners, or however plausible his representations, you may safely set him down as a thief, and deal with him accordingly. His very approach is an insult to the intelligence of every man whom he seeks to “play for a sucker.”

The amount of money abstracted from the business industries, and incomes of the people, mainly of the cities, of the United States, is simply something appalling in its magnitude. In all the great centers of population 567in the United States: New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Louisville, Kansas City, Denver, New Orleans and San Francisco, the depredations of the gambler will be found to run into the millions in each case. In Chicago and New York it is impossible to make any estimate. The actual truth, if it could be revealed, would no doubt be deemed incredible. One fact, however, that is definitely ascertained, will give some idea of the magnitude of this crime against society, in the western metropolis. At the Fall meeting at Washington Park, in 1889, forty-two gamblers paid to the track authorities, $100 each per day for the term of twenty-four days, the duration of the meeting. That amounted to $100,800. In addition to that they had to pay for the most expensive kind of living at the highest-priced hotels; and had to pay for “police protection,” touters, cappers and hangers-on, salaries that professional men would envy, and had to make high-rollers’ profits. Altogether, there cannot be a question that these sharpers, for the privilege for which they paid over $100,000, must have taken away out of the city, in the neighborhood of half a million of dollars for this one meeting alone. This would represent at a fair computation $2,000,000 for the year, without taking into account the enormous amount constantly being drained from the community by the other gambling operations.

In addition to these features—which certainly those responsible for the social, moral and material welfare of the community do not seem to realize—it is to be remembered that when the race-meeting has closed, when the principal thieves with their robber retainers have departed for the scene of their next activity, and good people heave a sigh of relief that their boys or their clerks or their students are now no longer in danger of this temptation, their deadly influence still remains. While the races, for instance, are progressing in St. Louis, the pool-rooms, the billiard rooms and saloons, by use of the telegraph, continue to keep alive the taint of turf gambling, to keep the temptation to our youth ever present, and to make easy for all, the deadly descent to Avernus. Here, too, the work of the skin gambler, the jackal of his tribe, is made particularly easy. Fraternities of these fragrant personalities are organized, who between the different cities keep each other “posted” on the true tips on races, and give the very latest and most reliable information as to the probabilities of each race. The dupe bets upon the regular “blackboard” reports; the scoundrel upon a dead certainty. The robber rejoices in his good fortune; the victim curses his “bad luck,” perhaps, but has no suspicion that he has not had an even chance upon the board.

If any young man, or old man for that matter, who is in the least degree fastidious upon the point of keeping decent company, will but get some one acquainted with the character of pool-room assemblies, or take the trouble to exercise judgment for himself, he will learn or perceive that which will make him take himself speedily away. Here all the proper distinctions of society are violated, and the lawyer or doctor, lost by his infatuation to self-respect, may be observed taking “pointers” from a ragged and ill-smelling stable-boy. The banker, with the cashier of his competitor, are jostling with a frowsy bootblack; the business man discusses the board with the pickpocket; the thief and gambler is everywhere. The odor of state prison associations is upon many. The pimp, the bummer, the thug, the midnight housebreaker and the daylight lawbreaker, all mingle in the throng with the representatives of business probity and youthful innocence—with the prop and stay of one family, and with the hope and pride of another household. If it were not for the fascination that centers upon the betting board and renders decency oblivious to its shameful surroundings, no man of sense, with a spark of manhood or self respect about him, could, for a moment endure the contamination of surroundings so degrading. The scene is one of the most repulsive that any pure mind could conceive. It is the monstrous anomaly presented of the vesture of life with warp of virtue and woof of vice.

While many of the evil influences which are organized in the pool-room to defraud, deceive and destroy, are common to the race-track, yet the latter possesses nefarious peculiarities whose features ought to be well scanned, and therefore carefully avoided. At the race track, while the vile types of character which infest the pool-room are to some extent visible, they have not the same freedom of communication nor familiarity with the visitor to the track as is the case in the pool-room. In the pure outer air they shrink from intrusion upon respectability, and are content to flock by themselves. Here it is, the well-dressed thief, the polite and polished tout, the sanctimonious sharper, and the keen and experienced shark, who carry on the operation of fleecing the victims of turf rapacity are to be found. The scene in itself is far from repulsive, as is the case with the pool-room. On the contrary, it is a kaleidoscopic view of human society of every decent grade seen in its most attractive form. Costly equipages, daintily dressed fair ladies, bright colors, the beauty of flowers and the fragrance of delicate perfume; men, each one dressed, like McGinty, in his best suit of clothes, moving hither and thither in constant bustle, flutter and excitement, the busy hum of multitudes of voices and the general and exhilarating impression of life, movement and animation, 569combine to give the race-course attractions that are apt to obscure its deadly menace to honor, honesty and morality. Looking beneath this fair exterior, however, we find a very charnel house, reeking foul with infamy and fraud.

Here we may observe the lady of fashion in her costly equipage stopping to despatch her coachman for a card, and to take instructions for a tip. Of course he gets the tip, for he knows where to go for it. He and the tout are pals, and after the lady shall have lost every one of her eager and confident ventures and leaves the ground with pocket-book light but disappointment heavy in her heart, we may get a glimpse at the decorous coachee as he smiles softly to himself, and thinks upon the liberal portion of his mistress’ money he will have to divide with the tout in the evening. Ladies who visit the race-track to bet are carefully “spotted;” their servants are suborned, and they become the very easiest and silliest victims that fall to the lot of the “fancy.”

A common swindle in the crowd at the pool-seller’s stand at the track is the eager and excited young man who is victimized by a brace of sharpers. They have watched him and sized him up; they recognize when he is ripe enough to pick and then dexterously perform the operation of gathering him in. “Bet two to one on Susie G.,” cries Mr. Verdant Green, after a short argument with his elbow neighbor. “I’ll take you,” retorts the other, counting out his bills, “we’ll put the money into the hands of this gentleman here.” Benevolent-looking rascal, who has been abstractedly looking the other way, is appealed to and consents to be the depository of the wagers. The race is on; excitement becomes intense; everybody is straining eyes upon the flying horses. Not so the confidential stake-holder and his friend. They have gone from the gaze of Mr. Verdant Green—“though lost to sight, to memory dear.” If they could be found ten minutes later they might be discovered in the act of dividing an easily earned “swag.” This kind of swindle is as old as the flood. But all do not read the newspapers, and, as the gams say, “there’s a sucker born every minute.” That is a cardinal doctrine with them, and they ought to believe in it firmly, for does not their experience seem to prove it? No one, however, who has read this book, whether he read newspapers or not, will be liable to be deceived by this simple fraud.

One of the very worst features that attend race meetings is the unavoidable presence, at every convenient point of proximity to the race track, and lining every approach and avenue to the central scene, of all 570the known skin games of which the reader of this book will have been afforded ample knowledge elsewhere. Here assemble the three-card-monte swindler, the shell-game shark, the wheel of fortune fakir, and in short every conceivable representative of the smaller forms of swindling by means of the practice of gambling. They cannot, it is true, get into the enclosure. Race-track representatives draw the line of its virtue there. True they are not a whit worse than their brethren inside, who play for higher game. Both are merely plundering honest people by means of gambling schemes. It is the case of the pot saying to the kettle, “Keep off; I fear you may besmut me.” But the shell game man and his confreres do not hanker to be within the sacred high fence. They can catch their kind of suckers just as well outside, as they come and go; and many a confiding innocent beside, who has not enough money to buy a seat on the grand stand, nor to make a bet on the race, has yet sufficient to lose by a turn of the wheel. They are not particular, bless you, these smaller knaves. They do not want the earth. So long as they get all the sucker has got, even though it be but a little, they are content.

Again, there are cases where the winning horse actually has become sick; so sick that he has had to be scratched, or been compelled to fail in even getting a “place,” and that even where the stable has been watched night and day by a man with a blunderbuss. Of course everybody knows, including the dupes who have laid their money on him, that the favorite has been “dosed.” Some suspect that the watcher may have been bribed by the enemy, and permitted his care to be drugged for a fee. It might be; but the odds are in favor of his innocence. The experienced mind will look for a larger villain. There was a big sum of money on the race: it would be an easy matter for the owner of the horse winning to scratch him, or allow him to be beaten, and win more than was on the board and in the stakes. Horses have been sold out by their owners, on American and English race courses, and will be again, so long as knavery lasts in the form of gambling on horse racing. And when you observe that said owner is particularly tumultuous and volcanic in the expression of his wrath, and encrimsons the surrounding air with richly embroidered profanity, then you may be tolerably sure that you might reach the secret of the case if you could only get deep down into his trousers pockets.

In no other human enterprise is it more frequently demonstrated that “the race is not always to the swift.” It is a not uncommon practice for owners of a horse by confederacy with book makers, and other necessary aids, to groom a horse to win a heavy stake upon a dead certainty. First the horse and his capabilities are discovered. Then he is ridden in one or two races to lose. He becomes regarded as a permanent tail-ender. 571His appearance on the blackboard is greeted with derision. Reports are circulated that the horse is “sick,” particularly just before the event for which he is being held back. He makes his appearance when his time has come. Nobody will bet on him. The wildest sort of odds against him are cheerfully offered, and as quietly gathered in by the confederates of the owner and pool-seller. He takes the field and comes in an easy winner in such a handsome manner that old sports who were not in the combine, recognize, with words not loud but deep, as they go down into their pockets to settle, that they have been “sold again.” In this as in all other ways the average bettor or amateur gambler stands no show. He has no chance, though he may think he has. He is simply food for sharks.

As the “king maker” to the claimant to the thrones of the days of old, so the jockey to the horse race, and to the high hopes which rest upon the particular animal in his charge. The jockey is generally a kind of person who would be a stable-boy, a boot-black or a street sweeper, if he were not a jockey. Being a jockey, he is clothed in purple and fine linen, and gets his $10,000 or $12,000 per year—which would pay salaries for two ministers of the gospel of the very first water, or of at least four superintendents of schools. Is the jockey paid this magnificent salary for being a jockey? Not at all; nor is he paid for being honest. It is for being honest to his employer in carrying out his wishes in regard to the horse, as it may happen to be more profitable to the owner to win or lose. Do jockeys ever sell a race? Probably: sometimes in obedience to the orders of the owner, and occasionally on his own account. In the latter event it is generally his last race; but he can afford to retire to an opulent private life, for his reward is exceedingly liberal. Who shall tell when the jockey is riding honestly or dishonestly? He alone knows the minutest shade of the temper and capacity of the horse. Half a nose may lose a race when he has seemed to have done his best. And yet he might have won by a neck had he so elected. The plain amateur, everyday sport who is slated to be swindled in any case, as well as the anxious owner, the vendor of pools, and the maker of books, are all at the mercy of the discretion of the jockey. Hence the frills upon his raiment; hence a salary so large that it is concluded that life can offer him no other temptations. In very many instances, indeed, the jockey is the instrument through whom the thousands of dupes are sold, the owner sometimes directing the robbery, and on other occasions being included in the list of goods delivered. The high-salaried jockey is a part of an evil system. Take away the gambling feature from horse racing, and let us have honest sport, and the jockey would be glad indeed to ride “square” for a dollar a 572day and found. And there will be no honest competitions of speed on the race-track until the immoral, rascally and thieving element of betting on the result, or gambling, as you may be pleased to term it, has been abolished, either by legal enactment, by public opinion, or by repudiation on the part of the people who now patronize it—in which latter case, the victims refusing to come to the fold to be sheared as they do now, the evil would die for want of pockets to pick.

In the “handicap” race lies one of the great opportunities for rascality on the race track. There is no doubt that some of the events which offer the largest prizes, in which the public takes the deepest interest, and which seem on the surface to be about the fairest tests of all for a square contest of speed, have become masterpieces of organized scoundrelism. The theory of the handicap is that all the horses are so exactly weighted that they start on a footing of perfect equality in the race, and that if it were possible for them all to cross in an exact line at the starting point, they would come under the wire nose to nose. Of course, to secure such an exact start is an impossibility, and the struggle is presumed to be a supreme effort on the part of each jockey to make up the space lost at the start. It makes a grand and thrilling spectacle to witness a handicap race: but it is generally a delusion. They are just going through the motions, and any gentlemen in the combination can tell you when the “start” is declared which horse is destined to come out first at the finish. In cases of crooked races of this kind, the horse is generally selected a season in advance and a combination between certain leading horsemen is made to allow him to be the winner and divide stakes and betting winnings. The stable from which this “dark horse” comes will have generally two or three others in the field, and the selected winner is ridden falsely for a whole season, and given a bad record, so as to give him so ridiculously light a weight at the handicap race that his winning is a comparative certainty. To be sure, other elements of fitness to win the race have been carefully ascertained, and his exact speed and staying qualities are well known to those interested. When he goes into the field a certain winner, he gets lightest weights and the longest odds to be had, and when he comes under the wire he is worth his weight in gold to his owner or managers. Sometimes it happens that there are two cliques working in the dark in this fashion, and then a division has to be made. A private meeting between the two selected horses is had, and this is a race for keeps and in which the best horse wins. Then both parties form a common syndicate, and labor to double the anticipated profits. Being leaders of the turf, they have ample opportunity to gull the public. The sporting papers, or sporting editors are “tipped” to systematically “bear” 573the winning horse, and to “write up” other horses which appear to give the public a fair chance for winning, or at least an even chance in betting upon the few favorites which have been selected for “stool pigeons,” which are “bulled,” in the estimation of the public without stint. When it comes to the test, the dark horse has a comparative walk-over; the syndicate reaps a golden harvest, and the public can divide the loss between the individual suckers who have been gulled. Sometimes it has happened that a genuine dark horse has honestly won, and these schemers come to grief. But that is as rare as teeth in the mouth of a hen, and the fact remains, generally speaking, that in this as in every other department of betting on the events of the turf, the confiding public is swindled on a deliberate system by which the professional gambler could not lose if he chose, unless he were to conspire actively to attain that end. This, however, there is no fear of, for a more selfish, cold-blooded and rapacious breed of blood-hounds never pursued a defenceless prey.

The author of this work has traveled over most of the surface of the United States, and has set up the green tables in towns and cities in nearly every State in the Union, and in each and every instance he has been compelled to purchase official protection for his unlawful trade; making payments in some cases to mayors; sometimes to the chiefs of police or city marshals, and on other occasions to individual policemenpolicemen. In this way the authority that is invested with the duty of protecting society is suborned and prostituted to the vile end of extending official protection to the very crime which it is its sworn duty to exterminate. That this perversion of public authority is almost universal seems to be unquestionable. We have recently been furnished with a forcible example of this in the great city of Chicago, where it has been strikingly illustrated that when rogues fall out honest men sometimes get their own. For months in the western metropolis efforts had been made to compel the public authorities to the enforcement of the law regarding this vice. It was persistently denied by the local authorities that there was any gambling going on in Chicago, and this in the face of a general public knowledge to the contrary. In order to prove the hypocrisy of the position of the officers of the city government in this matter, a daily newspaper entered upon a crusade upon its own account. Private detectives were hired and raids constantly made for some weeks, resulting in many arrests, the seizure of a large quantity of gaming apparatus and its destruction in the court-rooms of the city. Yet, still the authorities refused to act and continued to ignore the prevalence of gambling rooms throughout the city, even after the press had given lists of names and full information upon which to proceed. It was publicly and very directly intimated 574that this alleged ignorance on the part of the city government was a matter of bargain and sale—that specific money payments were made by the criminals for immunity from the proper consequences of their criminal operations; that, in fact, the officials of a great corporation had been suborned to become accessory to the operations of the gamblers. One part of this nefarious understanding was that while the races at Washington Park were in progress the down-town pool-rooms should remain closed in order that the race-track swindlers might be enabled to make the most of their opportunities. With the same scrupulous fidelity which is said to characterize transactions between some other violators of the law, this agreement was carried out. Then followed another race meeting at the track of one Corrigan, a noted horseman on the West Side. Corrigan claimed the same privilege of shutting out the pool-room competition as had been extended to the Washington Park club.

The pool-room keepers refused to recognize any obligation of the kind. They claimed that their agreement with the city administration had been completed; that they could not afford to remain longer closed up, and that by reason of their payment of the assessments which had been regularly levied upon them by the representatives of the city administration, they were entitled to continue their business without molestation. Then Corrigan began a war upon them by the aid of a private detective organization, and the shameful fact that the gamblers had the protection of the police force and its management became apparent beyond dispute. Not only was this the case, but the officials who had hitherto placidly ignored general and widespread gambling in the center of the city, became the active and open allies of the city gamblers, and used their legal powers in an endeavor to punish Corrigan by making arrests at the race-track. Corrigan resorted to the courts for protection against this interference, and secured a bill of injunction restraining the Mayor and Chief of Police from interfering with book making at his track. In the bill filed to secure this injunction the whole disgraceful bargain between the representatives of the city’s police force and the crooks and gamblers was distinctly related, alleging a direct compact of corruption by which crime purchased a stipulated protection at the hands of those sworn to uphold and enforce the laws. There is little reason to doubt that this practice is not confined to Chicago. It exists everywhere. It calls for a remedy, because it is a dangerous and deadly menace to morality, and to the security and safety of society. An aroused public opinion is needed everywhere to offset this great evil, and it is one of the earnest purposes of this work that good people may be awakened to the sense of the danger that threatens the public welfare in this particular. The foundation of justice, the fountain of the law, are thus assailed with an unscrupulous boldness that would be incredible if 575the facts were not beyond dispute. It is impossible to conceive a graver danger to the best interests of the republic than this widespread pollution of the honor of the custodians of law and morality, and the instinct of self-preservation on the part of all the decent elements of society should point the way to a united effort to secure reform and redress.

Year by year the fever of gambling on the races increases in intensity and the range of its operations. Thousands upon thousands go to the races who would not be able to distinguish between a Kentucky thoroughbred and a Miami valley towpath mule. They do not go for the “sport” there is in a splendid contest between the noblest of the brute creation. They go to “speculate,” to “buy pools;” in short, to gamble, in the idiotic hope that by some blind chance they may return a “winner,” with a hat full of gold bought for a silver dollar. In fact they go out sheep and they return home shorn. Speaking of the recent universality of this gambling mania, a story goes that lately a St. Louis wholesale merchant’s cashier came to him one day and said:

“I should like to get away this morning sir; my sister is to be married to-day.”

“I’m feeling very unwell, sir, and if you could spare me, I’d like to be excused for to-day.”

The amiable merchant cheerfully gave the requested permission. Shortly after the errand boy appeared.

“Please, sir; my grandmother died last night, and she’s to be buried this afternoon. Please may I go home?”

“To be sure, my boy,” said the merchant. “Sorry for your mother; here’s a quarter for you.”

“Well,” soliloquized the merchant, “since they’re all gone, I might as well shut up shop. I guess I’ll call and see the doctor to-day.”

At the doctor’s he got word that the physician had just been called away to visit a patient in the country, so he concluded to do some business with his lawyer. At the latter’s office he discovered that the man of law had gone to file a paper in the probate court.

“Well, if I can’t see anybody,” said he to himself, “I might just as well go over to the races awhile.”

As he approached the grand stand he observed astride the roof a small animate object, which closer inspection proved to him was his office boy, who was thus attending his grandmother’s funeral. In front of the stand stood the doctor holding a roll of bills in one hand, and shouting for bets on his favorite horse. Up on the stand he observed the lawyer wildly 576swinging his hat and hallooing like a maniac. Passing around the corner of the stand he came upon his sick clerk and the one who was marrying his sister, each with a schooner of lager in his hand and in an evidently hilarious condition.

“Well,” mused he, “King David was a good judge of human nature when he said, ‘All men are liars.’”

There is one topic more that may appropriately be used to conclude this chapter, and that is the recalcitrancy to the highest welfare of the people, and the best interest of true public morality, of the most powerful instrument for good or evil that to-day exists. The press of the country is not only fully cognizant of the deplorable evils that arise from gambling on the turf, but lends to it countenance, encouragement and aid; and it does so undoubtedly for the money there is in it. The newspapers spread page after page of the turf and its events over their daily issues. The attractions and the interest of the race meetings are set forth with all the skill at their command. They become agents of thieves by publishing “pointers” on the races, and giving advice to bettors which is no more honest nor reliable than that of the sharks of the pool-room. They are thus false to their high mission; false to their lofty responsibilities, which should in all things guide and direct; false to the interests of society, and to the welfare of their readers and patrons. Surely it is time to call a halt in the prostitution of this noble influence to the purposes of race track gambling and systematic knavery. The sordid influence which leads them to become an active party to the debauchery of public morals would no doubt give them the cohesion in action that grows out of a common source of plunder; but newspapers are amenable to one influence—that of a united public opinion. Let the ministers of the gospel, the natural guardians of our morality; the teachers, the parents, and all good men everywhere, bring a united and emphatic protest to bear upon the press, to induce it to desist from encouraging this national crime, and from familiarizing the youth of America with the methods and fascinations of turf gambling, and we may yet hope to see the newspapers of the land stand upon this question on the side of the family hearth, and of God and morality.

The origin of the commercial exchange is coeval with the beginning of commerce. According to that eminent Oriental scholar and historian, Rawlinson, the city of Babylon contained several of these marts, each devoted to the sale of some particular description of merchandise, and Herodotus intimates that one of them was set apart exclusively to the sale of wheat, corn, barley, millet and sesame. Athens and Rome also had their exchanges, and during the middle ages the traders of Venice were wont to assemble in the Rialto. Marseilles boasted of a Chamber of Commerce in the fifteenth century, and as early as 1566 London merchants were accustomed daily to convene in the open air at various localities in Lombard Street, until the erection of the present Royal Exchange, and to-day exchanges or bourses are among the prominent commercial features of every great European city.

The idea of a commercial exchange germinated in the United States before the war of the American Revolution. Here, as in Europe, the basis of every mercantile exchange is a voluntary union of business men, who deem it for their mutual interest regularly to assemble in some convenient locality, for the purpose of effecting the sale of commoditiescommodities or securities, and of profiting by the fluctuations in market prices. Stock exchanges, produce exchanges, chambers of commerce and boards of trade are all essentially identical in character, the principal point of difference being the nature of the commodities bought and sold.

The New York Chamber of Commerce, founded in 1768, is the oldest organization of this kind in this country. Similar institutions were established in Baltimore in 1821, and in Philadelphia in 1833. In 1858 there were ten chambers of commerce and twenty boards of trade between Portland and San Francisco. In 1865 these bodies organized what is known as the “National Board of Trade.” In this association are represented Albany, Baltimore, Boston, Buffalo, Charleston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Denver, Detroit, Dubuque, Louisville, Milwaukee, Newark, New Orleans, New York, Oswego, Peoria, Philadelphia, Pittsburg, Portland, Providence, Richmond, St. Louis, St. Paul, Toledo, Troy and Wilmington.

As an institution, the commercial exchange has been productive of some good, but much harm. If restricted in its scope to the legitimate purposes of commerce, it is unquestionably of the highest benefit to the 578business world. When its operations are diverted into illegitimate channels it becomes a source of incalculable injury to society. As a great market place, it plays an important part in modern civilization; as a gigantic agency for the promotion of gambling in the commodities of the world, it is a snare, a delusion and a curse.

Not all the gaming hells of the country combined afford facilities for gambling equal to those furnished by these organizations. The faro dealer places a limit upon the stakes wagered; upon the floor of ’Change one may bet without limit. Not everyone can obtain admittance to the gilded salon of the tiger; the commission merchant, or broker, who does business upon the Stock Exchange or Board of Trade accepts orders from all comers. The character of the transactions in which his principals engage is to him a matter of indifference, his interest being centered in their frequency and extent.

To one who is not versed in the methods of conducting trading in the mercantile exchange, the jargon of the ordinary journalistic report of a day is unmeaning gibberish. “Longs” and “shorts,” “puts, calls and straddles,” “scalpers” and “plungers,” a “squeal,” a “squeeze,” an “unloading,” are terms as destitute of significance as though they were words from a foreign tongue. Yet the mode of doing business is not so complicated that any man of average intelligence need fail to grasp it. The author—as he has already stated in his autobiography—was once connected with a firm operating on the Chicago Board of Trade, and as such, acquired an intimate acquaintance with the modus operandi of its dealings, and he believes that his work would be incomplete should he ignore the marble palace through whose noiselessly swinging doors so many thousands have entered upon the path of shame which leads to ruin. Not that the Chicago Board of Trade is either worse or better than the score of similar institutions scattered through the country; nor is it intended to select that organization as the object of special animadversion. The methods of all commercial exchanges are, as has been said, substantially identical.

Members of these bodies may be classified on any one of several general principles. One system of classification has relation to the character of their operations; in other words, all members may be divided into two classes, the first comprising those who venture on their own account (popularly known as “speculators”), and the second embracing those who buy or sell only on the receipt of orders from outsiders (i. e., brokers). Under another system, members may be classified as those who wish to enhance the prices of commodities on the one hand, and those who, on the other, seek to depress market quotations. The former are technically known as “bulls,” and the latter as “bears.” These sobriquets are derived from the well-known propensities of the two descriptions of 579animals, the one to hoist and the other to pull down. A “bull” is one who seeks to advance prices; a “bear” one who strives to lower them. The distinction between “longs” and “shorts” is substantially of the same nature. A “long” is a speculator who, believing that the price of a certain commodity is destined to advance, buys freely in anticipation of a rise. It follows that he is naturallynaturally, if not inherently, a “bull.” On the other hand, a “short,” judging that quotations are destined to decline, sells wherever he can find a purchaser. He, naturally, is a “bear.” It must not be forgotten, however, that neither of these parties for a moment actually expects either to receive or deliver the articles which he buys or sells; and the reason for this apparently inconsistent statement will be explained hereafter.

With these few prefatory words of explanation, we will pursue the course of the speculator, after which will be given a definition of the slang terms used, and following this the reader will find a concise description of the adventitious agencies employed in the manipulation of the market.

And first, as to the speculator: He may fall within either one of two categories—the professional or the occasional. Yet even under the general caption of professional speculators, operators may be divided into two classes. One embraces men whose large wealth enables them to contrive and engineer what is popularly known as a “corner;” the other includes those who follow in their wake, believing that they can discern their intentions, and laying the flattering delusion to their souls that they can presage the course of prices. The professional speculator, as being the “larger fish,” should first claim our notice. He it is who originates and conducts “corners,” by which term is meant the forcing up of prices for any given commodity to a point far beyond their legitimate value, with a view to enriching the few at the expense of the many. Men of this stamp ordinarily associate with themselves kindred spirits, whose natural bent is the same as their own, and whose capital may prove of value in carrying out their schemes. The combination having been formed, the first objective point is the selection of some commodity or stock to “corner.” The choice having been made, the next step is, quietly and unostentatiously to buy all of it that can be purchased. Let not the unsophisticated reader for a moment suppose, however, that the syndicate thus formed proposes to buy the article in question at current rates. Far otherwise. Prices must be depressed, and there is an obvious way in which to effect this result. Every market in the world is supposed to be governed by the normal relations between supply and demand. It follows that free offerings of any commodity are likely to reduce its quotable value. What, then, are the tactics of the “operator”? Evidently to offer to sell freely. Under the influence of the precipitation of large lots, prices recede, and the speculator is shrewd enough to purchase “at the 581bottom of the market.” Of course he does not expose his policy by buying such enormous quantities in his own name. He has recourse to firms doing a strictly commission business, of whom he employs a multiplicity, and who always refuse to disclose the name of their principal—not from any high sense of honor, but from motives of self-interest, for the simple reason that such exposure would result in a peremptory withdrawal of business. Having secured the desired quantity of the stock or commodity selected, the clique proceeds to advance the price, not abruptly but gradually, selling a little here and buying a little there, the object being the mystification of the miscellaneous dealers. At last comes what is known as the “squeeze.” The cabal having all, or at least the great preponderance, of the article where they can, if they choose, call for its immediate delivery, refuse to entertain any offers at less than the limit fixed. The consequence is that the “shorts”—i. e., the men who have sold to the syndicate—are compelled to settle at the price to which the coalition has forced quotations. The method of operation can be best illustrated by a suppositious case. Let us suppose—simply by way of illustration—that a coterie of dealers in grain resolve to force up the price of wheat, although not to localize the illustration, we might assume the formation of a “corner” on some one of the numerous stock exchanges with which the country is blessed (?), or cursed. But let us take the Chicago Board of Trade, with whose methods the author is most familiar: Let us suppose that the article to be “cornered” is “July wheat,” and that the combination has been formed in March. Resort is had to the tactics above explained. Wheat for July delivery is first depressed, then bought, and in the end sold without regard to its inherent value, but solely with a view to what the “shorts” may be forced to pay. The profits of such “corners,” thus constructed, are sometimes enormous. Yet, as in the game of faro, the most expert dealer is sometimes put to heavy loss by the combination which is playing against the bank; so even the machinations of the strongest and shrewdest operators are brought to naught either by a combination of brighter minds, by a failure carefully to guard every weak spot, or, it may be, by very chance. The same elements are present in both games, faro and stock-jobbing. These corners are conceived in cupidity, carried on in deceit, and consummated in heartlessness; yet there are not wanting those who affirm that the commercial exchange is the very prop and bulwark of American commerce! That the exchange, in its legitimate scope, affords an easy and safe way of doing business, cannot be denied; that its practical operation is to foster speculation and encourage reckless gambling is equally indisputable.

This assertion seems, on its face, perhaps, ill-considered, yet it is abundantly justified by facts. We have, thus far, considered only the tactics of the professional “operator.” Let us, for a moment, consider 582the fortune (or misfortune) that awaits the occasional speculator. The latter closely resembles the man who plunges, headlong, into the Niagara rapids without even a rudimentary knowledge of the art of swimming. Like a chip, he sports upon the crest of the eddying waters of the whirlpool, until, gradually drawn nearer and nearer toward the centre, he is sucked into its very vortex, sinking to reappear no more. Yet this comparison is weak. The outside speculator who fancies that he can buy or sell on “pointers,” (i. e. private information) given him by parties well-posted, very nearly approaches an idiot in the matter of intelligence. Let us take, as a single illustration, a case which fell under the author’s personal observation. The experience of the victim (whom we will call Jones) is by no means exceptional. Mr. “Jones” was advised by a friend (?) that “old Higgenbotham” had bought up all of a certain article and that within sixty days prices were destined materially to appreciate. Naturally “Mr. Jones” found his interest, as well as his cupidity stimulated. What would his friend recommend him to do? “Buy, of course; and buy heavily,” was the answer. “But I don’t know how to buy,” objected Jones. “Why,” replied his advisor, “that’s the easiest thing in the world, Q X & Z, one of the best houses in the street, are particular friends of mine. Take my card and go down and see them. They’ll use you right.” The unfortunate “Jones” listened to the siren song. He interviewed Q X & Z, by whom he was received with distinguished consideration. The firm of brokers explained to him how he could, by depositing with them a “margin” of five per cent. on the par value of his prospective purchase, become the putative owner of twenty times the amount of his deposit. Of course he must buy for future delivery, this not being a “cash” transaction. But there was no doubt that prices would advance. Oh, certainly not.

Mr. “Jones” was naturally a little timorous, being unaccustomed to speculation. He advanced a few hundred dollars, however, by way of “margins,” and at the conclusion of the “deal,” found himself winner by a handsome sum. His experience was a revelation to him. He ventured again and again, with varying success. Finally he found himself heavily interested on the wrong side of the market. He was assured that prices must necessarily take a turn, and he could ill afford to lose the sum already risked.

To understand the nature of the risk which he had incurred, however, some explanation of the method of speculating by means of margins is necessary. To illustrate: let us suppose that a certain article—say, wheat is to-day at $1.00 per bushel, of course 10,000 bushels are nominally worth $10,000. Imagine a legitimate purchase of such a quantity at these figures. Should the price advance one cent per bushel, the 10,000 bushels would be worth $10,100; should it fall off one cent the wheat 583would be worth only $9,900. In the former case the buyer would win $100; in the latter he would lose a like sum. In the case of a bona-fide sale, the whole of the $10,000 is actually paid. In a speculative transaction the purchaser only advances a part of the price, usually a few cents per bushel, which is placed in the hands of his broker, who gives him a receipt therefor. The commission merchant conducts the business in his own name, assuming personal responsibility for the payment of the money. To protect himself against possible loss, which may result from violent fluctuations in the market, he insists upon a marginal deposit as above stated. Should the depreciation in value approach the limit of the margin, the speculator is called upon to advance more money. If he fail to do so, and the decline continues, the broker protects himself by selling out the article bought, charging his customer with the loss sustained, together with his own brokerage charges, and handing over to him whatever small balance may remain to his credit. In the case of a speculative sale, precisely the same methods are employed, except that as the seller’s gain is derived from a depreciation and his loss through an advance, when the “margin” is in danger of being “wiped out,” the broker closes the transaction by buying on the customer’s account instead of selling.

But to return to the experience of Mr. “Jones.” As has been said he had ventured largely, and he found himself confronted with financial ruin. Although engaged in a money-making business, he had plunged so deeply into the maelstrom of speculation that his capital was seriously impaired. What was to be done? To withdraw meant bankruptcy; yet, how could he go on? Only one way presented itself to him. He was the executor of his brother’s will and the guardian of his brother’s minor children. The trust funds placed under his control might be utilized to avert impending disaster. Not that he would wrong the orphans whose patrimony had been committed to his care, but he would temporarily borrow the money of the estate, to be returned with interest, within a few weeks. He succumbed to the temptation and the result need hardly be told. The combination formed for the purpose of controlling prices absorbed these funds as it had the others, with the same relentless rapacity as do the knights of the green cloth the last hard-earned dollar of the day-laborer. The day of settlement arrived, the bubble burst and the unfortunate man found himself buried fathoms deep in dishonor and ruin. Not only was he penniless, but he realized that wherever he went the finger of scorn pointed out his every step. A temperate man before, he plunged headlong into dissipation. His wife found herself compelled to leave him, and to-day, stripped of fortune, bereft of family, deserted by friends, he walks the streets with faltering tread, aimlessly and hopelessly; living God knows how; hanging about bucket-shops and pool-rooms, considering that a fortunate day on which, honestly or dishonestly, he can earn half a dollar.

584Nor is this an isolated case. The speculator who has been alluded to is but a type of a class of men whose name is legion. The ruined reputations of confidential clerks, cashiers and administrators of trust funds mark the path of the reckless operator as milestones mark the causeway. The terrible fascination of gambling, whether through speculation or cards, when once the votary has succumbed to it, can be most fitly compared to that of the opium habit. The victim of this body-debasing, soul-destroying vice is willing to risk his hopes, not only for time but for eternity, on the gratification of his appetite. So does the devotee of the faro table or the man infatuated with the allurements of the exchange stake his life, his honor, his very salvation upon the turn of a die or the rise or fall of a particular stock.

Better, far better, were it for the man who enters a gaming resort that his first wager prove unsuccessful; far happier would he be who determines to “speculate in futures” did his first venture result in heavy loss. In either case the influence of failure would prove a deterrent sufficiently powerful to avert years of future misery, if not ultimate destruction.

The technical nomenclature of the exchange—sometimes termed the “slang of the street”—which, as has been remarked, is incomprehensible to the uninitiateduninitiated, in itself affords some key to the nature of the business transacted. Some of the most common terms are here defined, although to enumerate them all would swell the dimensions of the present chapter beyond the limits assigned it.

A “scalper” is an operator who makes it his practice to close his transactions as soon as he can see a small profit, say a quarter of one cent. His operations are neither more nor less than betting on a rise or fall in prices.

The “guerilla” is a species of the genus “scalper,” few in number, and makes a specialty of dealing in stocks and commodities: So unsavory is the reputation of this class that it has fixed the appellation of “Hell’s Kitchen” and “Robber’s Roost” upon certain localities in the New York Stock Exchange.

Still another class is composed of those who strive to enrich themselves by the fictitious rise and fall of a particular stock in which they constantly deal.

The terms “long” and “short,” when used as adjectives, have been already explained, and their signification when employed as nouns is practically the same. A “long” is a speculator who has bought heavily in anticipation of a rise. A “short” is one who has sold freely in expectation of a decline. The action of the former is called “loading.”

“Forcing quotations” is keeping up prices by any means whatever. When this is accomplished by the dissemination of fictitious news or the 585circulation of unfounded rumors, the operator is said to “balloon” prices.

A speculator is said to “take a flyer” when he engages in some side venture; he “flies kites” when he expands operations injudiciously; he “holds the market” when he prevents a decline in prices by buying heavily; he “milks the street” when he manipulates so skilfully that they rise or fall at his pleasure; he “unloads” when he sells the particular stock or commodity of which he is “long;” he “spills stock” when he offers large quantities with a view to lowering or “breaking” prices; if he is successful in these tactics he is said to “saddle the market.”

A “bear” is said to be “gunning” a stock when he employs all his energy and craft to “break” its price. He “covers,” or “covers his shorts,” when he buys to fulfill his contracts. He “sells out” a man by forcing prices down so that the latter is obliged to relinquish what he is “carrying,” perhaps to fail.

The nature of a “corner” has been already set forth in detail. The operator or clique organizing and managing it is said to “run” it. The day when final settlement must be made between the opposing parties engaged in such a transaction is termed “settling day.” If the “bears” are forced to settle at unusually high prices they are said to be “squeezed.” The “squeeze” which has followed many a corner has precipitated not a few wealthy men into financial ruin. This circumstance, however, is usually a matter of utter indifference to the manipulators. The success of a “corner” is sometimes prevented by what is known as a “squeal,” or revelation of the secrets of the pool or clique by one of its members. Sometimes the plans of the organizers of a “corner” are brought to naught by a “leak” in the pool, that is, by one of the members secretly selling out his holdings. Of course, a “corner” can be formed only on what is known as a “future,” or future delivery, by which is meant the sale and purchase of some stock or commodity to be delivered at some period in the future.

Yet another form of gambling very common upon the floors of stock and commercial exchanges is known as dealing in “puts,” “calls” and “straddles.” When a person buys a “put,” he pays a stipulated sum for the privilege of selling to the party to whom it is paid, a certain quantity of some particular stock or other article, within a fixed time, at a designated price. Thus A might pay to B one hundred dollars for the privilege of selling him one hundred shares of Union Pacific stock at a stipulated price, within ten days. As a matter of course, the price named is always a little below the current quotation ruling at the time the contract is made, i. e., the day upon which the “put” is bought. If, for instance, the “put” is sold at 80 cents on that day, and the market declines to 75, A might tender to B the one hundred shares, and the latter would be compelled to take them at that price. In such a case A would 586have gained five dollars per share, or five hundred dollars in all, provided he had “covered his shorts,” i. e., bought in the stock which he had already put, at the latter figure. As a matter of fact, neither party contemplated an actual delivery. The market having declined, A’s net gain is, of course, only four hundred dollars, he having already paid one hundred dollars to B. This appears an easy method of winning money. As a matter of fact, however, experience has shown that very few men win through the purchase of “puts” and “calls.”

A “call” is similar in its general nature to a “put,” but differs from it in that the buyer of the former has the privilege of calling or buying a certain quantity, under the same conditions. The seller of the “put” contracts to buy, and of the “call” to sell, whenever the demand is made.

A “straddle” is a combination of the “put” and the “call,” and is the option of either buying or selling. The cost of these “puts,” “calls,” and “straddles,” which are known as “privileges,” varies from one to five per cent. of the par value of the stock, or the market value of the commodity involved, and depends upon the time they have to run, the range covered, and the activity and sensitiveness of the market.

It is claimed in behalf of these privileges that they are, in their essence, really contracts of insurance, and as such are entirely legitimate. The general public, however, has always regarded them as a complex system of betting, and believes that they constitute one of the most pernicious features of the exchange. The fallacy of the argument in their favor, above outlined, becomes apparent when it is remembered that the law regards all contracts of insurance as being one form of gambling, and sanctions and enforces them only on grounds of public policy. The burden of proof is upon the defenders of “puts” and “calls” to show that, even if it be conceded that they are contracts of insurance, they can be justified as being necessary to the furtherance of commerce or the welfare of society. That they do not tend to promote commerce is shown by the fact that neither party to the transaction for a moment contemplates the actual delivery of the article bought or sold. It is essentially a wager between two individuals as to the future course of the market, one betting that prices will advance, and the other that they will decline. The absurdity of claiming that they promote the general welfare of society, (were such a claim advanced), may be easily demonstrated by calling attention to the economic consideration that the winner has done nothing to produce the money which he pockets, and by pointing to the pecuniary loss and moral debasement which they entail. They sustain somewhat of the same relation to the dealings of the large operators as does the keno room to the faro bank.

587The legislature of Illinois, a few years ago, placed the seal of its condemnation upon the practice by making it a misdemeanor to deal in privileges. It is said (although the author is unable to vouch for the truth of the statement), that this virtuous action on the part of the lawmakers was due to the influence brought to bear upon them by a well-known member of the Chicago Board of Trade, who had been dealing extensively in “puts” and “calls,” and had lost heavily. However that may be, the Chicago Board, after permitting the practice for years, adopted a rule prohibiting their sale, and even went to the length of suspending a few members for its violation, among them being one of the most prominent operators upon the floor. This spasm of virtue, however, was not of long duration, and at the present time such privileges may be procured from members of that august body with the greatest ease.

The action of this great Western Exchange in the premises may possibly have been prompted by motives other than a desire to comply with the statutes. Long after the enactment of the law, privileges were sold as freely as before its passage. In time, however, it was found to be a two-edged sword. Operators found it possible to purchase “puts” for the purpose of buying against them, and to buy “calls” with a view to shield themselves from loss when they became “bears.” Thus an army of sellers appeared when the “call” price was reached, and a horde of buyers when the market touched the price at which “puts” had been sold, the consequence being that the range of the market was curtailed. Members objected to tactics which robbed the market of that elasticity so dear to the speculator’s heart. Carping critics say that the virtue of the directors was the outgrowth of disappointeddisappointed self-seeking. In other words—speculation—the very life-blood of the exchange was being curtailed. Hinc illae lachrymae.

But the action of the directors, as was soon found, rendered it possible for certain members, who were willing to incur the risk, to do a thriving business in privileges provided the transactions were secret. Of course firms desiring to obey the rules were at a disadvantage, and legitimate brokerage suffered. There was one obvious, logical conclusion: “Allow every one to engage in the business or no one.” This commended itself to common sense, and a carefully worded resolution was adopted, the practical effect of which, as every one understood it, was virtually to remove the ban from the sale of privileges. Since that time, “puts” and “calls” may be purchased with the same ease as one may pay his taxes.

But let us return to the methods employed in the manipulation of prices. Reference has been already made to the very common practice of attempting to “bull” or “bear” quotations by buying or selling large quantities, or “blocks” of some particular article. There is probably no 588description of market in the world so extremely sensitive as the commercial exchange. A sale or purchase of any given commodity by certain, well-known operators, is often sufficient to excite its pulse to fever heat. A similar result may ensue from a report that the Secretary of the Treasury contemplates a call of a certain denomination of bonds; that Bismarck had been heard to say that the French blood was too thin and needed a little more iron; that a norther in Texas had killed a herd of cattle; that a few grasshoppers had been seen in the neighborhood of Fargo; or that the mercury was believed to be about to fall in Northern Minnesota. The great speculators, the master minds of these gigantic institutions, are quick to perceive this sensitiveness, and equally prompt to avail themselves of it. Fictitious news is as potent an agency in advancing or depressing prices as is the genuine article, and it is a sad truth that there are not wanting large operators who do not scruple to employ it. It is said—and there is good reason to believe the statement to be true—that there are men at all great commercial centers whose only occupation is the dissemination of unfounded reports, with a view of raising or lowering the prices of certain commodities in regard to which the rise or fall of a fraction of a cent may mean the gain or loss of millions. These manufacturers of fictitious news are said to “wear purple and fine linen and fare sumptuously every day.” The results of their operations are to be found in the wrecking of important financial and corporate interests and the corresponding enrichment of the unprincipled manipulators who employ them.

Some years ago, there came a mysterious rumor to the New York Stock Exchange, that the directors of a certain railroad in the Northwest had decided upon taking a step which could not fail to prove disastrous in the extreme to the interests of the corporation. No one was able to tell just where the rumor originated, yet it found sufficient credence to depress the price of the road’s stock, and to induce free selling. The next day came the refutation of the story; the stock recovered its tone, and the clique in whose interest the lie had been sent over the wires reaped a profit of $60,000. In the slang of Wall Street this was called “a plum.” It is difficult to see the difference in moral turpitude between such tactics as these and “steering” for a “brace” faro bank.

An acquaintance of the author, who served with distinction during the late civil war, on his return home, was employed by a company owning alleged oil lands in Pennsylvania, to superintend the sinking of wells within its territory. The salary was liberal and the duties not arduous. Wells were duly sunk, but no oil discovered, after a time, the gentleman in question received instructions from the headquarters of the company in an Eastern city to telegraph, on a certain day, that a well recently sunk, was yielding a certain large number of barrels per day. This dispatch 589was to be followed, a day later, by one of similar tenor, making a like assertion in reference to another well. The party who gave these instructions well knew that a certain class of speculators on the exchanges are in the habit of discounting private information through the bribery of telegraph employees, and he placed no little reliance upon this fact for the furtherance of his scheme. The event proved that he had calculated wisely. The telegrams were duly sent and were read by other parties before they reached the man to whom they were addressed. The result was that the company’s stock bounded upward with the celerity of a rubber-ball, and the projectors of the enterprize unloaded at an enormous profit. Of course, the purchasers found out that they had been deceived, but as none of the officers of the corporation had disseminated the report of the finding of oil, it was impossible to attach any responsibility to them.

And yet there are not wanting those who affirm, and stoutly maintain, that without the commercial exchange, business would be brought to a stand-still, and commerce paralyzed; that Boards of Trade and Produce and Stock Exchanges are prime factors in advancing the welfare of the country. And this is said despite the fact that the percentage of legitimate business done is utterly insignificant in comparison with that which is purely speculative in its character. The sales of one agricultural product alone upon the floor of a single mart of this sort for one month alone have been known to equal the production of the entire country for a whole year! Is this legitimate commerce, or is it gambling on the wildest and most extensive scale? Members of various Boards in the United States who assume to do a strictly legitimate business, send out circulars through the rural districts, the sole object of which is to induce the recipients to speculate upon the floor of ’Change. These communications depict, in glowing terms, the ease and certainty with which ignorant countrymen may acquire fortunes in a day, through the purchase of a “put” or a “call,” or a “straddle.” They purport to explain, fully and clearly, the methods of speculating in stocks and grain, and represent the system as simple and easily comprehensible, while the authors know that the system is in itself complex and the issue a venture—at the very best—uncertain. It is not pretended that the transaction contemplates an actual transfer of the commodity from seller to buyer. Is this frank? Is it manly? Is it honest?

Scarcely a decade has passed since the whole country rung with the echoes of the “Fund W” scandal. Unquestionably the men who engineered that gigantic scheme of fraud were not representative members of any commercial exchange, yet it is equally certain that but for the facilities afforded for the perpetration of the fraud through the Exchanges’ methods of doing business, that stupendous swindle would have been impossible. Yet the infatuated speculators who do business through legitimate houses, 590believe that they can trust their own judgment as to the future of the market! It may be that such folly has its parallel, but it is not to be found in that of the man who stakes his money on the issuance of a particular card from a faro box.

Few of those who have never witnessed the daily routine of business on the floor of an Exchange can conceive the wild uproar, the hubbub, the confusion, the tumultuous excitement, which there reigns supreme. Let us take a glance at one of the best known. During the busy hours of the session the floor of the magnificently proportioned room is crowded. Scattered about at distances more or less regular, are large marble-topped tables, about which gather groups of men engaged in quiet, though sometimes earnest, conversation. These tables contain drawers, in which members, who pay well for the privilege, keep samples of the commodities in which they deal. Hurrying to and fro about the room may be seen brokers and their clerks, carrying in their hands small paper bags, containing samples of grain which has been consigned by growers or other shippers, for sale. Similar bags are strewed all over the tables. Everything indicates activity, and it is evident that important business is being transacted. The sound of the voices of the traders rising from the floor to the visitors’ gallery, joined to the clicking of the myriad of telegraphic instruments, reminds one of the ceaseless hum of bees around a hive, heard in midsummer, when the nodding clover and bending buckwheat invite the tireless workers to taste their sweets.

Such is the scene during the early hours, but as the morning advances the picture changes. In the center of the room are four octagonal “pits,” formed by short flights of steps which rise from the floor on the outside and again descend on the inside. In these so-called pits is carried on the heaviest business of the Exchange. One is devoted to the sale of wheat, another to corn, and a third to provisions, pork, lard, etc. Gradually, as the minutes and hours pass, they fill with an eager crowd of traders, which swells in numbers until the area itself and the steps leading to it, are literally jammed with anan excited throng, yelling, gesticulating, waving their arms and shaking their fists in each other’s faces. The hum has risen to a surge, and to the onlooker in the gallery the scene seems to have been transformed into Bedlam or pandemonium. On the upper row of steps of one of the pits, men stand facing each other, forty feet apart. One raises his hand and makes what appear to be cabalistic signals to the other, who makes some other equally mysterious signs. Then each produces a card on which he makes an entry, and the dumb show is duplicated by others. To understand this pantomime, no less than the significance of these frenzied cries and frantic gyrations of arms and fingers requires an education of peculiar character, the education of the habitué of the floor. Each motion of the hand, each turn of a finger has its significance, 591representing the quantity of the particular commodity sold, and the price at which it is bought. These angry, dissonant voices, proceed from the hoarse throats of opposing factions, one trying to “bull” and the other to “bear” the market, and each striving to rival the other in clamor and persistency. No wonder that the excitement is intense. The entire wheat crop of the country is being sold before it is harvested, and much of it before it is planted, and on transactions of such magnitude a variation in price of even a fraction of a cent, means the gain to one and loss to another of tens of thousands of dollars. Fortunes are accumulated and sunk in an hour. One operator sees wealth within his grasp; another perceives bankruptcy staring him in the face. It is not strange that under such circumstances the strongest passions in the human breast should struggle for mastery, and find vent in expressions as wild as they are exaggerated.

Yet outside this howling, seething, surging crowd, within hailing distance from the center of all this hubbub (were language audible at a distance of thirty feet), sits a row of men, some of them in the prime of life, some of them scarcely past its meridian, others wearing the silver crown of age. Cool, collected, seemingly dispassionate, they exchange conversation which appears to be humorous, to judge from the laughter which it provokes. To the casual observer, they seem to be in the “madding crowd,” but not of it. Yet one who carefully watches their movements may see that from time to time signals are exchanged between some one or other of them and some individual on the steps of the pit. These men, thus sitting apart, are the great operators, those who make prices, and whose every movement is watched, as possibly affording a clue to their intentions. Jealously, however, do they guard their secrets; impassable are their countenances, and imperturbable their demeanor. With the seemingly stolid indifference of the veteran gamester, who sees his last dollar swept from the table by the turn of a card and gives no sign of regret, these men calmly witness the wiping out of a fortune by a rise or fall in prices, and manifest not the slightest indication of emotion.

To the visitor sitting aloft the spectacle is strange, bewildering, fascinating.

But let us descend to the floor, to enter upon which the stranger must obtain a card of admission. Here one passes men who have won largely, but whose countenances betray no symptom of exultation, and others whose losses have been heavy, yet whose laughing faces and merry jests indicate no dissatisfaction either with the world or with life. The busy operators at the telegraph key-board are too much absorbed in their work to give heed to the Babel of confusion around them. Messenger boys scurry hither and thither, in anxious quest of men for whom they bear 592tidings, perhaps of grave consequence. Suspended from various points about the room are charts, tables and diagrams, relating to almost every conceivable subject, the report and forecast of the Signal Service office; the supply of cereals at every market in the civilized world; the movement of breadstuffs and provisions at home and abroad; the cargoes of steam-ships from American, European and East Indian ports; comparative statements of receipts and shipments; and one thousand and one other matters, a knowledge of which may be of interest to members. On the front of one of the long galleries are huge dials, whose index fingers record the fluctuations of prices in the pit. On days when speculation runs riot and excitement is more than usually rampant, these pointers sway to and fro with a rapidity of movement almost bewildering.

But before we have satisfied our curiosity, or sufficiently indulged our admiration of the completeness of the mechanism of the gigantic machine whose revolutions we have been contemplating, the striking of the great gong indicates that the active business for the day in one of the world’s greatest marts has closed. To one who has regarded the transactions with the indifference of a chance spectator, this sound means little more than the tolling of the bell, which in some high tower marks the hour. But on more than one listening ear upon the floor it falls like the knell of doom. To many a venturesome speculator who has unfortunately placed himself upon the wrong side of the market, it is ominous of a crisis in his affairs which must be promptly met if he is not to be overtaken by ruin, perhaps by disgrace. He must become a borrower, or be publicly posted as being unable to meet his contracts. Perhaps he has already overstrained his credit, and knows that his commercial paper must go to protest. Who can surmise all the varied feelings which the sound of that gong awakens in the breasts of not a few of those who hear it? Yet no sign of emotion is visible in the vast throng of brokers and their principals as they descend the broad marble staircase or hurry to the elevators. They laugh, smoke and chat as though they were returning from a merrymaking, rather than from a gathering where millions of money had been staked, and where, perchance, some of them had sold their honor for a mess of pottage.

The charter powers bestowed upon some of these commercial corporations is enormous, rivalling those conferred upon courts of law. Thus, the charter of the Chicago Board of Trade contains the following provision:

Section 7, after providing for the appointment of a “Committee of Reference and Arbitration,” and a “Committee on Appeals,” and fixing their jurisdiction, further provides that “the acting chairman of either of said committees, when sitting as arbitrators, may administer oaths to the parties and witnesses, and issue subpœnas and attachments compelling the attendance of witnesses, the same as justices of the peace, and in like manner directed to any constable to execute.”

594Section 8 contains provisions of an equally extraordinary character. It reads as follows: “Whenever any submission shall have been made, in writing, and a final award shall have been rendered and no appeal taken within the time fixed by the Rules or By-Laws, then, on filing such award and submission with the Clerk of the Circuit Court, an execution may issue upon such award, as if it were a judgment rendered in the Circuit Court, and such award shall thenceforth have the force and effect of such a judgment, and shall be entered upon the judgment docket of said Court.”

The granting of such extra-judicial powers upon men who possess no special aptitude for their exercise is, to say the least, an anomaly in jurisprudence. That a court so constituted should naturally incline to the enforcement of agreements which are, in their essence, gambling contracts, is no more surprising than that juries of unbiased men should set them aside, or that courts, whose aim is to enforce the spirit as well as the letter of the law, should non-suit plaintiffs seeking relief under their provisions. Over and over again have courts and juries declined to regard a sale, the parties to which did not contemplate a bona fide delivery in any other light than as a bet or wager, the collection of which could not be legally enforced. It is a serious question whether an act clothing a loosely organized—if not self-constituted—tribunal with the powers of the highest court of original jurisdiction in a great commonwealth, is not a blot upon the judicial system of the State which sanctions it.

In what has been said, however, the author intends to draw no invidious distinction between the commercial exchanges of the country. As a rule, they occupy the same plane; and in respect of being a blessing or a curse to the country at large, they must stand or fall together. At the same time, the Board of Trade of the Western metropolis has seen fit to take a position which is, to say the least, somewhat anomalous. In the preamble to its “Rules and By-Laws” it declares that among its objects are: “to inculcate principles of justice and equity in trade * * * *” and “to acquire and disseminate valuable commercial and economic information.”

As regards the “principles of justice and equity in trade” which are “inculcated” by commercial exchanges generally, nothing more need be said. Were the transactions on their floors confined to actual sales at prices influenced only by legitimate means and natural causes, there can be little doubt that they would prove potent factors in the furtherance of commerce and advancements of its best interests. It is not in this aspect that the author is considering them. His reprehension of their practices is predicated upon the other, and broader, side of their character, i. e., their speculative side. It can scarcely be called an open question whether it “inculcates principles of justice and equity in trade” for one man to 595buy up all the wheat in sight (and out of sight too, for that matter) and then force an alleged buyer, but an actual rival whom he has done his best to mislead, to settle with him at a price exceeding by 100 to 150 per cent. the actual value of the commodity.

But it is the “object” last mentioned—the “dissemination of valuable commercial and economic information”—concerning which the exchange in question has taken such a peculiar position. Originally, the “information” at its command, whether “valuable” or otherwise, was “disseminated” with the automatic regularity of clock work. Whether this dissemination was undertaken for the benefit of the public at large, or from motives purely selfish is immaterial in this connection, although the “object” may be, perhaps, inferred from the course of the directors. It was found that places far less pretentious were being opened and were doing a thriving business. Within the shadow of the great tower sprang up an “Open Board,” which attracted speculators who might otherwise have conducted their operations through the channels opened by the more august body. Moreover “bucket shops” (the pernicious character of whose methods will be explained hereafter) multiplied and flourished. The quotations of the regular exchange were as the “vital air” to the smaller concerns. “Withdraw our quotations,” said the directors, “and all competition will come to naught.” A wrangle ensued, followed by litigation in the courts, resulting in the triumph of the more renowned body, the “genuine, old, original Jacobs.” In other words, the “dissemination“dissemination of valuable commercial and economic information,” came to an abrupt and untimely end, and one of the “objects” of the organization, announced to the world with gravity, parade and rhetorical flourish, failed of accomplishment.

Some years since, the president of this same exchange, in congratulating the members upon belonging to the ideal institution of the world, went out of his way to stigmatize all the other exchanges of the country as “bucket shops,” justifying his assertion by the charge that the latter depended for quotations upon that over which he presided, a circumstance which, in his opinion, formed the essential nature of a “bucket shop.” In other words, if the “valuable commercial and economic information” as “disseminated” by one body were used by members of another similar organization, the latter were preying upon the public, setting snares for the unwary and fleecing the ignorant. It is difficult to conceive of any loftier height to which egotism could soar. Of what value are the charts 596and diagrams to which reference has been made except to “disseminate” among members of this particular exchange the “valuable commercial and economic information” gathered by a kindred organization?

Yet the self-stultification went even farther.farther. At the very moment when the chief executive of this board was indulging in these rhapsodical flights of rhetoric, a determined effort was being made to open, in connection with that institution, as a sort of “side-show,” a stock exchange, where speculation might be carried on for the benefit of brokers and others, which should be based upon “information disseminated by the New York Stock Exchange!” Could inconsistency farther go? To use quotations on grain and provisions is piratical; to take advantage of quotations on stocks derived from a market one thousand miles away is, in every sense, proper and legitimate!

This fact is not mentioned in derision of the particular organization in question, but as an illustration of the absolute selfishness, the unbridled greed for gain, and the instinctive spirit of gambling which form the salient features of the average American commercial exchange as it exists in the present year of grace. For its members, the world is divided into two classes—the exchange and the rest of mankind, the latter having been created for the aggrandizement and glorification of the former. If the dissemination of information result in the enrichment of the master spirits, and the garnering of a golden harvest of commissions by brokers, let the good work go forward; if the publication of private news, however untrustworthy, will, like an ignis fatuus, lead the unsuspecting still further into the morass of blind and reckless speculation, let the “valuable economic information” be scattered broadcast upon the four winds of Heaven. But palsied be the hand which, with unhallowed touch, would desecrate the ark in which is contained the sacred privilege of the members to monopolize the fictitious sale of breadstuffs and provisions, to absorb alike the fortunes of the rich and the earnings of the poor, who like foolish children, chase the rainbow, in the vain hope that at the foot of the arch, so gorgeous in its prismatic tints, they may find the fabled pot of gold.

Yet if the legitimate exchange presents features worthy of condemnation, what shall be said of those veritable plague spots upon the bodybody commercial, those festering cancers which eat into the very heart of socialsocial morals—the “bucket shops”?

These institutions are peculiar to American cities. The more phlegmatic temperament of the denizens of the old world does not lead him into the vagaries of the citizen of the “great Republic,” where wealth fixes caste, and gold is too often worshiped in the place of God. In the United States, more than in any other country, activity, mental as well as physical, is regarded as the chief end of man. In fact, a rocking chair 597under full swing, would be no inappropriate heraldic national emblem. It is true, as a German paper says of us, that we “chew more tobacco and burst more steam engines than any other nation on earth.” With us, life is restless, and we can find recreation only in excitement. It is this feature of our national character that inclines us to gaming and to speculation in a far higher degree than any other people. Could it be eliminated from our nature the “bucket shop,” like Othello, would find its occupation gone.

Yet the reader, the lines of whose quiet life are cast outside the whirl and turmoil of a great city, may not understand the signification of the term. A “bucket shop” is an establishment where those whose inclinations prompt them to speculate in stocks or produce, but the scantiness of whose means forbids their operating on an extensive scale, may gratify their tastes by risking (and losing) the few dollars which they can ill afford to spare. The epithet “bucket” is a term of derision, having been originally applied to such an institution to imply that a customer might buy or sell a “bucketful” of any commodity which he might select.

These concerns differ only in respect of size and appointment. They are all conducted on one and the same principle. The visitor, on entering, finds himself within a large room, sometimes handsomely, sometimes meanly furnished. Rows of chairs are arranged for the convenience of customers and chance-comers, facing a blackboard. The latter is the indispensible requisite, the sine qua non, without which the transaction of business would be practically impossible. In these chairs are seated men of every age and of nearly all grades of social distinction. Clerks, artisans, merchants and men about town mingle in a sort of temporary companionship, truly democratic. Beardless youths sit side by side with men whose heads have grown bald and whose step has become feeble in a vain chase after a phantom, a chimera, a will-of-the-wisp, always just within the grasp, yet ever eluding the clutch. Here may be met the confidential clerk, who sees nothing wrong in following, at a respectable distance, the example of his employer, who ventures his thousands upon the floor of ’Change. Here one jostles against the decrepit old man, once a millionaire, but who having sunk his fortune in the maelstrom of some great Board of Trade, now passes his waking hours before these blackboards, reckoning that a red-letter day upon which he wins five dollars. And here, too, may be encountered the successful business man, keen of eye, quick of step, alert of perception, who has been drawn hither partly through a desire for speedy wealth, partly through an inordinate craving for the excitement which is not to be found in the legitimate walks of trade. The eyes of all are turned toward the immense board on which, chalk in hand, some attache of the establishment momentarily records 598some change in quotations of stocks or grain, and which seems to have for them all the fascination of the candle for the moth.

Far different is the scene here presented from that witnessed on the floor of the great Exchange. There all was clamor and apparent confusion; here quiet and decorum reign supreme. The silence is unbroken, save by the sharp tick of the telegraphic instrument and the droning monotone of the blackboard marker. Yet there is one point of resemblance between the habitues of the “bucket shop,” the dealers upon ’Change and the patrons of the gaming hell; one and all, they win without displaying exultation and lose without manifesting regret. In the “bucket shops,” however, the attentive observer may sometimes hear the heavy sigh of dispair from the young man who has been tempted to risk his employer’s money, as he perceives the last dollar of his margin swept away by an unlucky turn of prices; or witness a senile smile of satisfaction momentarily gleam upon the face of the feeble old man who sees himself about to be provided with the means of keeping soul and body together for another day. O, wretched picture of sordid greed, of fallacious hopes, of blank despair! O, sad illustration of the sadder truth that in the contact for the mastery of the heart of man, the evil too often outstrips the good!

But let us examine into the business methods of the proprietors of these resorts where gambling is made easy, and ruin is placed within reach of the humblest. As an illustration, let us suppose that the customer wishes to speculate in some stock, say Missouri, Kansas and Texas. The blackboard shows the fluctuations in quotations as they occur on the New York Stock Exchange. The margin which he is called upon to advance, is one dollar per share, and he may limit his transactions to five shares, if he sees fit. It is a matter of indifference to the proprietor whether he elects to buy or sell; that obliging individual will accommodate himself to his wishes, whatever they may be. Suppose that he buys five shares of the stock in question, at a moment when it is quoted at 16¼. If it rises to 17¼, he may, if he chooses, close his deal, receiving back the five dollars which he advanced as margin, together with another five dollars, the latter representing his profit. If, on the other hand, it drops to 15¼, he loses his margin. It is easy to see that such a transaction as this is nothing but a bet, pure and simple.

The illustration given above is drawn from the smallest description of business done. Yet, as has been said, these dens of iniquity are patronized by the wealthy merchant, as well as by the poor mechanic and clerk. It is on the poorer class of customers that the proprietors depend for their steady income; it is from the wealthier customers that they obtain sums of money which they denominate “plums.”

599The manner in which such traders are fleeced by the unscrupulous scoundrels who conduct these institutions may be illustrated as follows: One of them will inform a confiding patron that he has received information from a source which he regards as trustworthy, that some inactive stock—perhaps Denver & Rio Grande—then selling at 9, is about to rise. At his suggestion his customer purchases, let us say, 15,000 shares on a margin of one dollar per share. This done, the proprietor of the “bucket shop” telegraphs to a broker to “sell 3,000 D. & R. G.—quick, quick,” in blocks from 8¾ to 8. The broker who receives the dispatch, either alone or with assistance, offers the stock; the offer is promptly accepted by another broker, to whom the wily manager has telegraphed instructions to buy the stock at the price named. The final quotation, 8, fixes the price, and the sale is promptly reported to the bucket shop by telegraph. The result is that the too trustful customer’s $15,000 advanced as margin, is swept into the coffers of the daring rascal who has perpetrated the fraud, and whose only outlay is the payment of one-fourth of a cent commission on the fictitious sale and purchase.

Let us take another illustration, drawn from a suppositious transaction in wheat. The speculator perceives from the quotations on the blackboard that some future delivery of wheat opened at 86⅛. Every minute or two new quotations are shown on the board, the apparent tendency of the market being upward. He also sees that during the preceding hour the price has been as high as 86⅝, and as low as 86. When it touches 86 again he concludes to buy, guessing that it is likely to rise. Accordingly he purchases 1,000 bushels at that price, advancing ten dollars as a margin. Perhaps the next change is an advance to 86⅛. He might now sell out without loss, as the ⅛ in his favor amounts to exactly the commission charged by the shop. The next quotation is, say 86, and the following one 85⅞. If it should continue to fall until 85⅛ is touched, he is said to be “frozen out,” inasmuch as the decline of ⅞ added to the ⅛ brokerage charged by the proprietor, equals the ten dollars which he has advanced. Perhaps he concludes to “re-margin,” in which case he will put up ten dollars more. Possibly the market may now take an upward turn and rise until 86⅛ is again reached. It is now within his power to close the transaction without loss other than that involved in the payment of the commissions. Let us suppose that he does so. It is quite probable that it will now occur to him that the market is likely again to recede, and he accordingly sells 1,000 bushels at 86⅛, once more advancing ten dollars as a margin. If the price continues to rise until 87 is reached, our venturesome speculator is again frozen out, and is ten dollars lighter in pocket.

The above supposed cases are fair illustrations of the average bucket shop trading. A majority of the patrons of these establishments are 600“scalpers,” satisfied if they can win five, ten, or twenty dollars, and close observers say that fully seven out of ten guess the market wrong. The shop always makes its regular commission, no matter what may be the result of the transaction. “Puts,” “calls” and “straddles” are also sold at these places, although, of course on a far smaller scale than by members of the regular exchanges.

But bucket shops have other and darker sides. It is by no means uncommon for a manager so to manipulate quotations as to wipe out speculators margins at his own pleasure. Thus, if it is for his interest that a certain stock or commodity should decline, the quotations which he posts upon his blackboard show a fall, without reference to the actual course of the market at the regular exchanges.

Another, and favorite, device of the gentry, by which large sums are often realized, is to “fail.” A considerable amount of money—say $50,000 or $60,000—having been received as margins, and being carried by the house, a plan is formed by which it may be absorbed by the proprietor with but little chance of detection. In order to accomplish this he has resort to the aid of some reputable (?) firm of brokers, who are members in good standing, of some regular exchange. He arranges with them to enter in their books, records of fictitious transactions with him of such a character and to such an amount that he may appear to have lost the money in speculating, for the benefit of his customers, upon ’Change. The obliging firm of brokers receive, for rendering this valuable service, the regular commission of one-eighth of one cent per bushel upon the transactions thus fraudulently entered. It is, in itself, a striking commentary upon the methods and morals of the average commercial exchange of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, that brokers can be found, who, while claiming to be upright, honorable business men, are willing, for so paltry a consideration to outrage integrity, and drag honor in the dust.

Apropos of bucket shops, however, it may be cited as a singular commentary on the sincerity of the instituted condemnation heaped upon them by the Western exchange which resolved to cease its dissemination of “valuable commercial and economic information,” that the same organization has recently adopted a rule reducing the limit of bushels of grain which may be bought and sold upon the floor to one thousand bushels. It would be uncharitable to suppose that the institution in question intended to enter into rivalry with the bucket shops; yet had that been its intention it could scarcely have devised a scheme better calculated to bring about such a result. Men, the scantiness of whose means had forbidden their speculating on the regular exchange, may now gratify their inclinations upon the “floor” with almost the same ease as before the huge blackboard in the bucket shop.

601Nor should it be forgotten that there is an aspect in which the great commercial exchanges work more harm to the community at large than do the less reputable concerns which follow at a respectable distance in their wake. A sale or purchase of a large “block” of grain or provisions upon the floor of a regular exchange affects the price of the commodity in every retail market throughout the country, thus working a direct injury to the consumer, who finds himself unable to judge, from one day to another, what will be the cost on the morrow, of the necessaries of life. A transaction involving precisely the same quantity of the same commodity in a bucket shop works no such result. It is the “operators,” whose selfish greed brings about the fluctuations which work such hardships to the poor.

Such is the commercial exchange of to-day, and such the fungus-like excrescenceexcrescence which is its off-shoot. Call these practices which have been here described by what name you will, plain, unvarnished truth stamps them as gambling on a gigantic scale and in one of its deadliest forms. And yet the State holds over them the protecting ægis of the law, and the community at large gives them the moral support of its approving smile. For the avowed professional gambler there is no place in the political edifice. In the eye of society he is a pariah; in that of the law a culprit; in that of the church a moral leper. Yet the heartless operator who deliberates long and earnestly how he may most speedily and surely accomplish the ruin of the man for whom he professes the sincerest friendship; for the selfish speculator who passes toilsome days and sleepless nights in devising schemes for forcing up the price of the necessaries of life; for the far-seeing scoundrel who concocts a cunningly devised scheme for wrecking a railroad in whose stock, it may be, are invested the funds on which the widow and the orphan depend for subsistence—for these men, society has no condemnation, the law no terrors, and the pulpit no denunciation. They build churches and found colleges; they preside at public gatherings and occupy posts of honor upon public committees. It is a trite aphorism that “nothing succeeds like success,” and no more apt illustration of its truth could be given than the adulation bestowed upon men whose fortunes have been cemented by the groans of the unfortunate, and the tears of the widow. Of a truth it is time that society placed the seal of its disapproval upon gambling openly conducted in marble palaces as emphatically as upon the same vice carried on behind darkened windows and barred doors. In this, as in every other great moral reform, much depends upon the attitude and influence of the clergy, who, as a body, have hitherto kept silent as to the crying evil spread out before them.

The idea of the inception of the exchange was grand in its scope. Such organizations have a lofty mission, and it is within their power to encourage commerce, to promote honesty in trade, and to advance the 602best interests of the State. When an enlightened public sentiment shall compel the elimination from them of those baleful features which have been here portrayed, when the pure gold of legitimate traffic shall have been separated from the dross of illegitimate speculation, when the revival of a healthful moral tone shall have averted the danger which now menaces us, that through the influence and example of the exchange we shall become a nation of gamblers, then no longer shall phantoms haunt the imagination and fallacies pervert the judgment of men; but there shall rise upon the eye of the world the lineaments of a republic far transcending the loftiest conceptions of Plato; a republic of which poets have dreamed and which prophets have foreshadowed; the flowerage of centuries; the bloom and perfume of a Christian civilization.

An offshoot of the mania for gambling in stocks—yet one which is chargeable rather to the bucket shop than to the regular exchange—is known as the “clock.” Of all the multitudinous devices by which swindlers deceive dupes, this is, perhaps the most inherently and transparently absurd. I have fastened its parentage upon the bucket shop for the reason that it is undoubtedly the offspring of the fertile brain of some proprietor of one of these establishments, where rascals grow rich on the gullibility of fools.

The “clock” is a gambling device which can be likened to nothing so aptly as to a “brace” faro box. Both contain cards; in both these, cards are arranged according to the will of the manipulator; in both, the proprietor, or dealer, or other person operating the implement, can determine with tolerable accuracy, whether it is wisest to permit the victim to win or lose.

Yet there are minor points of difference. In the faro box the cards are drawn out through a slit; in the clock they are exposed to view by pulling a string which allows them to fall at the operator’s will. At faro, ordinary playing cards are used; in the case of the clock the cards employed contain the names of stocks—sometimes actual and sometimes fictitious—together with figures which purport to represent values of the stocks named, but which, as a matter of fact, sustain no more intimate relations to actual market quotations than would a map of China to the topography of the moon. The reader who will peruse the description given below will, if he has already had the patience to familiarize himself with the explanation of frauds at faro, recognize the fairness of the comparison above drawn.

The gambling “clock” consists of two parts: a contrivance in which the cards are kept and from which they are dropped, and a sort of dial in which they are exhibited to the interested gaze of the players. Its mechanism appears to be a triumph of the simplicity of invention. The operator sits either directly in front or at some convenient point where he may see the inscriptions on the cards as they fall. From time to time he pulls a string; the card exposed disappears from sight and is replaced by another.

The method of “speculating” (or, as it might more properly be called, betting) is as follows: The player notes the course of some stock—perhaps one called “Jem Dandy”—observing its “rise” or “fall,” as shown by the figures on the cards, and possibly keeping a record of its ostensible “fluctuations,” very much as a faro player records the issuance of cards from the dealing box. Perhaps one of them concludes that some particular “stock” having fallen, as shown by the cards during three or 604four consecutive exposures, he imagines that the chances are in favor of the next card of the same stock showing an “advance.” Accordingly, he concludes to back his judgment with his money. He does not bet directly, as a faro gamester, for instance, might place a stack of chips upon a queen. He “purchases” a certain number of “shares” of the “stock” in question, advancing the amount which he is willing to risk as a “margin,” precisely as he would were he buying stocks or grain in a bucket shop. His fate is sealed by the appearance of the next card inscribed with the same suit. If “Jem Dandy,” or whatever other stock he may have bought, “goes up” he wins; if it “falls” he loses.

The reader will have no difficulty in perceiving that, as has been intimated, the pretended “sale” was in reality no sale at all, the entire transaction being a wager, pure and simple, on the turn of a particular card. Nor is it difficult to comprehend that a professional gambler can manipulate pre-arranged cards by pulling a string as easily as by using his thumb and forefinger.

The rooms where the “clock” is used are not infrequently infested by confidence men of a peculiar sort. The verdant visitor who appears to be a “soft mark” is often approached by men who tell him that their “wives” are clairvoyants, or trance mediums, who can predict with infallible accuracy, the order in which these cards will leave the receptacle on the ensuing day. For a small consideration—e. g., five dollars—they will impart to him information through the possession of which he may certainly win hundreds, if not thousands. These persons, however, never explain why they should prefer to sacrifice, for such a paltry sum, the knowledge which would enable themselves to accumulate fortunes with a celerity which would cast completely into the shade the rapid mathematical computations of the “lightning calculator.”

It occasionally happens, however, that the proprietor of one of these “clocks” comes to grief through the wiles of a more adroit scoundrel than himself. Within a comparatively short period a manipulator of a machine of this kind in a great western metropolis found his attention diverted from his “clock,” with its attached string, by the progress of a fight in one corner of his room. There appeared to be no doubt as to the genuineness of the combatants’ hostility, the blows were heavy and blood flowed freely. The available force of the place was called into requisition to separate the combatants and restore order. Peace having once more settled down upon the establishment and the brawlers having been ejected, business was resumed. A quiet-looking gentleman, who had recently entered, became deeply interested in the market for “Jem Dandy;” he bought and sold with apparent recklessness, yet—mirabile dictu—he invariably won. He bet largely and won enormously. In consequence the proprietor concluded to abjure “speculation” for the day. In other 605words, he posted a placard to the effect that holders of contracts might cash their winnings at once, but that the house proposed to suspend further business until the next morning.

Of course the fight was what gamblers term a “stall,” i. e., a trick by which another gang of sharpers might have an opportunity of resorting to the same tactics employed by professionals who travel about the country “snaking” cards. In other words, and plainer English, the “fight,” however seemingly earnest, was in reality a sham. Five sharpers were confederated in the perpetration of the scheme. Three of them engaged in the scrimmage, one of them took advantage of the melee to “ring in a cold deck,” and the other, handsomely dressed and imperturbable of demeanor, quietly saw his confederates “pound” one another, and then quietly bet upon the descent of the cards from a pre-arranged pack which had been substituted in the receptacle for those placed there by the proprietor’s employes.

I hardly know how I could more fittingly close my exposition of gambling than by a description such as that given above. Nothing could more aptly illustrate the remorseless tactics of the professional scoundrel; nothing could better show the gullibility of the dupe; nothing could better exemplify the hollowness of the adage that there is “honor among thieves.”

O, young men of the only republic which has demonstrated its past vitality by the average virtue of its citizens; O, parents, to whose tender care has been committed a charge which God Himself has denominated a sacred trust; O, law-makers, to whose wisdom is entrusted the framing of statutes for the repression of vice and the propagation and perpetuation of public morals—listen to the voice of a penitent who has sounded the utmost depths of degradation. The enlightenment of the intellect, the awakening of the conscience, the conversion of the will—these are the agencies which Divine Providence may employ to avert from the American people the wrath of Him who has said that the casting of the lot is in the hands of the Lord.

No description of the Chicago Board of Trade would be complete which failed to bring out, in bold relief, the figure of the daring speculator whose mysterious movements have long proved an enigma to his fellow members, the sphinx of the chamber, the “king of the wheat pit,” Mr. Benjamin Peters Hutchinson, better known to his friends and to the country at large as “Old Hutch.” The accompanying cut is a good likeness of this remarkable man. Born in New England, he emigrated to the West while a mere youth, and has “grown up” with Chicago. Endowed by nature with indomitable pluck and marvelous energy, he has carved out his own success. He is beyond question the largest operator on the floor of ’Change in the city of his choice, and his ventures are as bold as they are gigantic. In a business enterprise he fears no foe, as he recognizes no friend, and his tall, spare form looms up as a tower of granite in the midst of the turbulent waves of speculation which surge around him.

Gambling holds a high place among the vices of society. It proposes to the young that they secure money without earning it honestly. It thus asks thousands of persons to disregard the noble pursuits and to become gamblers. True manhood is made by the following of an honorable industry. If we contrast Watt, who made the engine, with some gambler, the difference at once appears between the noble callings and the games of chance. The lawyer, the physician, the mechanic, the inventor, the writer can show a reason of existence. With the gambler this is impossible. He has no reason for being in life.

The first evil of gambling is this intellectual loss, incurred by being turned away from all those honorable pursuits which create mental power. Astronomy helped make Newton,Newton, art made Angelo, the law helped make Burke and Webster, traffic made Peabody and Peter Cooper, the press made Greeley and Raymond, but gambling will take the best mind the age can produce and degrade it to the level of the brain of a trickster or a thief. There is nothing in gambling except a kind of sneaking hope of a shameful success. It is a contest in which victory is as shameful as defeat.

The professional gambler does not glory in his calling. He does not call a convention for the purpose of conferring with the scientific men of the age; nor does he demand a corner in the world’s “fairs” that he may exhibit his implements and methods. His occupation asks concealment, and thus makes the features of the face carry at last the strange evidences of the hidden art.

The many fashionable people who play cards for a little money extract from the game a little amusement, but a certain per centum of those who thus begin so modestly move on to a financial and mental ruin. The taste for games of chance grows as days pass, and the one who played a little passes on until he plays much. Soon the heart, mind and face are those of the gambler.

The gambling room is based upon fraud. The philosophy is simply that of craft against innocence. It is a well known fact that a large part of the human race is simple-minded. These can be preyed upon by those who have made craft a study. Many persons are weak and innocent enough to be caught in a trap. The professional gambler belongs to a form of humanity which will spend life in betraying persons 608younger and less suspicious than itself. A large part of the human race possesses innocence enough to enable them to be betrayed. The gambler thus makes his fortune by wrecking the trust men have in each other. He picks the pockets of the simple of heart.

The game of the professional gambler is not one of chance. They cannot afford to use a fair game of chance, because nature would be against them half the time and loss and gain would be equal. All those games played on the railway and in the “den” are the gambler’s own games. They are doctored so as to fall, like loaded dice, in his favor. For the young man to play with a gambler is to be beaten. Fairness is a virtue for which the gambler has no use. If he loved fairness he would work at some trade or turn farmer. Luck may help a man for a day, but it will go over to the other man to-morrow, for it is no respecter of persons. The only help that will stand by a gambler all the year through is fraud.

It is difficult to measure this vice, but it is so great as to merit from all civilized States immediate destruction. Like the opium habit, it must be checked by law. When the police will not enforce an existing law, they cease to be police, because the word “police” implies the care of a city, the study of its welfare. It is a bad condition of wool-growing when wolves are employed to guard sheep.

“Did you ever see the autograph of the President?” said Warden B., of the I. State Penitentiary. He had been a member of my congregation for years, and at his request I had visited the prison to preach to the convicts. The wagon which brought me from the station carried the mail bag, and, while looking over his letters, he held up a large official envelope with the above question.

“No,” I answered, taking my eyes from the intelligent convict who sat in striped clothing writing at a desk, and whose shaven and shame-flushed face was persistently turned from me. “I would like to see his signature, as my vote helped to put him in the White House.”

“There it is,” said the warden, handing me the document, which I soon discovered to be a pardon for a certain youth, who had served three years of a six years sentence for theft from the Post Office Department.

“Why is this pardon given, warden?” “Well,” said he, “this young man is of good family, and has dependent on him a widowed mother, a wife and child. He became the dupe of gamblers who fleeced him, and then the Devil, I reckon, suggested that he might recoup his loss by stealing from the Government, and in an evil hour he fell, was detected, convicted, and with other United States men sent here. I remember the day he came; how heart-broken he stood in the corridor till the sheriff gave me the papers, unloosed his shackles, and turned the gang over to me. They were coupled in irons on the cars, and John was paired with a hardened felon who had done time before, as had most of the lot. They glanced defiantly around at the officers with a braggart insolence as the iron gates clanged on them, but he paled and trembled, tears silently flowing down his face to the stone floor. I followed to the bath-house, where they are washed, shaved, cropped and dressed in stripes. At the registry, when asked his age, name, etc., with great effort he managed to answer, but when asked his father’s name, a vision of the dead seemed to rise before him. Overwhelmed with shame he tried thrice with choking utterance to tell the name, and then faltered it with such a moan of agony that even the clerk, used to such scenes, felt his hand tremble as he wrote it down. You know our rules require the reading of all letters before they reach the prisoners. The chaplain, at my request, read those sent to him. We found such woe, such evidence of his former honor, such testimony 612to his previous good character, that friends became interested in him. I helped them, thinking it a case for Executive clemency. The President, who is a merciful man, looked into the case, pondered it a month, and sends this pardon.”

“Now,” I said when the sad story was ended, “warden, I want to ask a favor. Let me present this pardon to him in person. I understand that it makes him free from this hour; I wish to study the human face in the moment when the revelation that he is free dawns on his mind. May I do this?”

“Certainly,” was the answer, and striking a silver bell, a “trusty” appeared. He said, “Tom, bring John R. to my office at once.”

“No,” was the answer, “he knows nothing of the efforts to set him free. It will be a total surprise to him.”

In a few moments the trusty returned with the man he was sent to summon. The jail garb did not wholly hide his handsome form, nor the cropped hair entirely vulgarize the intellectual countenance which fell as he saw strangers looking at him. He seemed to wonder why he was ordered up before the warden; there was shame, sorrow, helplessness in his face as I rose, with the paper in my hand and walked toward him.

“John,” said the warden, “this gentleman has a few words to say to you.”

The convict braced himself for the interview, and I said, “Your name is John R., I believe.” “Yes,” he replied steadily.

“I have here,” I went on, “a paper addressed to you, signed by the President of the United States. It is a pardon. You are a free man, John.”

The look of assumed courage in his eyes changed to one of infinite pathos, then softened piteously as his soul swooned with joy that was almost too much. I saw him sway as if to fall, but caught him, and leaning on my shoulder, he said, “Free! free! O God, is it true? When can I go home?” “This very moment,” said I. He looked wistfully out the great door where the sentry stood, and asked, “Can I go out there now.”

“Yes,” I said, “come, I will go with you,” and arm in arm we walked down the great stone stair, passed the guards into the street and across to a fence beyond. He stopped a pace or two away, looked at the emerald hills, the river flowing by, the children passing, the firmament above, and as the happy tears drenched his face, said: “O, sir, I am the happiest man alive. When does the train start East?” “At three,” I said, “I will see you safely started.”

“Wont my wife and baby Jess be glad to-morrow, and mother, how she will smile; I am eager to be off.” I took him in and soon saw him 613fitted with the civilian’s clothes and provided with the railway ticket to his destination, and with the $10 the State gives every released convict.convict.

How proudly he walked by my side to the station, and as the bell clanged, he held my hand and said, “You talk to hundreds of young men. SirSir, tell them this, tell it with burning eloquence, tell it with pleading tears, beware of gaming, shun gamblers as lepers. Cards are accursed of God, and pass-ports to perdition. Will you tell them this?” And as the train moved off I said, “I will.”

To this end I write a chapter in this book, that by earnest warning or brotherly appeal, I may help to pluck young men out of the hands of this giant enemy of our race, and perhaps halt some who are already hurrying down this highway to dishonor. Standing here at the very gates of these polluted temples, where many have been cruelly “done to death,” I raise the cry “beware of gaming. It dishonors God, degrades man, wrecks honor, ruins business, destroys homes, breaks wifely hearts, steals babes’ bread, brings mothers sorrowing to the grave, and at last, with reckless bravado, launches the sinful soul into the path of God’s descending wrath, to be overwhelmed forever.”

The only argument offered by gamblers is that their business keeps money in circulation. It does, indeed, transferring it from the pocket of the fool to that of the knave, and thence to the pockets of the harlot or rum-seller, but there is no gain in this transaction. Better the money had remained where it was, or been put to other uses.

Young men will read these words who know not one card from another; who have no personal knowledge of lotteries, raffles, dice or betting. Yours is blissful ignorance, honorable innocence.

How I love the youth who can say, when cards are brought out for play in a private house, “I do not know one card from another. I have no desire to learn their use.” Young heart of oak, give me thy hand. Some will sneer, I charge you to keep your honor bright.

Though people of good character persuade and gloss this evil, stand firm as the hills. Should professing Christians (God pity them) make of the painted paste-boards a social snare, be the company never so charming, the stakes never so trifling, beware. Once you play the first game, you are on the slant; the descent is smooth and swift, and the end is terrible.

You will hear sophistries about the difference between playing and gambling, and the harmlessness of cards and other Devil’s toggery. Playing is the egg out of which the cockatrice is hatched. Handle it not.

Climbing a slippery pass in the Alps, one comes to a narrow icy path with a great rock on the one hand, and a deep gorge on the other. It is called by the guides the “Hell Place,” and you are asked to creep cautiously there, a slip is destruction. The green cloth of the gaming table 614is the moral hell place to many souls; to this, sorrowing relatives, weeping wives, heart-broken mothers can point and say, “There my boy slipped, there my husband fell, lost property, position, honor, all.” At the foot of this slant is the prisoner’s cell, the maniac’s cage, the suicide’s grave; at the top the smiling decoy, shod with adder skin, or the smooth tongued gamester, waiting to lure men to the fatal hazard.

Some will read these words who are already acquainted with the beginnings of this honeyed vice. They have shuffled the satanic pack, booked the bet, and perhaps pinched themselves in purse to pay the lost wager, or have now in pocket the coins won at gambling. Take these coins out and look at them; they are unclean, polluted.

Once, when the plague ravished an English village, the wretched people resorted to the bank of the stream near by, to get bread left there for them. They tossed the coins for payment into the brook where they were found hours afterwards by those who sold the food. They thought the water had cleansed the pestilent contagion from the coins. Perhaps it had, but no brook, river or sea hath tide medicinal enough to cleanse the curse from money won at gaming. It is cankered. It is blood-stained and tear-rusted. It will curse him that wins and him that loses.

My friend, you are yet only a novice in this black art. Let me, by all rational appeal, abjure you to abstain. It is the father of falsehood, forgery and fraud, and the covetous human heart is the mother of this ill-gotten brood.

Can you specify one instance where the gains of gambling have brought comfort or contentment? What would your father think, your employer say, if they knew that you were a gamester, spending your evenings where these human swine whet their tusks? Who sinks so low in the mire of infamy as the man who is kicked out of business or society with the millstone of gambling hung to his neck? Bitter is the ban and black is the brand put on the wretch whose hardened forehead is set against the hissing of that word “gambler.”

Who are the associates a man finds at races and the card table? Are they not the Pariahs, social lepers whose touch is pollution? Would a man take his sisters or his children among these white-fanged wolves; are they not nameless at the hearth, unknown where high-toned and virtuous people meet? Think of the vile talk, the impure jest, the unclean associations. You cannot stoop to this. What can money buy, though you won every wager, that will repay you for the loss of wifely love, childhood’s trust, the father’s proud faith in his boy.

Consider the malign vicissitudes of this sport, see the ruined, forsaken, nerveless gambler, wrecked and wretched at last; abandoned to the gibes of men, and the anger of God; crawling into a lazaretto to die. Mother, with dimpled hands upheld to you at evening, and fair head pillowed 615on your bosom, think not, “My bonnie boy is safe.” This fiend spares none. He will seek this braw lad to destroy him. With devilish cunning he will even persuade you to aid in your son’s downfall; to teach him in the social game, to use the leprous papers of the pit, on which is inscribed the voiceless litany of woe.

Hell’s utmost anguish surely has no deeper depth than that of the mother who sees her son a degraded, sodden gamester, and remembers that she taught him to handle the implements of his ruin. If a mother can front the judgment and say, “I never countenancedcountenanced the evil, I bitterly opposed it always, to the utmost of my power,” she may feel when her dear son is lost, the most unspeakable regret, but she escapes the remorse which eats the heart of her who unwittingly fostered the serpent which compassed her child’s destruction. Let us ring our children round with circles of flame across which none of these man hawks can come. Let us make home the happiest place on earth. With mirth, laughter, music, books, friends; a safe refuge, a snug harbor, a shadow of a great rock, and a citadel for defence of our dear ones from this pitiless foe.

Let me sketch the career of an upright, kindly village youth who longs for a wider field of action. He has mastered the elements of business as practiced in the rural community; he desires to try his talents in the busy world, and chooses a mighty city as the field of his endeavor. A roaring center of commercial activity; its streets a throbbing ganglion of business nerves; its mart the engorged plexus of traffic, where the best and the worst have habitation.

As I see this young fellow, with face like an open book, standing for the first time in the city’s streets, I am reminded of a scene I once witnessed in the country. I stood on the edge of a wood looking across a beautiful meadow. It was a perfect day in June, and all the world seemed at peace. Crickets were chirping in the grass, the yellow-hammer was tapping on a tree above, the cattle were grazing brisket-deep in the lush grass, the birds were singing as if to breathe were music. All nature looked lovely. Far away across the brook, on a dead tree, I noticed a number of buzzards, waiting for the sight of something on which they might gorge their unclean appetites.

I think of this as I watch him alone on the city’s street at evening, gazing into a window where the light falls on diamonds, opals, rubies; amid the din of the city, near the theaters and saloons, where music throbs, lamps flare, cabs rattle, and through these noises comes a voice in modulated semi-tones from one standing at his side, who asks: “Did you hear of the big winning last night.”night.” “No, sir, where was it?” “Up the street, at old Brad’s place, No. 197. A fellow won $6,000 in two hours. I am going up to try my luck. Come along, just for the fun of the thing.” He goes. The front of the house is dark; a red light burns over 616the stairway door—danger signal over a bottomless abyss. He is void of understanding; a private key, pass word, or patron of the game is needed to secure entrance. The panel of the door slips aside, a whisper, then a reply. The door opens, upstairs they go. Men seated and standing scarcely look up—wheels click—dice rattle—cards shuffle—glasses clink—sooty servants glide with trays, and bottles—cheap stucco statuary appear through the smoke—muttered curses tell of losses. He is led to the faro table, where a mastiff-faced man deals cards, and after he has sipped a little liquor, which is freely offered, he tells his guide that he has never played. He is informed that a man always wins his first bet—fortune favors first play. Men put chips in his hands, saying, “Play this bet for me.” “But I don’t know the cards,” he replies. “Put the bet down on any card, it will surely win.” Down it goes—it wins—and as they rake in the gains, he thinks, “I might have won a month’s salary in a moment.” Lightly as snowflakes fall the cards; deft the touch; swift the shuffle. It seems so simple. He carries money saved from a father’s toil, a sister’s earnings offered to help him secure his stock of goods to start business. Mother has helped him, saying, “David will help me when I need his help. I will have a strong son to lean on when my old feet dip down falteringly to the cold river of death.”

As he hesitates there on the porch of Perdition, he is about to bid farewell to peace, farewell to prospects of success, farewell to the promise of his young manhood, farewell to the prayers of his parents. Pray, mother! with clasped hands kneeling at this very hour under the pictures in your boy’s room. Pray, “God be gracious to my boy. Gird him round with mercy.” Sing, sister, sing! Sitting alone where the moon-light falls on thy fingers as they wander over the keys, sing soft and low the very hymn you sang at parting, “God be with you till we meet again.” Sing! maiden, till the tears falling fast tell the fears uprising in thy heart.

Look, old father, down the road where the peaceful world lies transfigured in the mellow beams of the moon; down the road where he went away so cheery, brave, tender, looking backwards from the coach with many a wave of the hand and fond goodbye. Listen, father to the whip-poor-will in the copse answering the katydid in the hedge, frogs shrilling from the swamp, an owl hooting from the woods; the air grows cold, a chilling sense of discomfort shakes thy frame.

Ah, if thou couldst see thy son now, thy hope, thy pride—among knaves. He stakes his means—he wins—he has doubled his fund. Good, good—his face glows, his pulses are rhythmic to the music of success. Excited, confident, reckless, he loses—doubles his loss—forgets all prudence, unrolls the savings of years on the little farm—mother’s needle, father’s plow, sister’s music lessons, earned that hoard. He piles it on 617the board with burning eyes set on the cards, watches them coming one by one. Oh, unpicturable horror! Money, honor, parental hopes—all earthly and eternal weal staked on that hazard. The Sphinx-faced scoundrel slips the card—the young man hears the word “Lost!”—sees the sharpers laugh as the dealer draws in his all. The room swims before his sight; madness seizes him as the sneering taunt, “Another sucker done up,” smites him like a lash across the face.

Frenzied, he clears the table at a bound, his brown fingers close around the white throat of the lean-faced hellion who has robbed him. Like a tiger uncaged he hurls him to the floor, and fronts the crowd of desperadoes with blazing face. In vain are all his struggles; many leap on him, he is beaten, kicked, hustled down stairs, where, hatless and bruised, he madly pounds the heavy door till his hand is a mass of bleeding pain. All in vain. He turns helplessly at last to the street, and through the gray light of dawn finds his room. For hours he hangs on misery’s brink; haggard remorse sits opposite and suggests suicide. Swift as a homing dove his thoughts fly to the farm.

He sees his father in the furrow, his mother in the doorway, her face as radiant as the morning. She gathers a few honeysuckles for his empty room, to her it is a sanctuary now, and he liked them so, and ’twill seem as though he was coming home soon.

An organ beneath his room strikes up an air heavy with old memories; the tune of “The Old Folks at Home,” quavers through his window. With a shuddering cry—“A gambler! a gambler! Oh, God, be merciful; let me die,” he falls by the bedside and burning tears are vain to staunch the hurt in his heart.

He is now in a whirlpool; return seems impossible. You have seen an apple tree in May, rosy in pink and white blossoms, murmurous with bees, glad with birds and glorious with sunshine. In one night the frost kills the bloom; next day the tree hangs with damp, blighted blossoms and blackened buds, an unlovely spectacle.

Next we find him in snuggeries, curtained from basement bar-rooms, studying the cards at midnight, robbing unwary verdants. Conscience is seared as with a hot iron. His heart is flint. He strives with drink to banish thoughts of home, heaven and God; grows morose, cunning, merciless; works a little, hurries again to the feverish excitement of the game, herds with greasy disreputables in foul dens, amid the reek of pipes and hideous blasphemy. Soiled, ill-kempt, rag-clad, he nears the bottom of the slant. One night, crazed with vile rum, he mingles in a fight with fellow outcasts; blood is shed; the alarm brings the clattering patrol wagon, and through the red of early dawn he rides to a cell in 618murderer’s row. Convicted, condemned, he goes to prison for life—years pass—his sorrowing parents think him dead. He is dead. He died that night when he climbed the stairs to “Old Brad’s den.”

His post is to open and close a gate in the prison yard. Seven years in stripes, taciturn, sullen, he stands there. His soul starves, his heart stagnates, his face becomes stupidly half-human, despair feeds on his mind.

One day two visiting gentlemen see him, they recognize him and speak, holding out a hand which he will not take, trying to stir hope within him. They talk to him of freedom and home. He makes no sign of pleasure; hopeless vacuity rests on his imbruted face. He stares at his gate, shuts it, and says, “Seven years dead, seven years dead.” There he stands, and will stand, till carried to the little graveyard of the prison, touching at last the lowest level of the slant on which the gambler stands.

I charge you with a jealous affection, born of an unfeigned brotherhood, and based on many years study of the effects of this vice. Beware of the beginning of gambling. Have no commerce with the monster iniquity.

First of all, because it dethrones God. Seek its victims in the ranks of bankrupt merchants, in the cells of criminals, in the cellars of shame, or garrets of poverty; talk with them, or with those who have suffered through them, and you will find that the sad sequence of misery began with this heinous affront to God, viz: a practical denial of His very existence and a setting up in His place a blind deity called Chance, before whom they bowed, and on whose favor they risked their all. Even if in their darkened minds the votaries of gaming allow God to exist, they deny His government of the affairs of men. They flee away from all works that can win the help of Jehovah, and ask only the help of fortune. This is heathenry of the worst sort. The farmer plows, plants, cultivates, and hopes that the God of nature will help him by sending sun, rain and dew, that together they may produce the harvest. The sailor, by the march of the constellations and the veracity of the magnetic needle which God offers for his guidance, comes at last to port. The mason builds his wall by the laws of God, and his plumb line and level bear eloquent witness that he wishes to base his work on the certain laws which steadfastly bind the worlds together. These men, however much they ignore God in their speech, keep faith with Him in their work, knowing full well that they can only succeed in any task by keeping in line with His laws. Thus they have yoked the elements to the car of progress. The gambler, however, mocks at God’s laws and insolently banishes Him. He asks no help from fixed laws ordained by the Father to bless his children; he scorns the co-operation of Nature, sets up a fetish called Fortune, and grovelling, courts its smiles. I know of no form of paganism more base 619than this, and it is not surprising that in the worship of this block-eyed god, the most obscene rites and debasing superstitions are practiced. Dreams, charms, spells, incantations, black art, even the help of the powers of darkness have been used in wooing his favor. The most frightful depths of moral and mental depravity are touched in this shameful business. The negro who sells stolen articles to buy lottery tickets has some gruesome cabalistic secret which he fondly hopes will bring the favor of fortune; the lady who cons the dream-book in her room to learn which number to buy, and fancies her night vision of a gallows tree or a burning Bible will bring propitious fate, are alike far from reason and from God.

Frogs, spiders, beetles, graveyard grass, rabbits killed in burial places, pieces cut from a shroud or slivers from a coffin will insure winnings. Some put the ticket in the cold hand of a corpse, and the lowest level of blasphemous sacrilege is touched when the bread of the sacrament is carried secretly home to be used as a sort of magic aid to conjure the desired gain. Can anything more awful be conceived by the human mind—nay, could the most malignant devil desire a more direct insult to God than this? First the Creator is asked to abdicate His throne to this monstrous usurper, then the sacred symbols of His Son’s sacrificial death are offered to propitiate the unclean and unholy thing set up in His place. This is the iniquity of Balshazar’s feast repeated in our time. The sacred vessels of His holy worship are employed in the service of sensual lust or abandoned carnality. What shall be the outcome of all this depravity? If these souls seeking the brief success of the gamester deliberately turn away from God and practice harlotry with the princes of hell, wantoning with the powers of the pit in unblushing shame, who will paint their last estate when his vengeance finds them out?

The traveller in Egypt who explores with Arab guides the dismal mummy pits by the Nile finds some startling experiences in these caverns of the dead. More fearsome than the dark labyrinths where the bodies lie wrapped in linen and smeared with ghastly hideousness, more terrible than the gloomy grottos where cadavorous mortality swathed in silence waits the resurrection trump, is that grisly cave where the bats, the unclean birds, make their home. Into this the hardiest guides dare not go. The uncanny creatures invade it in myriads, and with their fluttering, furry vans, would quench the light and drive out the bravest intruder. If one desires a sight of these birds, he stands in the sunlight at noon close to the rocky ledge which walls the gardens of the Pharoahs. A shiek, musket in hand, steps a few paces into the vault. His gun is fired directly into the Plutonian chamber with a roar as if an earthquake was shaking the knees of the eternal hills. Then a dark torrent of winged things, with a sound as of a mighty wind, sweeps out into the light, 620fluttering the sweet air into horror with leathern wings. They fly about in circles and dart back, pained and dazzled by the light, into their obscene home. Some in blindness, eager to escape the sun, dash themselves against the rocky lintel and posts of the entrance, and fall broken and mangled at your feet, as tremblingly you shrink from the bruised clots fluttering in dying spasms about you.

Such shall be the condition of these poor blinded souls who choose darkness rather than day, leaving the light of the smile of heaven to dwell in the gloomy precincts where the gamester’s deity sits in grim mockery and receives the worship of his clans. Suddenly, with a mighty shout, shall their leaden souls be wakened to their shame. The shining Angel, with one sandal on the heaving earth, and the other in the swelling sea, shall cry in trumpet tones that split the silence of earthly crypts and sea deep caves, “Awake, ye dead, and come to judgment!” Then, impelled by a resistless force, shall all souls sweep into the bright light of the great white throne.

Some who have looked at the cross on that lone Syrian hill, shall see one beloved seated thereon, and shall sing for very joy as they press nearer for his greeting. Others who come from the confines of Godless unbelief will be dazzled into blindness by the glory of his presence.

Then shall they call upon the rocks to fall upon them, and say to the hills, “Hide us from the face of the Lamb.” Frenzied, they will essay to flee back into their former holes, dashing their souls, bruised and ruined, against the adamantine front of God’s eternal laws, and drop shrieking into Perdition, where the Prince of gamesters, catching them to himself, will say, “Souls are stakes. The game is done. All these I have won.”

Not only does gambling dethrone God, but it degrades man. In this evil work it is the most certain and effectual of all vices. It commonly works in iniquitous league with other sins, but alone it eats out honesty, affection and virtue from the heart, and leaves it as empty as a dead man’s hand.

When this vice has had free course through the moral nature for a few years, the man is a mere shell, a human husk, within all is punk and hollowness.hollowness.

The law by which the force of gravitation acts is not more resistless or irrevocable than this law of gaming. Other vices give their devotees intervals of rest, intermissions growing briefer until the last stages bring woe upon the heels of woe to drive the victim to his doom. The gambling demon, once admitted to the mind, never leaves. He haunts his slaves every waking hour, and flits on filthy wings athwart his dreams, spectre-like he walks at his side, keeping pace for pace with his prey. The swift result of his influence is complete moral atrophy.

621Ask yourself this question: Where is the dearest spot to man in all the wide creation’s bound? Search all the stars that God has spilled like jewels through the blue abyss. Roam from bloom to bloom of that tree once enrapt in primeval night, which, at his word, burst into blossoms of worlds like this. Yea, visit heaven itself, explore the city which has foundations whose builder and maker is God; the city of the jewelled walls and gates of pearl. Stand where the healing trees trail their branches in the crystal river of life; or walk amidst the asphodel and amaranth that deck the fadeless green of the Paradise of the Saints, and you will not find one spot so dear, so precious to our race, as that Judean hill whereon hangs one whose holy hands were nailed for our salvation on the cross. There, where wondering heaven bends to look pityingly on the exalted one, where dumb nature strives with darkened skies to hide the shame, where man, mad with rage, curses the Christ, and woman, bowed with sorrow, bewails her lord. There, on that most sacred spot in all the universe, in the holiest hour ever marked on the dial of time, when heaven, earth and hell are quick with interest, who is it sits unmoved, unobservant, unstirred, concerned only with the game? Ruthless gamblers sit beneath the lowering skies, and on the palsied earth they shake the dice to win the garments of the man of sorrows.

This infamy was needed to make Christ’s death as ignominious as a demon could desire. Only Apollyon could suggest the shameful scene on which the dying eyes of the Son of man rested, as the crowning demonism of it all. A group of gamblers bending over the few robes which were all his possessions. O, Satan, that was a monster stroke to embitter his last hour! No other being but a gambler could have put a fit climax to that day’s iniquity.

As I think on the merciless nature of the abandoned gamester, I am reminded of the story told of a petrified forest in Idaho. “Yes,” said the yarn spinner, “you can see trees standing there petrified, bushes and vines, leaves and buds and all, petrified, and there stands a hunter with his gun up. He has just shot a hawk in the air, and the hawk hangs dead in the air, petrified.” “O, that’s too much,” remarked a bystander, “the law of gravitation would bring the hawk down.” “Not at all,” said the other, “the law of gravitation is petrified too.”

In the gambler’s nature all natural feelings seem petrified. He never relents or pities. His drink is fen-water, his meat is adder’s flesh. Innocent men are the victims of his callous covetousness. Women and children are deprived of the money needed for the comforts and even the necessities of life. Trust funds and moneys belonging to others swell his ill-gotten gains, and as revealed in the pathetic history of the author of this volume, he is such a thrall to sin that a father’s pleading, a mother’s prayers, even that best blessing which God can give a man, a true, chaste woman’s 622wifely love, are forgotten to follow this evil passion that rages like a fire in his bosom. He is like a strong swimmer enmeshed in treacherous seaweeds which seem so easily broken, but cling to hands and feet more strongly than chains, and at last wrap him in death as he goes with a despairing cry down to lie in the ooze at the bottom.

If all who have been ruined in temporal and eternal things by it could rise and walk in sad procession through the land, the spectacle would appal the stoutest heart. If all the names of the men undone by this art could be written on the cards used to-day in gaming, every one would be signed across with the blood-red autograph of a doomed soul.

The fountains of Monaco seem to drip tears, and in the odorous shrubbery the wind sighs like the echo of the last cry of the bond slave led captive from its sinks of sin. Were it not for the stupifying spell gambling throws on all its thralls, the licentious associations and scrofulous surroundings of the play might stir the soul to escape from its condemnation. Fathers have wept over lost sons; tender children over disgraced fathers, downcast sisters have beseechingly invoked vengeance on a brother’s destroyers, and wives with little ones clinging to their skirts have implored with tearful eloquence the gamester to break the bonds that held him. All in vain. He mingles with the moral refuse of the land, plunges deeper in degradation, becomes an inmate in these habitations of cruelty, and with all the pith and marrow of mankind sucked out, with blood poisoned and bone rotted, he consorts with drunken sailors, filthy women and skulking vagrants, playing with unsteady hand for the few coins he can gather, till death with the besom of a nameless disease sweeps his foul carcass into the pauper’s grave.

Of all men, he seems to me the most spectral and bloodless, the most effectually blighted and paralyzed. How the virtuous person shrinks from one who is pointed out as a gambler. If you wish to see what nature thinks of this vice, look into his face. Women of fair fame shun him. Children avoid him on the street, and men pass him with averted faces. Burns, in his strange poem of “Tam O’Shanter,” tells how the tipsy hero peers into “Alloways auld haunted kirk,” and watches the witches’ unearthly dance, taking note of what lay upon the holy table. Surely ’tis a chilling catalogue as he writes it:

Now fancy another son of this murdered father using this bloody knife as a plaything. Such the cards used in gaming seem to me—hideously 623stained with the blood of loved ones, and I would as soon think of rattling the handles of my baby’s coffin for music, as shuffling the cards for pleasure. I can appreciate the feeling of that man who was one of a shipload of passengers wrecked on the Atlantic coast some five years ago. In the bitter freezing night they clung to the rigging, and when about to let go and die, one put his hand in his pocket and took out the cards they had been playing with and tossed them into the angry sea, saying, “Boys, I don’t want to go into the presence of God with a deck of cards in my pocket.” More than one “happy couple” have I married only to see the wife deserted that the husband might throw their all into the whirlpool of chance. More than one little home have I seen engulfed in this maelstrom. Many a servant cheats his master, many an employe robs his employer; many a wife abstracts part of her husband’s earnings, thus breeding domestic strife, to cast it all into the coffers of the lottery or the policy shop.

I personally know a man once bright, respected and promising, who takes some of the money his wife earns teaching music, to play faro. Not long ago a man supposed to have a competence died. His heirs found his estate had been squandered, nothing was left save several hundred lottery tickets, which told the story of his folly and his children’s beggary.

What merchant wants a gambler for a clerk? What boss wants a gambler for a workman? What foreman wants a gambler for an apprentice? What family wants a gambler for a doctor? What firm wants a gambler for a salesman? What railway wants a gambler for a conductor? What boy would wish to learn so disgraceful a trade? At the time that I was apprenticed to the bricklaying trade, I knew a lad who began to herd with gamesters. He learned that trade, I learned mine. He earned money; so did I. I was proud of mine, and now I hold up my hands and say, “If my voice should fail, I have an honest trade in my fingers by which I can win my bread.”bread.”

I take my little ones in this very city to the walls where I worked. I show them the courses of brick their father laid, and proudly tell the story of my toil. Can this other man do likewise? Can he hold up his hands before men and say, “I have an honest trade in my fingers”? Can he take his children and show them his work, and tell them with glad face the story of his apprenticeship? No, no; his face crimsons when his trade is mentioned, and though he spent more years at it than I did at mine, he is ashamed of his work to-day.

Young men, learn an honest trade which tends toward manliness. Be content with simple life and frugal means until you can rise honorably to luxuries. Acquire no money by sinful methods. Do not begin gaming as a relaxation, for it will soon become a business. Avoid pool-rooms, race-courses, faro banks, cockfights, policy shops, lotteries, raffles, betting 624of every form. All such things are perilous. Where one grows rich, one hundred grow poor, and the one who wins is poorest of all. No man is as pitiably poor as the man who has money won by gambling. This form of evil doing will tempt you everywhere, on rail train and steamboat, in hotels, clubs and barber shops; in the loft of the barn, or the carpeted parlor. On the race-track and fair grounds, week days and Sundays, day and night, winter and summer, at home or abroad, in public and private, it will meet you. The suave snob, the seedy scoundrel, will inveigle you, try to win your confidence, borrow or lend, lead or drive; coax or threaten, sometimes with words smooth as butter, then with words that smite like hail. Stand fast, my son. “When sinners entice thee, consent thou not.” Money unearned is blessingless. God’s law is this: If man gets anything from nature he must give labor. If he gets anything from his neighbor he must give a fair equivalent. Only money gotten in this way can bring a blessing.

What does the gambler give his victim in return for his money? Nothing. One of these gold pieces would make the weary wife smile, but the impassive harpy with the cold face and the fire of Gehenna in his heart cuts and deals, shuffles and sorts, then takes all, giving no return but a sneer.

If you think to beat him at his own game, you will know your folly when over your head the waves of misery have met. His motto is: “There is a fool born every minute.” His place is called a “Hell,” and the name fits it like a kid glove. His victim is called a “lamb,” he is led to be fleeced, and driven forth to shiver. The thorough-bred gambler suckled snow for mother’s milk, and all the blood in his frozen heart could be carried in a bottomless cup. There is consolation for other woes, but for losses in gambling there is none. No man will pity you. None will sympathize with you, the very best you can hope for is that they will not laugh as they pass you by.

Do you say that you must have excitement, something to break the dull monotony of existence? Well, if you wish to break the monotony of food, you need not take arsenic, nor break the monotony of drink by prussic acid. Guard yourself just here; the love of excitement ruins thousands. The jaded mind needs a fillip. One tries the play; the death scene in the fourth act excites him. Another tries rum or brandy, another the impure novel; another opium or morphine; another travels to far lands; another lechery; another gambling, and the last is the worst of all. There are wholesome excitements which never enslave and have no bad reaction; which develop, broaden and brace the whole being, but keep clear of gamblers, they are a pack of scullions, experts at thievery, masterhands at cheating. Gyved diabolists who would rape your soul of all that makes life blessed.

625I stood in this city beside the coffin of a lovely babe; sweeter child the sunshine never kissed. The mother sat dissolved in tears, with a bright boy holding to her gown. Women tried to comfort her; then I tried. I spoke of the little spirit safe in the arms of Jesus, but lifting her streaming eyes, she said sadly, “It is not the baby’s death, sir, I can endure that. I would not have her back in this cold world. It is my husband’s absence. Oh, that he did not come at this hour to help me.” I questioned the neighbors in the room, and they said, “Her husband is a gambler, does not come home for weeks. She sent him word of the child’s death, but he came not.” Standing there by that lily bud broken from the stem, I thought, “How can a man be so heartless as to stain the forehead of his child with such a wrong”wrong” Heartless? A gambler carries a cinder where the heart should be.

A wife, almost demented with grief, about to be cast out of her house for unpaid rent, went to the mousing scamps who had filched her husband’s money for years, and in broken accents asked for help. With ribaldry, the underlings scoffed her out of their room, while the metallicmetallic faced dealer sat with the veto of silence on his mouth, till she staggered to the street mad, and is to-day a maniac.

An old father receives a letter telling of his son’s downfall, and his aged form falls prone upon the floor of the village post office where he reads the letter. When gentle hands restored him to consciousnessconsciousness he opened his eyes, and when they said, “We thought you were dead.” “Would God I had died,” he replied. “Life is naught to me now.” For years afterward that old man, with mind dethroned, went about the village, writing in the snow or the sand, on the walls and fences, the name of his lost son.

I would like to open the seven vials of the wrath of the Most High and spill them on this nefarious industry. Every day the press tells of some official, treasurer, agent or partner who has fallen or fled, a ruined man, and uncounted thousands suffer their shame unknown.

It is on record that one lottery drawing in London was followed by the suicide of fifty persons who held blank tickets. What rapacious miscreants they must be who ply this trade of spoilation.

As I study the character of this obdurate and unprincipled human wolf, I see only one trait that is worthy of praise; the zeal and strategy displayed in his gross rascality.

As I contrast this with the apathy of many of the virtuous men who seek to lead the people in ways of rectitude, I recall the reply of the Scottish fisherman to the listless angler who caught nothing, while the old hand was steadily filling the creel. “What is the difference, Sandy?” asked the dawdler, “between your fishing and mine?” “Dinna ye ken the difference, mon? You are fishin’ for fun and I’m fishin’ for fish.” 626Would that we who work in the laudable employment of saving and reforming men, were as busy and as full of resources as these reprehensible foes of society!

Perhaps the young man who reads these words will ask, “How can I keep my mind from defilement and escape the lure of these soul destroyers?” There is only one sure way, and then there is one not so sure. By the simple moral integrity of your soul and a happy bias of natural temperament you may stand firm amid all temptations and come through unscathed. Some have been able to come forth conquerors with these weapons, but many have failed.

The better way, the surer way, is to make a friend and associate early in life of Him who is mighty to save; to cling close to Him with tremorless trust, and take from Him such blameless pleasures as shall make this and all other vicious indulgences seem mean. Remember the mythical story of the sirens who decoyed men to death. When the wise Ulysses had to sail hard by the enchanted isle, he bound the sailors fast to the mast with knotted ropes, and when the ravishing strains of their music floated over the waves they could only tug at their cords, they could not go to their death. The sweet singer Orpheus had to steer his boat over the same dangerous course, but he tied no man. He left them bodily free to leap into the sea and swim to their destruction, but he bound their souls with chords of such heavenly harmonies struck from his lute, that they sailed heedless under the lee of the fateful island, steeped in such ecstacy of melody that they heard not one note of the siren’s song.

It is well to bind the passions and lusts with strong vows and good resolutions. It is best of all to have the soul bound by the heaven-born spell which fills the whole being with delight. This bliss ineffable makes earthly and carnal joys seem contemptible, and drowns every evil desire in the great cry from the heart’s depths:

The third count in this black indictment is that gaming not only dethrones God and degrades man, but destroys the most blessed of all human institutions, the home.

Gamblers flock together as naturally as lean-necked vultures; they hunt in packs like coyotes, and intermingle like a knot of clammy vipers that crawl in the dank gloom of a sunless canyon. They have no share in the sweet sanctities of the fireside, and desire vehemently to be elsewhere. Even when the gamester sits at his own table, or embraces his own children, his heart is in another place. Physical contact is not intimacy. He may kiss the wife of his bosom and be as far from her as the east is from the west. Judas kissed Christ, yet at that moment one was in heaven and the other in hell. He hurries away to boon companions, 627and to the familiar scenes his soul covets. In vain the little ones beseech him to abide at home, in vain the wife entreats him to continue at work, in vain the mother asks the comfort of his presence, the help of his strong arm. He hopes to make a great winning some day, to buy a fine house for his family, then to make amends, turn over a new leaf, and soberly take up the duties of manhood. Some lucky hazard, some windfall, wager or lot will lift him to the level of his dreams. Meanwhile he sinks deeper, debauches himself more and more, till home becomes a hateful place; he deserts his family, or in self-defense is forbidden to cross the sill of the house he has desecrated.

I have gone on missions of comfort to the homes of the drunkard, the bankrupt, the convict, the dying, but never have I seen on woman’s face such unutterable grief and pitiable misery as in the home of the gambler. A cyclone cannot level, nor a fire consume a home so surely as gambling. The infatuated bondman to this vice will let the fire go out on the hearth where his helpless brood crouches in the cold. He will let them ask mother in the lampless twilight with tear-stained faces, why papa does not come. How can the wife tell the weans, what delays his steps?

Was ever woman’s love insulted as he insults it? If some pure passion for art or high scientific research detained him, she would smile, and explain it to the little ones. If profound books or merciful work of benevolence kept him late; if some grave problem of social welfare held him from her arms for awhile, she could bide the time, but the indignity put on her is this, that a loving, virtuous wife with all womanly charms and gentle ministries, waits unheeded while he consorts with disreputable dicers, and the clinging kisses of sweet-lipped babes are forgotten that he may enjoy the company of a lot of heartless card mongers hanging on the frayed edges of society.

When a man will toss away the priceless jewel of wifely love to clutch a bubble like this, turn from a warm, throbbing, palpitant, gentle help-meet to herd with jackals, he puts a shameful affront on her, one that he will have to answer for at the bar of God.

The deluded man is chasing a phantom and hoping to find a happiness that ever eludes him. He could find happiness at home in domestic helpfulness and fatherly endearments. He is like the Scandinavian lover who coveted a kiss from his sweetheart, and said, “I wish I could, some day, find the lost whistle of the Fairy Queen. She has promised to grant one wish to the man who finds it.” “Well,” said the maiden, “if you did find it, what would your wish be?” “It would be this,” said the timid youth, “that I might have one kiss from your red lips.”

628The autobiography of the author of this book shows plainly that he had true happiness within his reach. He had wealth, talents, friends, good personal presence, and best of all, a beautiful and gracious wife who truly loved him. Here are all the elements of happiness, yet he went longing for something else, blind to the joys he might have had.

If I should ever write a book on “How to be miserable,” (though married) I would put down as the first condition, let the husband take to gambling. It will assuredly overturn the home, and without a home, man can have but little bliss in this world.

On the terraced lawn of one of the great English schools there are these Latin words, cut in the turf, visible from afar, “Dulce Domum”—“Sweet Home.” There they tell this sad story: A cruel head master, who had in those days almost unlimited power, kept a bright boy, a widow’s only son, at the school during the long summer vacation as punishment for some shortcoming. The lad saw all the others go away to their homes, saw the gates fastened, and he was forced to remain with his keepers. He knew his mother waited his coming; he asked the master with tears, the other boys all joining in the petition, that he might go home. “No, no,” was the stern reply, “you must remain.” No one was permitted to visit from the outside during vacation, and all the weary weeks the lad walked alone on the lawn or wept beneath the trees. His feet wore in the grass the rude outlines of the words “Sweet Home” as he paced in sorrow all the summer days. When school opened, the boy was dying of a broken heart, the mother was allowed to enter, she saw but the pale wreck of her noble son, sinking into death. He knew her not, but as she bent above his white face, she heard the words “Sweet Home, Sweet Home.” He was going home indeed, and no heartless master could hinder him now.

When all was over, the boys marched with spades to the lawn and cut the letters he had traced with his feet, and they abide there to this day, eloquently telling of the love the human heart has for home. This refuge and strong tower, gaming would utterly destroy.

Beginning with the specious plea of amusement, the player soon finds the game grows tasteless as an egg without salt unless there is a stake—at first a small stake, a few dimes or a dollar. Then comes the race track, the raffle, the lottery. Life’s duties seem dull, hilarious comradeship cheers him on, the perverted mind loathes clean food.

Sunday is the chosen day for this transgression. If the man works at all he slights his job, longs for a rainy day or break-down in the machinery to let him off; quarrels with his overseer, hastens to the card table to sit till late at night; looks on the foxiest tricksters around him with deference, thinks it a fine thing to be called a “sport,” smells of tobacco and brandy, is put by society in moral quarantine, barred out of 629desirable and helpful company, grows more reckless and with all his honor raveled to dirty shreds, becomes a hanger on, a roper, steerer, or double-faced decoy to lure others to the sacrifice.

These are the usual gradations. Now, he is an Ishmael, with only two motives of action, hatred of society, and fierce lust for gain. These burn in his breast till the suicide’s draught, or the crack of some outraged victim’s pistol puts an end to the man who could date his downfall to the day he took up cards for amusement.

He who might have been the head of a happy household goes down to death, his highest hopes being that he may be permitted to creep back

His brother gamesters buy a wreath of flowers for his cheap coffin, and the blossoms wither as the baleful breath of these men falls on them when they file by for a farewell look. Poor lilies, you are out of place. A bunch of nightshade twisted with thorns were fitter for that casket. The preacher tries hard to say something consolatory, gives it up and dismisses the group, his soul sick within him as he thinks on the outcast’s doom and the fate of his fellows, already hurrying away to their den for another game. Such is the end of a sinful life wasted in gambling and associate vices.

What has become of the woman he married? He took her from a loving home, out of the shelter of a mother’s love. Well do we remember the night of the wedding feast. There are weddings as sad as funerals. This was one. We saw the traces of dissipation on him then. We, who were older and wiser, trembled for her. She was so young, so beauteous, so full of love’s content. They stood there radiant beneath the bridal arch, while a sister’s fingers woke from the piano the wedding march. The eager witnesses looked on, the elders moist eyed and prayerful, the younger folks with quickened pulses studied her face. Nothing of fear was there; only affection, truth and purity. Solemnly the responses were given—just a tremor in her low-spoken but firm “I will.” Then the wedding circlet on her finger gleamed, the binding words, “Till death do us part.” The burst of gratulation, hands outheld, kisses, laughter, smiles and tears, some quiet talk, friendly admonition, and “good night.”

Away to the great city, where he is tempted in the store, tempted on the street, tempted in the park, tempted on every hand. Now, he is away all night. She with her child, suffers on in silence; only her babe and her God see her nightly tears. Poverty’s bread is bitter, and love spurned makes the heart bleed. From cosy home to narrow flat, from flat to noisome tenement, from tenement to damp cellar, driven, forsaken 630at last, two rooms over an alley stable her only shelter. See her come home from her fruitless endeavor to find him in his haunts, chilled, weak, fainting, she comes to the stable door. With a burst of anguish beyond control she lifts her babe, lays the child in an empty manger, falls upon the straw kneeling and with lifted hands, her wan face white as a winter moon, implores her God to help her utter need. “Come to me, Lord,” she cries, “I am desolate, forsaken, ready to perish: only a stable for a dwelling, Lord. Only a manger wherein to lay my babe. Thou, O Christ, knowest my distress. Thy mother in a stable clasped thee, and Thou, like my helpless little one, wert laid here. Let me reach Thee, let my failing hands find Thy garment’s hem. Thou art good, O God, good beyond all telling. Have I not suffered? See how weak, helpless, deserted I am! Help me, I cry!”

To this, and far worse than this, come those whom this fell plague has bereft of the strong staff and support of home.

Look on another picture of the home where gambling and kindred evils have never entered. This couple started with little and have had a full share of adversity, but hand in hand, with steady effort, unflagging, unflinching, they have climbed to midlife, to business success, to easy circumstances, to honor, respect, influence, and troops of friends.

’Tis a winter evening; the wind howls in the lonely streets and bites to the bone. Belated people steady themselves in the gale, hurrying homeward. Within this home a glowing fire, with tropic heat and rosy light, paves a plaza of gold across the parlor floor. An astral lamp sheds soft brilliance on the heaped books and on the pictured walls. A lad romps in the firelight, another cons a magazine, a maid of twelve plays while her elder sister sings. The father, looking into the fire, ponders on the past. A chord of music wakes him from his reverie; they are singing “The Palace of the King;” he glances at the wife and says softly, “Alice, sit here a while.” Together they sit and talk of God’s goodness and love till the room broadens into the very vestibule of heaven, and they, through the door ajar, can almost look into the palace of the King. For fifteen years, true to the vows made to each other, true to the vows made to God, they have kept clear of vice and walked humbly, and as the happy wife leads in prayer amid the household, round the family altar, she thanks God that these agencies of the great hater of the soul have no power over Him who is the head of her happy household.

The fourth and last charge I bring against gambling is as heavy as any yet stated, and is the direct and final result of the other three.

Can the transient delights of a few years of idleness and sensual gratification atone for an eternity of banishment from hope and heaven? Will the poor pleasures of the voluptuary, the theater and wine cup, the 631fast pace, the boughten smiles of wantons, the flashing pin, the showy clothes, the jingling fob, the curled mustache, and the whole empty round which the successful gamester treads, solace him for the loss of his immortal soul? Will the fleeting hours spent with unscrupulous men, adepts in trickery and confidence games, touts and tipsters, skilled in marked cards, bogus boxes, wheels of (mis)fortune and loaded dice, adroit in fascinating the unwary with hollow smiles and lying speeches, like honey mingled in the hemlock’s poisoned draught—will these repay the willing serf of Satan for a life wasted and a soul passed into hell? Surely not all the pleasures of this high domed, blossoming world heaped in the balance can outweigh the loss of heaven.

Is there anything in fallacious hopes, unstable judgment, despairing ventures or desperate ruin, attended by parental grief, rejected love, and never dying remorse, to make men seek the blandishments of iniquity?

Let not this seducer of youth corrupt your morals, pull down your fortune and cloud your future by his false promises. Let the downward career of others prove effectual warning. Rouse not this ungovernable lust for gain by hazard in your breast. Let the lottery, faro bank, pool room, race course, all such places be as pest houses to you, unless you are prepared to brave God’s intolerable scorn.

Remember that the man who, through any device of chance or knavery, takes money without giving anything in return, belongs in the class with the swindler and the thief. Remember that on the track of this evil follow defalcations, embezzlements, breaches of trust, false entries, forgeries, misappropriation of trust funds and crimes innumerable.

Rebuke its insidious flattery with stern face, and do not tamper with the lightest fringe of it.

What palpable political offence is perpetrated on common morality, and what a tension is put up on the minds of the toiling poor, when such corporations as the Louisiana lottery are licensed by the state to torture the people with glittering visions of wealth easily obtainable, and thus induce them to undergo more grinding poverty that every possible pittance may be laid on the altar of this fat idol to be swept into the wallets of the managers.

The burglar and pirate are respectable citizens compared to these vampires. Even the bookmaker, who controls not only the horse, but the jockey on whose skill you fondly hope to get a fair chance to win, is honorable by comparison. I had despaired of finding a match for the lottery shark, until I saw the man who would juggle with corn and wheat, cornering the necessities of life, using the increase on the price of the poor man’s loaf to line his pocket, and by combination of capital and shrewd manipulations of contingencies, making the sewing woman’s oil a little dearer that he might pile his own full board, and indulge in more luxurious or wasteful excess.

632I fear these men are nursing a Carracas earthquake under the social system of this fair land.

This embrace means death for two worlds. Not even the strongest can get free once the shackles are locked on the limbs.

See Manoah’s boy, the brown babe who played beneath the mulberry trees of Judea while his parents reaped the barley and the durrha. Favorite of Jehovah, he grew in stature and strength, till he was the dread of Israel’s foes. When proud Philistia lifted its insolent mouth with curses to God, no angel legion hung pendulous like a white avalanche of wrath above them. No militant host from the blue sky burst to avenge the affront. God summoned this youth, whose neck was like a stag’s for brawn, and o’er whose massive shoulders swept the black terror of his hair, and bade him smite them. How they fled like sheep before him. How he rent the tawny lion jaw from jaw in mid air, as it leaped on the lover faring down to Timnath. Yet, this hero was led decked to the slaughter, blinded and undone by wicked associates; haltered like a beast, he trudged the weary round in the prison house of his foes, because he had not the wisdom to shun evil company.

As I meditate on the ruin of the fine young fellows who come up every year to this city and to all cities, knowing that these words will be tossed by the press into hundreds of quiet rural communities, I am resolved now to put my best energies and most earnest entreaties into this last appeal to young men. You are thinking of coming up to the city. You are set on this purpose; you will not be gainsayed or denied. I do not wish to hinder you if you come, seeking a broader field of usefulness and better opportunities for true success. If you come for pleasure, for mere money getting, or seeking entertainment of the baser sort, stay! We have too many now of that kind. Better your native hills encircled you, and all your days were spent where you were born, than come to the city on such an errand. But if you come to do rightly, live honestly, act manfully and fear God, all will be well. There is need of such men everywhere.

When you are ready to bid farewell to the old place, when you have taken a last look at the old bridge and the stream, the orchard and the lower meadow, when you have seen the swallows in the dusk of the old barn, the bucket in the old well, the pin in the old gate post and the bee hive in the old garden for the last time, when you have plucked a cluster 633of bloom from the honey locust and a few sweet pinks from the side of the path, and have kissed your sisters and cheered your father with the promise, “I will be home for Christmas,” while the stage is coming up the hill and your best boy friend holds your satchel at the roadside, dear boy, turn for a moment, climb up the stairs where mother is—you know the room, the room which is the holy of holies in any house, “Mother’s room”—kneel with her by the bed, and let that last tender prayer sink like a plummet into the crystal depths of your unpolluted soul. Take the little Bible she gave you out of your pocket, and ask her to write upon the fly leaf the single word that Duncan Matheson, the evangelist, wanted engraved upon his tombstone—the one word, “Kept.”

Now, with the chrism of that trusting mother’s kiss upon your forehead, come on, you are ready for battle—of such stuff are freedom’s young apostles made. The kings of commerce are always looking for well favored and spotless young men.

On the cars coming here you may meet the gambler. He will enter into conversation with you, he is well-informed and companionable. His genial manner and friendly style will impress you; by and by he will invite you into the smoking car to take a hand in a game of cards. Resent the implied indignity. Tell him you would rather get out and ride in a cattle car the balance of the way than mix fraternally with his breed. He will not withstand the fire in your eye, and the scorn in your speech. He will skulk off with a low oath, half hissed between his teeth. He will, however, have a higher opinion of the intelligence of the young man he mistook for a greenhorn, and you will be on better terms with yourself, and feel no accusing pangs of self-reproach from your conscience.

You will meet him or his mate afterwards on the street, in depots, restaurants, lobbies and offices. He will be affable and solicitous. Never exchange civilities with him, let your indignation burn at his approach, use the scourge of righteous wrath on him, and he will flee from your presence.

You will soon learn that while the gambler works hand in glove with every evil doer, his favorite co-worker and sharer in his unholy earnings is the scarlet woman. It would be safe to say that one-third of all the lost women of our cities are affiliated with men who live by schemes of chance and by the knavery which accompanies such trades. And thus, hand in hand, the sharper and the soiled dove, the sediment of society, the dregs of moral abomination, go down the broad road together. Keep far from this pair.

634Think not that there are no high-toned and godly young men in these great cities. Here are many of heroic mould, born and bred in the din of the town. They have kept their hands as stainless, their speech as pure, their hearts as gentle, as any reared in the quiet hamlets of the country. They are men of mettle, grounded in good principles, established and fixed, not fluctuating and unreliable.

A wise writer says when a young man has learned that he can be depended on, he is already of some account in the world. These young men have learned that. They have many pleasures and choice delights, but they reject the gamblers’ villainous bribes and flee his contaminating society, well aware, by the testimony of many unimpeachable witnesses, that his primrose path, which seemed so pleasant to the eye, ends in a labyrinth of remorse, whence the reprobate can no more return to fellowship with men.

There is in some parts of the West a periodical disease called the ague. It passes through phases of chills, sweats, nausea, discoloration and fever. When the fever seems to be grilling the sufferer, he sometimes has a slight delirium and vividly imagines that he is two persons—two separate and distinct personalities of the Jekyll and Hyde type—one is a kindly, courteous, clean man, ready to help anyone, quick to befriend and forward all who need his aid. The other is a cringing, envious, scowling loafer. The sick man sees these two sitting, one on each side of the bed, and each of them is he. A strange delusion, is it not? Yet, not so visionary as you might suppose. It is strictly scriptural and squares with experience.

The evil nature and the good are present in every man. His breast is the arena of a gladitorialgladitorial combat between these two. St. Paul says, “I keep my body under.” That is, he held his carnal nature down under the feet of his spiritual nature.nature.

In this fight the devil squires the evil, low-browed, lustful half of you. It is possible with help from on high, to beat these allies. St. John says, “I write unto you, young men, because you are strong, and have overcome the wicked one.”one.”

What young men did then they can do to-day—master Satan and control the lower part of their natures, letting the higher and better part predominate, thus securely laying hold on eternal life.

The so-called pleasure of a life of sin is but a cup of cordial offered a condemned man on the way to execution; a feast of Damocles with the naked sword, thread-hung above the head; a dipping the hand in Belshazzar’s dainty dish, while the Divine finger writes the soul’s woe upon the wall.

In all this article I have been like one who anchors buoys above sunken rocks in the channel where many have gone down. I have been hanging red lamps above the slime pits of the city’s streets.

635As the Alpine dwellers set a cross on the brink of a torrent or the verge of an abyss, to mark the spot where men have met death, so I have tried to lift up the symbol of salvation and keep the wayfarer from destruction.

If a man loses one fortune, he may accumulate another; if he lose a hand, he has another; if an eye, he can still make his way, but if his soul is lost, all is lost.

How can a sane man risk this soul and gamble with Belial, knowing the total renunciation of all joy that must follow its loss—to trudge forever the vassal of the slave of slaves through a sunless, starless eternity.

A spot is shown at Niagara where a child was dashed to death. A father, intending to give his child a slight fright, lifted her over the flood. A paroxysm of fear twisted the little one in his hands. She slipped—fell, her death shriek filling him with anguish as the seething flood swept the babe from his sight forever. Fool! fool! you say. Right; he was a fool, but what accusation will be brought against the man who stands at last, abashed and guilty, charged with flinging his soul into insatiable hell. Even when the gambler’s soul is saved, much that makes this life good is lost forever. The author of this volume has to drink this cup of bitterness to the dregs. His wicked life made a false charge seem plausible. A crime was fathered on him of which he was innocent. No virtues rose to plead trumpet tongued in his behalf; he had been a wrong-doer from early youth, so he was made to suffer. O, if he could live life over; the door is shut. O, if he could go among men, where talents and present longings fit him to go; the door is shut. O, if the one fair babe who once climbed to his knee could but smile up to him now and bruise his name to sweetness on his baby lips in the fashion of the old times. If that white hand could lay its benediction on his brow, with the silk soft touch of long ago. Alas, the door is shut. If that wife, so dear to him through all the dishonored years, could be restored, could walk with him hand in hand through the evening shadows across the home-leading fields where their babe waits their coming at the gate. O, that it could be. How immeasurable the loss entailed by him who is taken in the gamblers’ toils.

Perchance, these words may come under the eye of one whose brow bears already the stigma of this craft.

Brother, there must be hidden somewhere in your heart a remnant of your early purity. Drop the implements of your calling; let my hand slip into yours; come apart where we can sit and talk together. Pardon me if I press the question home to your conscience. What is to be the outcome of all this? Shake off the palsy of years, I pray you, and essay an answer. I wait to hear your own verdict on your case. You cannot always be blind to the havoc you are making; you cannot always be deaf 636to the piteous cries that go up to heaven’s chancery from women and children, kenneled in extreme want by reason of your profession. You blandly ask me Cain’s question: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

Listen to Tennyson’s answer, adapted to your sneering philosophy, that each must look out for himself:

Of all arts there is but one more hated of men than yours, that of the procuress, who flings shrinking innocence into the arms of lust. You may only mean to strip away from man his temporal possessions. This is atrocious. But, my friend, do you not see that the secondary result is to put the souls of men and women into the grip of the demon, whose unsated lust ever asks for more? Above the brand of gambler must be stamped “Procurer for Perdition,” a soul-hunting hound, who, with the filthy pack, runs helpless ones into the dungeon of the lords of hell.

Rise up, shake off this dark enchantment—dash down the dice, shred the cards into the flames—pass out into the pure air, and while there yet is hope ask heavenly help to break your heavy chains.

Yours is the very insanity of crime; like the imprisoned eagle who might swim the blue sky and bathe in the sun, you are caged in a dungeon’s walls. Nature cannot furnish nor the imagination create a figure of speech to parallel your unfortunate condition.

Let us go back to first principles and ask, “What is a man? What was the Maker’s design when he fashioned man?” After creation was completed from chaos to order, from darkness to light, from the lowest polyp, through crinoid batrachian, reptile, fish, bird, to the highest mammals, God paused to consider what likeness the Prince of this earthly creation should wear. He was to be the link binding heaven and earth, animal and angel, material and spiritual, so that an unbroken chain of life might exist from the loftiest archangelarchangel to the lowest monad, related to both spheres and completing all; his body from one world, his soul from the other.

“What fashion shall he be formed in?” Was the question which seemed to give the Creator pause. None of the lower creatures would do for a model, as he must govern them and be superior to them. Surely some of the angelic or seraphic ones will be chosen as the pattern! They were mighty, beatific and holy; in favor with God and obedient to his behests.

If some shining one from beside the throne, who had been wrapt in the serene presence of the Uncreate, had been chosen, what an honor to be 637like him! But such a one is not selected. As our Father in Heaven thinks of his Child that is to be, we hear the mysterious declaration, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” And so it was.

Consider the supreme honor done us in this act. God could find no being but himself fit to be thy pattern, and wilt thou for whom he passed the hierarchs of glory by, stoop to such groveling ingratitude as to ignore him and humiliate thy brother man?

Oh, that I could inspire you to cast these cords far from you, and rise toward that mark set for you by our kind and ever present Lord. Come out from among these Philistines.

I would as soon expect to grow a plant under the dripping of vitrol or in the fumes of sulphur as in such a place, and if you willfully persist in impiety, you must expect retribution to overtake your impenitence and the last door of hope will be shut.

Perhaps you came out of a religious home and had a legacy of faithful prayers; a pious parent dedicated you to God in infancy, and as the baptisimal drops fell on your baby brow, they fervently hoped that your nature might know the inward cleansing of which that rite was the outward sign.

All the riches of Midas would not give you such pleasure as the memories of that dear old couple, if you were in the way they trod so long. Oft in the village church, or at the cottage altar, your father, bowed with white hair and dim eye, lifted his voice in supplication for you. Oft he led you o’er the hill on Sabbath Day, pensive, rejoicing, giving you good counsel in quiet tones, or telling at dusk with open Bible, and the family in a circle about him, some rich story of Holy Writ, which now comes back at times in the quaint old-fashioned words to your remembrance as you trample daily on the truth he taught you. A verse of some melodious hymn sung by your mother floats up out of the past, sweeter than opera strains to you.

Can the driveling ditties and sentimental songs affected by your associates drown the cadence of that tender old voice crooning the songs of Zion? Often she looked in your eyes. They were not bloodshot then, not dim with vigils at the iniquitous game, but pure and deep as the wells of Gaza; your face was as the dawn to her, your forehead candid and fair.

What dreams she had of your useful and exalted career. Has it all come to this? Are you not glad the saintly old couple are asleep on the hillside under the yew trees, with eyes closed and hands folded in the long 638rest! Could you revisit that place you would not care to meet old friends, they might ask annoying questions and start vain regrets. You would just slip out half a mile to that burial ground, every step seeming to make your burden heavier, every moment to aggravate your unbearable guilt. Once there, by those two graves, alone, unseen of man, you would bow and put your face in the grass, weeping that you could get no nearer to the beloved ones. This you would do, and it would be the manliest thing you have done for many a miserable month.

There is a manlier yet. That old couple is not there; they are nearer to you than that in spirit, they are not far from you now. Better than tears to them would be the solemn resolution to leave this moment and for aye the guilty men and evil trade which have brought you low.

Give me thy hand, man! Look level in my eyes! Gird up thy loins, there is help nigh.

Break away! Break away! All may yet be forgiven and atoned for. Pluck up heart. You shall yet praise God with all your ransomed powers. Your heart shall cast forth its idols, and shall let all its tendrils of affection curl and twine about the Cross. Your soul shall adore Him and have one object of worship. He shall have full dominion over you. Your mind with all its renewed faculties shall exult in liberty. Even your body shall share in the general joy and fulfill all its functions with a glad obedience unknown before.

A traveler who had put a girdle round the earth and studied many nations, was asked to relate the most thrilling incident of his long and eventful life. He hesitated long, hushed in thought, and said: “It occurred just before the civil war. I was crossing from this country to Canada in a ferry boat. The captain knew me, as I had often crossed with him. Midstream he touched my arm and said, ‘Come with me, I will show you something worth seeing.’ I followed him to the dark coal hole of the craft, and when my eyes became accustomed to the gloom, I saw crouching in a corner a black man, an escaped slave. Helped through the North by friends, he was nearing liberty; for no shackles could come, no slave hunter tread the soil where floated the flag of England. As the boat neared the shore the captain beckoned to him, and while we all gazed on him he crept to the bow, impatient to gain the shore. Never on any face have I seen such burning eagerness. As the keel touched the gravel, with a mighty shout he bounded into the water, waded ashore, all dripping, and turning his great eyes to the heavens, his chest heaving with emotion, he cried, ‘O God! O God! At last! At last! I’se free! I’se free!’

“There,” said the traveler, “I saw the greatest spectacle of my life, a soul springing full statured from slave to man in an hour.”

639Surely ’twas a stirring sight, but there is an escape more moving yet—to see the slave of evil habits long driven by his task master, cross the line to moral manhood and break into the larger liberty of the gospel.

I have seen it done—seen the drunkard snap his shackles—the bondman of habit leap out of his old sins with a mighty effort, and begin a new life.

The truth is seeking an entrance into your heart, even as the sunbeams seek entrance into a long disused and darkened room. How patiently they play about the door, peeping into every crevice, slipping wedges of gold through the shutters and laying bars of bullion on the dusty floor. “Let us in,” they cry, “we will cast out the devils of gloom, disease, dirt, dampness. Let us in.”

Every dawn they come again to plead, every sundown they go reluctantly away. At last, the master from within flings open the door, pushes wide the shutters, lifts the windows, and in they rush to rinse every nook, cleanse every corner, reveal every stain, and they will not be satisfied till all is renewed, swept and garnished within.

You wonder, like the prodigal, sometimes, if you would be received if you returned. Listen to that broken column of marble, lying there among the rubbish. I thought I heard it laugh. There it is again. Listen! Hear it saying, “Oh, happy stone that I am.” Others sneer and say, “What is there to give you happiness, lying there forsaken, among the debris of this old temple?” “I rejoice,” replies the blackened pillar, “not“not for what I am, but for what I am to be. The great sculptor, Angelo, was here to-day. He measured me, he made a mark on me. I heard him say as he looked at me, ‘This will do.’”

640Even within the vilest sinner, there is a glorious possibility. Once in the hands of Christ, hidden beauty will shine forth and deformity will disappear. So beautiful will he make the soul that it will be fit for the inheritance of the saints in light.

Weep not over misspent youth, much may yet be done, even now. Crippled as you are, you may have a little work to show in return for His love. You may never have as much as others, but there is this consolation, you may love Him as dearly, obey Him as implicitly, follow Him as closely, and suffer for Him as gladly, as any of His church.

Sometimes I think you can know Him better for your very misery. Hear the ninety and nine telling the praises of the Good Shepherd; how he has led them, folded them, defended them. When all have spoken in concurrent testimony, the lost sheep, crippled, scarred, torn, speaks in tones low and full of pathos: “All you have said is true, but none of you know the dear Shepherd as I know him. I am the most unworthy of all, yet into the hills, among the wolves, in the dark night, through the cold streams, He came seeking me. I was bleeding, mangled on the rocks, ready to die. Through the pelting of the pitiless storm I heard Him call my name, saying, ‘Come home, come home.’ Tenderly he lifted me, gently bound up my wounds, patiently he carried me all the way. Ah, you know something of His love, but I know nothing else.”else.”

So it is. There is room in His mercy for all, and if there is no other gate into the city of refuge that you dare to enter, hold my hand and together we will go into this one, which he opened for us.

“Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.”

Transcriber’s Note

This text, frankly, is rife with errors. It is often not possible to attribute the errors of spelling and punctuation to the author or the printer. Generally, obvious punctuation errors (missing periods, unbalanced quotation marks, etc.) have been corrected, and noted in the table below.

Typographical mistakes (e.g. inverted or transposed letters, doubled syllables on line breaks, ‘halt’ for ‘half’, etc.) are also corrected and noted.

Spelling errors are more problematic. Where other instances of a word are spelled correctly (by our standards),they are noted and corrected. The Single instances are noted, but remain uncorrected. Many very obvious mistakes (e.g., conspicious, sufficent, countenaces) have been corrected. The goal was to render the text readable while preserving as accurately as possible the author’s intent.

In passages of extended quotation, the author (or printer) regularly fails to be consistent in the use of quotations marks, either failing to include the opening mark on continuing paragraphs, or neglecting to nest them properly using single marks.

In the section of Part I, Chapter II on “Hindoos”, a quoted narrative beginning on the bottom of p. 75 abandons the use of enclosing double quotation marks for each paragraph by the top of p. 77.

A quote purportedly from the Eclectic Magazine of May, 1885, beginning on p. 148, fails to clearly finish, with a confusion of quotation marks making that a matter of speculation. That volume of the magazine has no article regarding gambling (which might have allowed a correct scope for the passage).

On pp. 431-437, a letter and an extended description of various gambling devices uses only a single opening quotation, and is distinguished from the main text only by the use of a smaller font.

Beginning on p. 178, a passage from the Gentleman’s Magazine of 1796 is quoted, but the quotation marks are inconsistently applied. These have been corrected for clarity. There are several points, where the author lapses into paraphrase, that are left intact here.

Rather than attempting to regularize the punctuation of these passages, the text is given as printed.

The author employs borrowed French words usually without providing accents.

The name ‘Petitt’ is also found as ‘Pettit’ and since the former was more frequently the case, the several instances of the latter were corrected.

On p. 474, there are several paragraphs which repeat verbatim a passage appearing on p. 472, beginning with ‘Lottery playing has always...’ and ending three paragraphs later with ‘...so popular among the people at large as was the Havana Lottery.’ This is without doubt a typesetting error, and the redundant passage has been removed. The removed paragraphs occurred here.

In discussing the South Sea Bubble, the author repeatedly refers to Tobias Smollet as ‘Smallet’ or ‘Smallett’. Each variant has been retained and noted.

Hyphenation of compound words follows the text. Where the hyphen appears on a line or page break, it is kept or discarded in keeping with other instances.

Inconsistencies in the punctuation of the Index are corrected without further mention here.

The references in this table are to the page and line in the original.

8.11	“knowledge of good and evil.[’/”]	Replaced.
10.35	“Striking the White Dove[”]	Added.
14.48	“Ropers” and [“]Steerers”	Added.
18.25	“Straddles”[—]Fictitious	Added.
24.34	his policy [to-]toward gambling, 404.	Removed.
37.4	it may serve to illus[s]trate	Removed.
40.42	failed to d[e/i]scover the right one.	Replaced.
50.25	as thereupon made again[s]t me	Added.
51.32	cared little[.]	Added.
54.8	The latter was cor[r]oborated by his wife	Inserted.
55.28	They had kind[s] words for us	Removed.
55.29	in that hour of our humil[i]ation	Inserted.
55.32	by that ma[t]chless orator	Inserted.
56.22	he proceeded to Indian[o/a]polis	Replaced.
97.33	gamble for ‘Loukouni,’	sic Loukoumi?
60.8	a Young Men’s Christian Association[”]	Removed.
63.7	[“/‘]God bless mamma and papa ...	Replaced.
63.8	... and everybody. Amen.[’]”	Inserted.
58.43	such a [grievious] wrong,	sic grievous
75.43	more a matter of chance[.]	Added.
79.16	[“]What waste of words	Added.
84.38	who were conspic[i/u]ous for	Replaced.
85.5	Two Ta[n/ou]ist priests	Replaced.
87.36	It consisted of three sixes on the te[rr/ss]esarae	Replaced.
89.23	at the battle of [Acton]?	sic Actium
94.15	which pierced the mirror behind him.[”]	Added.
97.6	advertisements of the [sanitive] properties	sic sanative
98.6	they can earn money so easily?[’]	Added.
102.23	described them as [“]arrayed	sic: unclosed quote.
112.12	is now the only social entertainment[s] of the salons	Removed.
110.22	[“]Her husband,	Added.
110.28	[“]There was an expression	Added.
110.36	[“]Another figure at the gaming table	Added.
111.2	that she was an Englishwoman.[”]	Added.
117.12	is the last and sole represen[ta]tive of the class	Inserted.
117.17	a suffic[i]ent guarantee	Inserted.
120.3	to violence, drunken[n]ess and gaming	Inserted.
122.27	the oldest magistrate in the [parliment]	sic parlement or parliament
122.41	in fullness of their te[r]merity	Removed.
123.40	to such a noble position,[”]	Added.
127.23	A large propor[tion] of the patrons	Missing.
128.19	some sort of lia[i]son	Inserted.
128.36	has long been ended.[”]	Added.
129.41	of the game on a Mississipp[p]i river boat	Removed.
131.4	he said[,] “until one evening in 1872	Added.
135.6	in other European countries[.]	Added.
136.9	do not play for gain but for pleasure.[”]	Added.
141.1	and his footman told me so,” he replied.[”]	Removed.
141.33	the catastrophe of Sir [, ——/ ——,] who has frittered away	Comma moved.
141.39	but there was nothing done.[”]	Added.
143.19	are said to be fully £150,000 ($750,000[.)/).]	Transposed.
144.7	[‘/“]The ‘hells’ generally	Replaced.
145.19	accumulated a col[l]ossal fortune	Removed.
148.10	another occas[s]ion he kept the bank	Removed.
148.28	succ[c/e]eded in winning back	Replaced.
150.38	which the police raid from time to time.[”]	Removed.
152.19	“Roulette, £1,000 in the bank[.]”	Added.
154.40	If the caster throws d[ue/eu]ces or aces	Transposed.
155.23	portrayed on the countena[n]ces of the players	Inserted.
156.30	they are at their own homes.[’]	Added.
160.23	as [Smallett] has truly called it	sic Smollett
162.1	says [Smallet],	sic Smollett
162.30	Smallett gives us	sic Smollett
163.6	interfered with the usefuln[e]ss of servants	Inserted.
163.38	under a pen[alty] of 40s	Completed.
163.43	a monthly penalty of 40s. for every default.[”]	Added.
166.25	he hastily decamped[.]	Added,
170.40	to jeopardize them again[.]	Added.
173.3	he soon bec[o/a]me an ensign	Replaced.
174.16	[“]When King James ascended	Removed.
174.15	was very glad of his absence.”	Added.
174.30	by which those famil[i]ar with the tricks	Inserted.
178.12	the latter apol[i/o]gized for becoming intoxicated	Replaced.
179.4	where I am to be found.[”/’]	Replaced.
179.24	[”]Mr. Justice Rooke summed up the evidence	Added.
179.26	[“/‘manslaughter[’/”	Replaced.
179.41	was another eminent Englishm[e/a]n	Replaced.
179.43	[“/‘]We played a good deal at [“/‘]Goosetree’s[’]”	Replaced/Added.
180.10	[“/‘]What, Wilberfor[c]e is that you?[”/’]	Corrected/inserted.
180.16	Miles’ and ‘Evans’[,] Brooks[,] Boodle’s, White’s and Goosetree’s.	Added.
181.10	“Twenty-five guineas,[”] answered the alderman.	Added.
182.12	The cases of Lords Halifax, Ang[el/le]sey	Transposed.
186.32	and by the [decrepted] old negro	sic decrepit
189.14	the will of the people[.]	Added.
196.2	(“Make your play, gentlemen!” “Nothing more goes!”[)]	Added.
198.13	to pull from the ends like “rakes[:/.]”	Replaced.
200.4	which will be explained[.]	Added.
201.21	to the grating of the finger nails[.]	Added.
201.40	in advance of the de[s/c]k	Replaced.
207.1	Here’s your money old man.[”]	Added.
208.17	entered the ap[p]artment	Removed.
212.22	Close[,] one of the best known	Added.
214.2	one of the “peculiar institutions[”]	Added.
216.24	[“]When a player puts in that much	Removed.
218.18	instead of saying [‘/“]I bet,”	Replaced.
219.31	which may [h/b]e held by players	Replaced.
222.33	a moral impossibility for the unsoph[ist]icated	Inserted.
226.26	until number 3 has “staked” his [“]pile.”	Added.
227.19	the person to who[w/m] he wishes to give	Inverted.
230.44	In some of the succe[e]ding paragraphs	Inserted.
236.27	he bet wildly on his adve[r]sary’s deal	Inserted.
236.39	the foot of the operator accident[al]ly slipped	Inserted.
242.4	a liberal supply of worthless checks[.]	Added.
244.29	and the [apperture] in the box	sic aperture
246.39	While a rouge et no[u/i]r table	Replaced.
248.9	marked “[B/R],” is for wagers on the red	Replaced.
248.24	the first and last hal[t/f] of the numbers	Replaced.
252.15	is thus enabled t[e/o] win through fraud	Replaced.
254.7	Two it[e/i]nerant sharpers	Replaced.
254.14	and that—to use a colloqu[i]alism—	Inserted.
257.10	holding neither face cards no[t/r] tens	Replaced.
260.3	it makes not the sligh[t]est difference	Inserted.
264.9	I’m your man for twenty or so.[’]”	Removed.
266.37	“Briefs” may also be advantageou[s]ly used	Inserted.
267.42	“just a little higher.[”]	Added.
268.1	[“]When a “gudgeon” displays	Removed.
270.4	the kingdom of Great Brit[ia/ai]n	Transposed.
271.22	with absolute certain[i]ty	Removed.
271.39	that will fill the d[a/e]aler[’]s hand	Replaced/Inserted.
272.4	they already hold nineteen or twenty[,/.]	Replaced.
273.15	in the land of the Pharoahs	sic Pharaohs
273.29	will be treated seriatum	sic seriatim
274.10	on the corresponding squares on the cloth[,/.]	Replaced.
275.3	has never [occured] to him	sic occurred
275.21	“the old army [“]game,”	Removed.
277.36	the other dice is in[s]cribed	Inserted.
282.29	that his luck may not ap[p]ear	Inserted.
284.5	of an immense n[e/u]mber of “fakirs,”	Replaced.
287.37	as explained above[.]	Added.
288.29	the “book-keeper[”] occasionally brings	Added.
290.36	By simply pressing on this [mechanicism]	sic mechanism
295.40	(as shown in fig. [1/2])	Corrected. Fig. 2 is unlabelled.
369.37	the hair escaped i[u/n] flowing rings	Inverted.
300.12	a “[a ]sure winner” for the manipulator	Removed.
301.32	the proprietor knows [t/w]hat number	Replaced.
309.31	and will also give him a gratuit[i]ous chance	Removed.
312.15	The inherent [villany] of such a transaction	sic villainy
312.26	is substantially as describ[e]d below	Inserted.
314.35	“Why,[”] man, Mississippi is a big State,	Removed.
314.36	What city?[”]	Added.
316.2	from the hands of his friend[.]	Added.
316.16	with which the sc[r]oundrels have taken	Removed.
318.35	[‘/“]Beyond a question.”	Replaced.
320.26	He said, ‘An Indian ain’t got any rights anyhow[,/.]	Replaced.
321.19	and sell it outright[./?]”	Replaced.
321.33	the height of the ho[n/u]ses	Inverted.
331.11	by members of the fraternity as “send”[.]	Added.
334.22	as they lie upon the table[.]	Added.
336.18	in having a second conf[i]ederate	Removed.
338.14	the“agent[”] of the gift distribution scheme	Added.
341.4	he (the sharper) ia the[;] agent	Removed.
341.30	submits to his loss without a [murmer].	sic murmur
353.18	bet on a certainty.[”]	Removed.
353.40	you shentlemen’s want nohow?[”]	Added.
355.28	The “soap man” t[u/a]kes his position	Replaced.
357.15	with the fleet-f[l]ooted runner.	Removed.
357.18	he is glad that his “uncle[”]	Added.
361.39	[“]I thought as much,”	Added.
366.35	My inborn proclivities were towards physic[i]al cowardice	Removed.
367.30	in a small Missouri village[.]	Added.
370.30	without attracting their attention.[tion.]	Removed.
371.17	that his [custodion] was a devotee	sic custodion
373.39	His next mess[s]age to his father	Removed.
374.36	and offer to stake them for $2.00[.]	Added.
374.40	as good a “bottom dealer” [w]as there [w]as in the country	Removed/Added.
376.9	give me a nick[le/el]’s worth.	Transposed.
377.19	he accosted us[.]	Added.
378.17	O[’i/’]ive got the wrong man.[”]	Transposed/Added.
382.41	than between two meals[,/.]	Replaced.
383.49	She replied, “[‘] might be buried in it.”	Removed.
384.1	and then started for home[,/.]	Replaced.
384.2	seemed to be “turned around[”] to me	Added.
389.24	receiving their stipul[ l/ulat]ed proportion	Replaced.
390.31	property of this de[cs/sc/ription	Transposed.
395.6	Not[h]withstanding all this lavish outlay	Removed.
399.20	[harrassing] them night and day	sic harassing
404.6	had the power to enfor[c]e his behest	Inserted.
405.7	one outside watchman at $20[:/;]	Replaced.
407.37	Keplinger’s patent [00]	sic
409.28	St[au/ua]rt Eddy	Transposed.
411.28a	he s[au/ua]vely asked	Transposed.
411.28b	“how can I accom[m]odate you?	Removed.
415.4	He sprang from [s/a] good New England family	Replaced.
417.28	power of long-sustain[e]d application	Inserted.
418.6	Ex[ -]Governor Jenkins, of Colorado	Added.
426.35	“[‘]The players	Removed.
427.14	[‘/“]That’s all right,” answered Allriver.	Replaced.
427.16	“I’ve inquired into that[,]”	Added.
433.13	loaded dice come i[s/n] sets of “9”	Replaced.
440.3	“Ed.[’/”] Moses sauntered up	Replaced.
440.9	is drinking the mellow[i/e]st “bourbon”	Replaced.
440.30	and a few dime[s]	Added.
441.41	[being] a favorite resort for stock-brokers	sic became?
441.42	overcome their old time sporting proclivities[.]	Added.
442.3	chiefl[l]y “brace”	Removed.
446.35	A large p[or/ro]portion of these “touts”	Transposed.
447.6	to a president[i]al election	Inserted.
451.8	sc[h]edule of rates	Inserted.
452.18	the fair was for some[ ]time the question	Inserted.
452.41	who for some[ ]time tried without success	Inserted.
457.39	of the third mun[i]cipality	Inserted.
459.11	McGrath, Sherwood and Pet[ti/it]t were the first	Transposed.
461.11	Davis, McGrath and Pet[ti/it]t, in particular	Transposed.
461.37	(which came in a few weeks[)]	Added.
464.30	Mr. Shak[e]speare	Removed.
468.33	has not proved more re[num/mun]rative	Transposed.
469.30	as affording even greater fluc[ut/tu]ations	Transposed.
470.30	the tangible result [that was/was that] in the single year	Words transposed.
471.2	was accustomed, now and then[,] to “take a little flyer.”	Added.
471.6	More[o]ver the business	Inserted.
476.17	“Age cannot wither nor custom sta[t/l]e”	Replaced.
477.27	The “sports” had become politic[i]ans	Inserted.
477.32	the sentiment in the legislature again[s]t gaming	Inserted.
478.8	Temporary [abberation] of mind	sic aberration
478.40	unprecedented and unparal[el/le]led in history	Transposed.
479.3	they found the [i/I]ndians racing ponies	Capitalized.
479.32	until some[ ]time in or about 1872	Inserted.
480.1	in each instance has ignomin[i]ously failed	Inserted.
480.25	most of the dealers and [supernumeries]	sic supernumeraries
483.7	being permitted to “sit,[’/”]	Replaced.
491.8	applicants for admiss[s]ion are subjected	Removed.
492.8	There is then another outcry[,] they are ordered	Added.
504.19	a very prominent Republican politic[i]an	Added.
505.2	a great devotee of the game[.]	Added.
507.4	patronized almost exclusively by the elite[.]	Added.
509.28	burned out an extensive gam[b]ling establishment	Inserted.
511.13	Professional gam[e]sters	Inserted.
511.35	a remarkable degree the [effrontry]	sic effrontery
511.40	assemble for the same purpose in each other[’]s rooms[.]	Added.
512.23	to lose it again[.]	Added.
515.17	and “chuc[h/k]-a-luck,” were not neglected	Replaced.
516.14	was immediately resumed[,/.]	Replaced.
517.27	at the sailor[’s/s’] boarding houses	Transposed.
520.23	the infatuation of the habit s[ie/ei]zed upon him	Transposed.
521.10	is certain that in [t]he history of gambling	Added.
522.23	For[r]ester about 20 years ago	Inserted.
523.15	a part of his entertainment[.]	Added.
526.2	they are fug[u/i]tives and outcasts	Replaced.
535.10	were to be calm[l]y and quietly	Inserted.
537.31	But, [sa/as] in all other trades	Transposed.
537.32	The habitues and[c / c]ustomers	Transposed.
538.9	“Steerers[”] were numerous	Added.
538.36	corral[l]ing some of the large profits	Inserted.
542.13	drawing the capital prize[.]	Added.
544.25	to promote and foster gambling[,/.]	Replaced.
545.43	“Sock” Ri[el]le]y	Transposed.
547.35	whose steps take hold on hell[.]	Added.
549.34	and at first with var[r]ying success.	Removed.
557.13	[I]t became generally recognized	Added.
561.8	that is, the individu[a]l chances	Inserted.
565.4	to have been a large field of favorites[.]	Added.
573.23	to individual policeme[u/n]	Replaced.
577.20	the sale of commodit[i]es	Inserted.
579.6	It follows that he is natu[u/r]ally	Replaced.
584.20	is incomprehensible to the uni[ni]tiated	Inserted.
587.26	was the outgrowth of disappointed[,] self-seeking	Removed.
590.32	jammed with a[u/n] excited throng	Inverted.
595.23	the [“]dissemination of valuable commercial	Added.
596.4	the self-stultification went even farther[,/.]	Replaced.
596.35	spots upon the b[ody]	Restored.
596.36	the very heart of so[cial] morals	Restored.
601.14	the fungus-like excres[c]ence	Inserted.
607.13	Astronomy helped make Newton[;/,] art made Angelo,	Replaced.
613.2	every released convict[,/.]	Replaced.
613.5	[s/S]ir, tell them this	Capitalized.
615.9	I never cou[n]tenanced the evil	Inserted.
615.40	the big winning last night.[”]	Added.
620.33	within all is punk and hollowness[.]	Added.
623.30	I can win my bread.[”]	Added.
625.12	forehead of his child with such a wrong[”]	Added.
625.17	while the meta[l]lic	Inserted.
625.22	to con[s]ciousness	Inserted.
633.43	One grand sweet song.[”]	Added.
634.27	[gladitorial] combat	sic
634.29	his spiritual nature[.]	Added.
634.33	the wicked one.[”]	Added.
636.6	define it well[./,]	Replaced.
636.32	the loftiest archang[le/el]	Transposed.
639.23	[“] for what I am not	Added.
640.22	but I know nothing else.[”]	Added.

Dedication.	5
Preface.	7-9
Index.	19-25
Introduction:—By Charles P. Johnson.	26-28
” By Rev. John Snyder, D. D.	29-30
Autobiography of John Philip Quinn,	33-64
The Three Stages of a Gambler’s Life,	65

CHAPTER I.

PRELIMINARY REMARKS, FOOD FOR REFLECTION.

Gaming Indefensible—A False Idea of Happiness—Oriental Knowledge of Ethics—Origin of the Gaming Instinct—Blackstone’s Definition of Gaming—Gambling and Commerce Contrasted—The Gambler’s Philosophy—His End—The Gaming Table an Incentive to Suicide—Gambling Subversive of Social Order—The Gamester an Ishmaelite—Hereditary Vice—The Practice Condemned by Legislative Enactment—Jewish and Egyptian Statutes—How Gaming was Regarded by the Greeks and Romans—The Code of Justinian—The Common Law and Statutes of England Compared—The Enactments of American Legislatures Examined and Compared—The True Theory of Repression	67-73


CHAPTER II.

HEBREWS, PERSIANS, CHINESE AND JAPANESE.

The “Lot” Among the Hebrews—The Putative Sacred Origin of Gaming—Egyptian Legends—Mercury Gambling With the Sun—Artaxerxes and Paracletus—An Assassin’s Life at Stake—Gambling Prohibited by the Mohammedan Code—Gaming Among the Hindoos—Worship of the Goddess of Wealth—Ancient Dice Throwing—Antiquity of Loaded Dice—A Game For a Kingdom and a Wife—A Persian Legend—The Wrath of Duryodhana—The Vengeance of the Pandavas—Gambling Among the Chinese—Favorite Frauds Among the Celestials—Chinese Gambling Implements—The “Poetical” Game—Gaming Prohibited by Chinese Statutes—Oriental “Hells”—The Tan-Koon, the N’gan, and the Ho-Koon—Favorite Chinese Games—“Ching Low”—“Nim”—Women as Gamesters—How “Koo Yan” is Played—Betting on Enigmas—Frauds—“Striking the White Dove”Dove”—A Substitute For the Lottery—Cards and Dice Prohibited in Japan	74-86

11CHAPTER III.

ANCIENT AND MODERN GREEKS AND ROMANS, TURKEY IN EUROPE, AND ASIA MINOR.

Gaming a Factor in the Fall of Greece—Dicing at Athens—Gaming an Aid to Despotism—Encouraged by Alexander—Cocking Mains Among the Greeks—Origin of Dice—Roman Dice—Value of Throws—Odd Customs—Roman Laws Regarding Gaming—Infamous Character and Practices of Roman Gamblers-“Cogged Dice”—Ancient Writers Deplore the Prevalence of Dicing—Caligula as a Gamester—Claudius and Nero—Cato’s Infatuation for Play—Corruption of Children—Fighting Quails—Rome at the End of the Fourth Century—Skill in Gaming an Introduction to Society—Gambling a Cause of the Fall of the Empire—The Vice Universally Prevalent—Gambling Among the Modern Greeks—Tricks of Sharpers—Shifting the Cut—Methods of Stocking—The “Bridge”—Fraudulent Dealing—Crimping—Palming—Tricks of Confederates—The “Roof”—The Cold Deck—Finettes—Costieres—Marked Cards—The Bug—Pincers as a Gambling Implement—Strippers—The Chaplet—Degradation of the Turks and Modern Greeks—Gambling a Source of Poverty and Squalor—Wagering One’s Liberty as a Stake—Street Gambling—The “Comboloio”—A Water Jug as a Dice Box—Gambling Hells in Greece—A Multiplicity of “Joints”—Cheating Not Regarded as Disgraceful—False Bottoms—Perils of Travelers—Surprising Cleverness of the Greek Gamblers—Personal Reminiscences—An Ancient Gaming House—A Gambling Hell at Corinth	87-94

CHAPTER IV.

GERMANY, RUSSIA, ROUMANIA, BULGARIA AND SERVIA.

Gambling among the Ancient Huns—Ancient German Warriors as Gamesters—Playing For One’s Liberty—Selling the Loser as a Slave—Modern Germany—Famous Gambling Resorts—The Gaming Season—The Games Played—The Growth of Homburg—The Blanc Brothers—A Venal Prime Minister—The First Roulette Wheel at Homburg—A Heavy Tax—The First Cure-Hall Built—A Great Gaming Company—A Gorgeous Resort—“The Temple of Fortune”—Gambling in the Balkan Peninsula—Gaming Among the Bulgarian and Servian Peasants—Playing for Bread and Milk—Gamins Gambling for Candy—Street Gamblers—Peripatetic Fakirs—“Doubles or Quits”—Gaming Preferred to Manual Labor—A Successful Gamester—Suicide and Starvation—“Tag Alek” A Hell in Belgrade—Scenes of Debauchery—The “Shades”—Lightly Clad Women as Attendants—Female Gamesters—The “Lurley”—Opium Smoking as an Adjunct to Gambling—A Dangerous Resort—Licensed Gambling—Large Revenues Enjoyed by Principalities—Baden Baden—Heavy Expenses and Enormous Profits—Wiesbaden and Ems—Spa—A President of a Council Leases His Mansion to a Gaming Company—The attractions at Wiesbaden—The Cure Hall—A Mixed State of Society—Blackmailing Courtesans—Beauties of Baden—The Conversation House—Gorgeous Appointments—Attractive Promenades—The Gambling Rooms at Baden—Heavy License Fees and Running Expenses—An Interesting Scene—Playing for High Stakes—The Cure Hall—Reckless Playing—Infatuated Women—A Ruined Gamester—A Cosmopolitan Assembly—Venturesome Spirits—A Woman’s Passion for Play—Characteristics at Ems—A Noted Croupier—A Checkered Career—Russian Society—Easy Morals—Aristocratic Debauchees—Gaming in Roumania	95-112

12CHAPTER V.

ITALY, MONTE CARLO, FRANCE, SPAIN, MEXICO, CENTRAL AND SOUTH AMERICA.

Gaming in Italy—At Naples, Under the Spaniards—Cardinal Zapata’s Prohibition—High Stakes and Heavy Losses—Monte Carlo—The Famous Casino—The Handiwork of Blanc—A Palace Built at the Expense of Dupes—The Tables and Their Games—Public Resorts and Private Clubs—French Disgrace—An Enormous Rental—The Hours of Play—A Meeting Place For Gamesters of all Nations—Are the Games Fair?—The Limit of the Stakes—A Trente et Quarante Table described—The Bank’s Advantage—Famous Gardens and Drives—An Ornate Theater—Free Musical Entertainments of Rare Merit—Hotels and Cafés—Depravity of the French Aristocracy—A Royal Gambler—Historic Reminiscences—Cards and Dice in the Louvre—Professional Gamblers Hired by a King—Reckless Prodigality—Fortunes Lost and Won—Efforts to Suppress Gambling in Paris—Spread of the Vice Among the French People—The Reign of Louis XIV—Licensed Gaming Houses—Gambling at the Mansions of Ambassadors—Hospitals Founded and Supported by Fees Paid for Gambling Licenses—Women Allowed to Play in Public Houses—Crime, Misfortune and Scandal—Frequency of Suicides and Bankruptcy—Fouche’s Enormous Revenue from the Sale of Licenses—Gamblers as Police Spies—Abolition of the License System—Gambling by high Officials of the Republic—Frascadi’s and the Circle des Etrangers—Loans Without Security—Suppers and Balls as Attractions at the “Hells”—Anecdotes of French Gamblers—A Resort For Noblemen, Mechanics and Loafers—French Usurers—French Women’s Love For Play—French Club Houses—Cheating at the Parisian Gambling Dens—“The Chaplet”—Stocking—A Snuff Box as a Shiner—Cold Decks—Marked Cards—Celebrated Frenchmen Ruined by Gambling—Shameful Stakes—The Reign of Napoleon III—Demoralization Caused by Gambling—Police Surveillance of Club Houses—Playing for Ready Money Stakes Prohibited—Sad Experience of a Proprietor of a Club—A Million Lost in Four Years—Profits of Baccarat Houses—High Sounding Names for Gaming Hells—French “Steerers”—Dishonest Play the Rule—Spanish Love For Gaming—Liberality of the Grandees of Ancient Times—Prodigality of the Duke of Lima—Gambling Universal and Open—Noblemen Who Live by Gaming—A Spanish Countess’ Shame—Women Who Conduct “Banks”—Gambling Dens in Madrid—Gambling a Characteristic Feature of the Latin Races—Mexico, Central and South America—Dice and Cards—Popularity of the Lottery—Publicity of Gambling in the Central and South American Republics—A Mexican Fandango—Mexican Gaming Booths—Chusa—Gaming the Favorite Amusement of All Classes	113-137


CHAPTER VI.

ENGLAND.

Gambling at the time of the Crusades—The Reigns of Richard I and John—Dice Throwing among the Barons—Restrictions placed upon the Limit of Stakes among the Crusaders—Gambling During the Reign of Elizabeth and the Stuarts—Gaming in 1668—Practices of Sharpers—A Game with a King for the Bells of St. Paul’s—Cromwell’s Efforts to Suppress Gaming—Prevalence of the Vice Under Charles II—A Gamester’s Suicide—A Duke Loses £230,000 in a Night—The Reign of George III—Fox’s Heavy Losses—Faro in the Houses of the Nobility—Decline of Gaming with Cards and Dice—Universality 13of Turf-Betting—Characteristics of English Gamesters—Gaming at Clubs and Coffee Houses—Vile Dens—White’s—Brooks’—Crockford’s—Fishmonger’s Hall—The Berkely Club—St. James’—Melton Mowbray—Stangers’—Cavendish—Leicester’s—Hertford’s—Description of a London “Hell” in 1824—A Successful Gambling House—Palatial Appointments—An Aristocratic Resort—Reckless Playing—Dean Swift’s Strictures on White’s—Titled Dupes—Inveterate Gamesters of High Degree—A Fortune Lost at Hazard—A Novel Betting Book—Strange Subjects for Wagers—Heartless Bets—Celebrities to be Found at Brooks’—Almack’s—Heavy Stakes—Pitt as a Gambler—Wilberforce and Gibbon at Almack’s—The Waiter’s Club—Dishonesty—Prevalence of Gambling in the Eighteenth Century—Ruin, Disgrace and Despair—Multiplicity of Gaming Rooms—The Official Staff of an English Gambling House in 1751—Gaming in Theatrical Green Rooms—Among the Lower Classes—The “Devil’s Walk”—Dangerous Dens—Dissolute Women as “Steerers”—“Quadrant” Clubs—London “Hells” in 1844—Gamblers “Following the Races”—The Eldorado at Doncaster—Unlimited Play at Warwick—Open Solicitation—A “Groom-porter”—English and French Hazard—The Proprietor’s Winnings—Vile Resorts—From Rags to Affluence—Infatuation and Ruin—A “Hell” Early in the Nineteenth Century—Plundering Drunken and Belated Players—Odds at Hazard—Provisions Against Police Raids—Bullying Patrons—Disgusting Scenes—Staking Apparel—Debauchery Run Riot—Various Grades of Gaming Houses—Fortunes for the Proprietors and Ruin for the Dupes—Subsidizing the Police—Force and Cunning—Steerers—Dishonest Servants—Friend Betraying Friend—The Nobility in League with Swindlers—Blacklegs at the Tables of the Aristocracy—Base Stakes—Fashionable Ladies as Gamesters—A Minister Conducting an Illegal Lottery—The South Sea Bubble—Lotteries and Their Debasing Effects—History of Ante-Gaming Legislation in England—Curious Evidence Given Before the House of Lords—Prosecutions for Keeping Gaming Tables—A Salesman’s Confession—Defects in Legal Administration—Gambling English Statesmen—Chevalier and Mad Ogle—Noted London Gamblers—Germain—Hughes—“Beau” Nash—“Whig” Middleton—Bennett—O’Kelly—Dick England—A Noteworthy Trial—Wilberforce and George Selwyn—Sir Philip Frances—Anecdotes of “Beau” Brummel	138-182

CHAPTER I.

PRELIMINARY REMARKS.

14Gambling Spirit in the United States—The Features Which Characterize It—The Green Cloth and the Stock Exchange—Greed for Gain and a Spirit of Recklessness—“Margins” and Stakes—“Profits” and Winnings—Various Forms of Gaming—Bucket Shops—Policy Playing—The Louisiana Lottery—Aim of Part II—Gambling in “Hells” and on Fair Grounds—“Banking” Games—Their Popularity—Percentage of the Proprietors—“Draw” and “Stud” Poker—“Square” and “Brace” Houses—“Plucking Pigeons”—Dishonest Devices Employed at “Square” Houses—Tacit Toleration of Gambling Rooms—Poker a National Pastime—Gambling at Fashionable Clubs—Play at Semi-Private Club Rooms—Police Indifference—Itinerant Gamblers—Inefficiency of Prohibitory Legislation—The Johnson Law—Gambling and Drunkenness Twin Relics of Barbarism	185-190


CHAPTER II.

FARO GAMBLING AND GAMBLERS.

Origin of Cards—Origin of Faro—Its Antiquity and Popularity—A Fruitful Source of Misery—Faro Compared to the Tiger—The Principles of the Game—Playing on a “System”—The Dealer and the “Looker-Out”—The “Plain” and “Running” Limit—“Parleeing” a Bet—The Lay-Out—The “Big Square”—The “Second Square”—The “Pot”—Method of Dealing in Germany—Invention of Dealing Boxes—“Soda” and “Hock” Cards—Mum—“Coppering” a Bet—A “Turn”—“Splits”—“Barring” a Bet—“Calling the Last Turn”—A “Cat Hop”—“String Bets”—“Cue Cards”—The Chances of the Game—Fraudulent Methods and Devices—”Side Strippers”—“Rakes”—“Hollows and Rounds”—“Squares and Rounds”—“Faked” Dealing Boxes—The “Screw Box”—The “Lever Movement, or End Squeeze”—The “Needle Movement”—The “Sand-Tell” Box—“Case Keepers”—The “Put-Back”—The “Hair Copper”—“Snaking” and the Various Methods Employed—The Card Punch—Marking the Edges—The “Odd”—Playing With Fifty-Three Cards—The “Double-Odd”—Other Schemes of Fraud—Incidents—Misadventure of a “Brace” Dealer—“Cappers,” “Steerers” and “Ropers”—Their Shameless Practices—A “Steerer’s” Benevolent Act—“Brace” Houses Opened by “Square”(?) Gamblers—Schemes of Rascally Confederates to Defraud One Another—“Throwing Off” a Game—A Unique Establishment—The Great “Hell” at Pueblo—Short Faro—Police Protection to Gambling—Devices for Defeating an Honest Raid—Personal Recollections—Deplorable Results of the Gambling Mania—Sad Fate of Prominent Professional Gamblers—A “Dip”—Heartlessness of the Blackleg	191-213


CHAPTER III.

POKER AND POKER PLAYING.

Essentially an American Game—Its Great and Growing Popularity—Dangers of Its Insidious Fascination—Method of Play—Relative Value of the Hands—Definition of Technical Terms Employed—Frauds Practiced—Strippers—Briefs—“Stocking”—The Top Stock—Bottom Stock—Jog Stock—Palm Stock—False Shuffles—False Cuts—Running Up Two Hands—Crimping—Cold Decks—Marked Cards—Despicable Devices—Partnerships—Double Discard—Flushes, Fulls and Fours—Holding Out—The “Bug”—The Sleeve Hold Out—The Table Hold Out—The Vest Hold Out—Convexes and Shiners—The “Nail Prick”—“Second Dealing”—The “Telegraph”—A Sure Hand—Stud Poker—Incidents and Reminiscences	214-242


CHAPTER IV.

SHORT GAMES.

Why Called “Short”—Rouge et Noir—The Lay-Out—Method of Play—The Enormous Preponderance of Chances in the Bank’s Favor—Schemes of Fraud—Barefaced Robbery—Doubles or Quits—Turning Up Jack—“Ropers” and “Steerers“Steerers”—Comparative Popularity of the Game in America and Europe—Roulette—The Table 15and Wheel—How Bets are Made—Heavy Odds Against the Player—Various “Faked” Wheels Described—The “Double Centre”—Players at the Mercy of the Proprietors—Keno—How Played—“Rollers” and “Collectors”—The Percentage Exacted on Winnings—Fortunes Won With Keno “Globes”—Collusion with “Cappers”—Rolling Faro—The Wheel Explained—How Played on Fair Grounds, and How at Gaming Houses—The Natural Odds in Favor of the “Bank”—How the Wheel is “Faked”—Rival Gamblers—A Personal Reminiscence—High-Ball Poker—How and Where Played—The Proprietor’s Percentage—The “Square” and “Skin” Game—“Cappers” and “Pluggers”	243-255

CHAPTER V.

VARIOUS CARD GAMES.

Seven-Up, or Old Sledge—Principles of the Game—Fraudulent Methods—Strippers—Briefs—Half Stock—The Whole Stock—Crimping—Marking the Edges—The High Hand—The Long Hand—The Short Hand—Holding Out—Marked Cards—Whist—Cold Decks—A Dupe’s Good Hand—Casino—“Canada Bill” as a Casino Player—The Use of “Paper”—Euchre—Strippers—Briefs—Stocking—Crimping—The “Bug”—Palming—The “High Hand” at Euchre—Cribbage—Various Schemes of Fraud—How Cards Are Trimmed For Cribbage—The “Telegraph”—Vingt-un, or Twenty-One—How Played—Devices of the Professional Blackleg—Confederated Rascals	256-272


CHAPTER VI.

DICE AND THE DICE BOX.

Antiquity of Dice Throwing—The Sport Declining in Popularity—Hieronymus—The Game Explained—The “Bowl” and Dice—A Heavy Percentage Against Players—Deception and Trickery—Substitution of Dice—The “Spring Board”—Fraudulent Dice—Chuck-a-Luck—An “Old Army Game”—An Inexpensive Outfit—Method of Betting—How Greenhorns are Cheated—A Favorite Game for “Ringing In” Loaded Dice—Holding Out the Cubes—An Artful Device—The Work of a “Side Partner”—“Craps”—Personal Introduction to the Game—“Come, Seven or Eleven”—A Rather Expensive Experience—Mode of Play—Favorite Frauds at “Craps”—Substitution of Unfair Dice—Cubes Made of Sugar—The Police Foiled—Eight Die Case—A Gift Enterprise—The Prizes—Why they Cannot be Won—How Dupes are Defrauded—“Representing”—A Shameful Deceit—“Cappers”—Poker Dice—“Over and Under Seven”—How Played—Modes of Cheating—“Top and Bottom”—A Bold Scheme of Fraud—How Victims are Fleeced—Dice Tops—Grand Hazard—Heavy Odds Against an Impossible Contingency—The Use of “Ringers”—“Mustang”—Loaded Dice	273-283


CHAPTER VII.

GAMES AT FAIRS AND CIRCUSES.

How Licenses are Obtained—The Directors’ Disgrace—Personal Experience—Collusion With the Authorities—Officers of the Law as Blackmailers—The Author’s Aim—The Needle Wheel—Its Construction—How Operated—The “Faked Element”—“Cappers” as an Adjunct—“Representing”—“Corona,” or “Mascot”—“Cappers,” “Bookkeepers” and “Suckers”—Nursing False 16Hopes—The “Wheel of Fortune”—Its Principle—Mode of Betting—“Playing for Prizes”—The “Six Number Wheel”—Defrauding Greenhorns—A Manipulator a Victim—The Board of Trade Wheel—The Squeeze Spindle—How Operated—Disadvantages of “Suckers”—A Reminiscence—The Discomfiture of a Countryman—Fraudulent Spindles—A Countryman’s Enforced Demand—Tivoli, or Bagatelle—The Game Explained—“Representing”—“Cappers”—The Jenny Wheel—The “Faked” Devices—The Profits of the Machine—The O’Leary Belt—Its Fraudulent Winnings—“Cappers”—Risks of the Operator—“Hap-Hazard, or Bee-Hive”—Box and Balls—An Unfortunate Experience—Miniature Race Track—Striking Machines—Top and Bottom Boxes—The Swinging Ball	284-310


CHAPTER VIII.

GOLD BRICK AND BUNKO.

Ingenuity of the Gold Brick Swindlers—Inadequacy of Newspaper Explanations—The Victim’s Taciturnity—Three Confederates Necessary—A Small Capital Required—Selection of a Victim—Shameless Practices of Reputable Citizens—The “Miner”—The “Rockies”—The “Indian”—“Tom Jones”—Cupidity an Aid to Deception—“Mr. Jones” as an Amanuensis—The Nugget and the “Medicine Shop”—“Smoke Water”—A Tempting Bait—The “Miner” and Mr. Jones Fellow Travelers—The “Trailer”—A Duplicate Purchase of Acid—A Suspicious “Redskin”—“Sleepy Water”—Substituted Borings—A “Sucker” Over-reaching Himself—A Hasty Departure—“Every Bit True”—Dr. Snyder’s Experience With a Gold Brick Swindler—Bunko—Millions Won Through the Fraud—Its Methods Explained—The “Chart”—The “Steerer” and the “Sucker”—Heartless Scoundrels—The “Capper” and the “Dupe”—The “Send”—The “Trailer”—A Substituted Package—A “Bunko” Game at Eureka Springs	311-332


CHAPTER IX.

CONFIDENCE GAMES.

Depravity of Confidence Men—Why they Succeed—Their Dupes—Misplaced Sympathy—Three Card Monte—Bogus Checks—Over Issue—“Dropping the Pigeon”—The Tobacco Box—Knife—“Padlock” and “Safe”—“Quarter Under Foot”—The “Shot Gun”—“Give Away”—“Five Cards”—Top and Bottom Boxes—Foot Racing—The “Shell Game”—“Dollar Store,” or “Drop Case”—Minor Confidence Games—The Grandmother Trick—The Soap Game—The Foot Race—“Flim-Flam”	333-359


CHAPTER X.

GAMBLING STORIES AND PERSONAL REMINISCENCES.

Ruined by a Funeral—“Fly-Loo”—The “Top Stock” Beaten—A Woodsman Known by His Chips—The “Morning” Principle—A Friend’s Bad Faith—Influence of Money on Parental Disapprobation—Timidity of Professional Gamblers—“Old Black Dan”—Effects of a Sensitive Conscience—How an Old Scout Had an Ace “Full”—The Failure of a Telegraph Wire—A Queer Stake—Dan Rice’s Big Poker Game—A Discouraged Speculator—The Luck of a One-Eyed Man—Bottom Dealing—A Whiff For a Nickel—A Good Swimmer—A Hungry Trio—A Case of Mistaken Identity—The Would-Be Confederate Disappointed—Five Equal Hands—A Change of Demeanor	360-380


17CHAPTER XI.

MY WIFE.

Her Family—Parental Opposition to Our Marriage—Our Elopement—Our Marriage—Her Parents’ Anger—A Pitiful Appeal to Maternal Love—Our Married Life—Poverty and Affliction—A Dress for a Burial—Heart Yearnings—A Mother’s Regret—The Agony of Separation—My Wife’s Death Bed—Mutual Devotion—Unavailing Regrets—Taken Away From the Sorrow to Come	381-386


CHAPTER XII.

LOCAL GAMBLING.

Celebrated Gamesters and Gaming Houses—Gambling in the “Hell” and the Policy Shop, on the Race-Track and the Exchange—Incidents—Biographical Reminiscences—Historical Facts—When, Where, and How Far Tolerated by the Authorities—Public Sentiment—Rise, Progress and Status of the Vice at Commercial Centres—Chicago—Laxity Versus Repression—Wentworth’s Famous Raid—Gambling Under Various Municipal Administrations—“Skin” Gamblers—Notorious Characters—The Gamblers’ Sad End—Players and their Characteristics—Present Status of Pool Selling—A Chicago Dealer’s Catalogue of Gambling Goods—St. Louis—Prevalence of the Gaming Mania—A Poker Hand as “Collateral” Security at a Bank—Famous Houses and their Proprietors—“Skin” Games—Sketch of Ex-Governor Charles P. Johnson—The Gambling Houses of New York—Street Gamins—The “Bowery”—Elegant Resorts—Low Dives—Coming Home From the Races—A New York Gambler’s Catalogue—Gambling at Newport—A Quiet House—San Francisco—Early Argonauts—Women as Dealers—A Gambler’s “Nerve”—Legislation—Famous Capitalists and Noted Gamblers—Mining Stocks—Chinese as Gamblers—Odd Games—The Chinese Lottery—Mongolian frauds—The California State Fair—A Perplexing Legal Question—New Orleans—Gambling Among the Creoles—The License System—Famous Resorts—Streets Named After Games—New Orleans Under Military Rule—Indirect License—The “Shakspeare Almshouse”—Keno—Negroes as Gamesters—The Louisiana Lottery—Policy Playing—The Cotton Exchange—Milwaukee—“Tom” Wicks—Saratoga—Morrissey’s Club House—The American Monte Carlo—Efforts to Suppress Gambling—Cincinnati—“Eph” Holland and Other “Sports”—The “Queen of Spades”—Cleveland—Municipal Policy—Perfunctory Raids—Salaries Paid to Employes—Capital Invested—Chinese Laundrymen—Gambling in Stocks and Grain—Mobile—Charleston—Curious Advertisements—The Charleston Club—Policy Playing—Computation Table—Facsimiles of “Slips”—Charleston Faro Banks—Austin—A Trusted Employe Disgraced—Negroes Defrauded—Hartford—A Fire in a “Hell”—A Raid—Policy—Quebec—The “Quebec Whist Club”—A Shameful Revelation—Kansas City—Buffalo—Early Gambling—Canal Street—Noted Professionals—Policy Playing—St Paul—The Gambler’s Luck—Minneapolis—“Brace” Games—Bucket Shops—Policy—Gambling at Home—Peoria—Indianapolis—The Union Depot—Springfield, Illinois—A “Pigeon Plucker” at a Private Club	388-547

CHAPTER I.

THE TURF.

Evils of the Race-Course—Antiquity of Horse-Racing—Ancient and Modern Times Compared—Racing in England—Blacklegs on the Track—A “National Sport”—The American Turf—Colonial Days—Puritans and Cavaliers—Famous Tracks in New York—The National Association—The American Association—“Board of Review”—American Trotting Association—Racing at Sheepshead Bay—A National Vice—Betting on Races and Lottery Gambling Compared—The Duty of Congress—The Pool Room—Its Methods—A “Betting Book”—The “Book Maker’s Odds”—The “Combination Board”—The “Friendly Tip”—Depreciation of Turf Gambling—Never a Local Affair—Pool Room Habitues—Features Peculiar to the Track—The Lady Gambler—The Confidential Stake-holder\—“Skin” Games Outside the Track—“Dosing” Horses—Ways That are Dark and Tricks that are Vain—The Jockey—The Handicap Fraud—Officially Protected Crime—Effects of the Mania—A False Guide	553-576


CHAPTER II.

THE EXCHANGE.

The Exchange of the Ancients—Royal Exchange—New York Chamber of Commerce—American Boards of Trade—Scope of the Exchange—“Speculating” and Gambling—“Corners”—The Operator and the Speculator—An Incident—The “Scalper”—The “Guerilla”—“Longs” and “Shorts”—“Forcing Quotations”—“Flying Kites”—“Puts,” “Calls,” and “Straddles”—Fictitious—Fictitious News—Tempting Bait—A Day’s Session on a Western Exchange—Regrets versus Stoicism—Interior Arrangement of a Great Mart—Extraordinary Judicial Powers—A Travesty on Equity—Bucket Shops—The Exchange as a Factor in Civilization—The “Clock”	577-606


CHAPTER III.

NATURE AND EFFECTS OF GAMING.

By Rev. Professor David Swing	607-608


CHAPTER IV.

ARRAIGNMENT OF GAMBLING IN ITS MORAL ASPECTS.

By Rev. Robt. McIntyre	611-640

When only six cards, it is	2 to 1
When only four cards,	2 to 1
That the player does not win his first stake is an equal bet.
That he does not win twice following, is	3 to 1
Three times following, is	7 to 1
Four ditto, is	15 to 1
Five ditto, is	31 to 1
Six ditto, is	63 to 1

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Fools of Fortune; or, Gambling and Gamblers

FOOLS OF FORTUNE

PREFACE.

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

INDEX.

INTRODUCTION.

INTRODUCTION.

PART I.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JOHN PHILIP QUINN.

THE THREE STAGES OF A GAMBLER’S LIFE.

PRELIMINARY REMARKS—FOOD FOR REFLECTION.

HEBREWS, PERSIANS, CHINESE AND JAPANESE.

ANCIENT AND MODERN GREEKS AND ROMANS, TURKEY IN EUROPE, AND ASIA MINOR.

GERMANY, RUSSIA, ROUMANIA, BULGARIA AND SERVIA.

ITALY, MONTE CARLO, FRANCE, SPAIN, MEXICO, CENTRAL AND SOUTH AMERICA.

ENGLAND.

PART II.

GAMBLING IN THE NEW WORLD.

FARO GAMBLING AND GAMBLERS.

POKER AND POKER PLAYERS.

SHORT GAMES.

VARIOUS CARD GAMES.

DICE AND THE DICE BOX.

GAMES AT FAIRS AND CIRCUSES.

“GOLD BRICKS.”

CONFIDENCE GAMES.

GAMBLING STORIES AND PERSONAL REMINISCENCES.

MY WIFE.

LOCAL GAMBLING.

PART III.

THE TURF

THE EXCHANGE

NATURE AND EFFECTS OF GAMING.

ARRAIGNMENT OF GAMBLING IN ITS MORAL ASPECTS.

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

Upon a single number,	37	to 1
Upon any twelve numbers,	13	to 6
Upon two numbers,	18	to 1
Upon three numbers,	11⅔	to 1
Upon four numbers,	17	to 2
Upon six numbers,	16	to 3
Upon odd or even, red or black,	10	to 9

Each	Ace	four	towards	game.
”	King	three	”	”
”	Queen	two	”	”
”	Jack	one	”	”
”	Ten	ten	”	”

Jewelry.	Jewelry.	Jewelry.	$3.00	Jewelry.	Jewelry.	Rep.
19	38	24	9	37	21	15
25 cts.	Jewelry.	$1.00	Jewelry.	Rep.	Rep.	$5.00
13	30	43	33	18	29	46
Rep.	Jewelry.	$5.00	$20.00	Rep.	50 cts.	Jewelry.
23	39	8	1215	36	12	34
Rep.	Blank.	Jewelry.	Jewelry.	Jewelry.	Jewelry.	Jewelry.
32	17	35	28	16	41	22
$2.00	$5.00	Rep.	Jewelry.	Jewelry.	$50.00	$10.00
11	48	20	42	31	10	37
	$2.00	Jewelry.	Jewelry.	Jewelry.	Jewelry.	Blank.
	44	27	14	25	04	20

	Cond.
Rep.		Rep.	$1.00	Rep.	$500.00
	$500.00
18		39	15	27	10
	25
					Cond.
Rep.	Rep.	Rep.	Ch’cy.	Rep.
					$5000.00
32	46	30	42	36
					23

$20.00	$5.00	$1.00	0 0	$300.00	0

12	50	14	20	51	45
			Cond.
Ch’cy.	$500.00	Rep.		$1000.00	Rep.
			$500.00
37	54	19		53	16
			33
Cond.					Cond.
	Rep.	$1000.00	Rep.	0 0
100.00					$100.00
	24	9	43	49
17					28
Cond.
	Bl’k.	Rep.	Ch’cy.	$5.00	0 0
$500.00
	29	35	26	13	34
48
			Cond.		Cond.
0	0 0	$300.00		Rep.
			$100.00		$1000.00
22	41	11		21
			31		40
	Cond.
		$500.00	Rep.	Rep.
	$500.00
		52	38	47
	44

1	$5,000	prize.
3	1,000	”
7	500	”
2	300	”
3	100	”
1	20	”
2	5	”
2	1	”
4	Double 0s.
2	Single 0s.
15	“Represents.”
1	“Blank.”
3	“Chancerys.”
——
46

406
SELECTIONS FROM A PRICE LIST OF SPORTING GOODS MANUFACTURED AND FOR SALE BY A FIRM IN CHICAGO, ILL.

FARO TOOLS.

Trimming Shears, double bar, brass block				$40 00
” ” with attachment for cutting briefs				45 00
Cutter, for cutting round corners on cards				20 00
Trimming Plates, will cut any style of cards				8 00
Trimming Shears repaired and sharpened.
Dealing Boxes, Lever movement		$35 00 to $60 00
” ” End, or Needle movement		$50 00 to $100 00
” ” Sand Tell	$13 00, $15 00 to $18 00
” ” ” ” to lock up square			$20 00, $25 00
Dealing Boxes repaired, or changed to end or needle squeeze.
Faro Dealing Cards, unsquared, per doz.				$15 00
” ” ” squared, per doz.				15 00
” ” ” ” per pack				1 25
” ” ” Linen, second quality				6 50
” ” ” ” ” ” squared				7 50
☞ Dealing Cards of every kind furnished to order.
Card Punches, best steel				2 00
” Sighters, set of 4 in case				2 00
Glass Paper, better than sand, per doz. sheets				1 00

DEALING GAMES FOR BOX AND CARDS.

Card Hazard, cards, box, layout complete	$25 00
” ” Layout	15 00
Red and Black Dealing Boxes, to lock and unlock	25 00
” ” ” ” Skeleton boxes, to lock and unlock	10 00
” ” ” ” Boxes, to work with gaff	25 00
Short Faro, or Card Chuck Luck, Enameled Layout	3 00
Diana Dealing Boxes, for two packs	15 00

ROULETTE, RONDO AND BALL GAMES.

High Ball Poker Balls, ivory, flat face, each	$ 25
Patent Bottle, with Keno mouthpiece, bottle only	10 00
(Rubber Tubing for above, per foot, 15c.)
Red, White and Blue Layout, box and balls	12 00

POOL AND SPINDLE GAMES.

Chuck-luck Wheel, complete with layouts	$30 00
Spindle Game, red, white, blue and horses	15 00
Jenny Wheel, for high or low, or red or black	10 00
” ” with two centers, and paddles	15 00
Rolling Faro, 28 Aces, and 2 Stars—with fake	60 00
” ” 28 Cards, and 4 Jacks ”	60 00
” ” 1-2-3-4-5-6 and Stars ”	60 00
” ” on table, to work with knee or pressure	125 00
” ” Extra Spreads, with Rings to match	20 00
Jewelry Squeeze Spindle	40 00
Needle Wheel, complete with Layout	80 00
Bee Hive (Hap Hazard), new and sure	50 00
O’Leary Belt, with one box, complete	75 00
407Striking Machines, two fakes, with chart	40 00
Miniature Race Tracks, seven horses, to order	300 00
(Packed in cases for traveling, $50.00 extra.)
“Corona,” or “Mascott”	200 00
Tivoli, or Derby Pool, faked	100 00
$20.00 required with order for faked goods.

DICE GAMES.

Bunko Chart, “Special Drawing,” without tickets	$ 5 00
Bunko tickets, per set of 56	2 00
Ivory Dice, for top and bottom, three fair,with ringer	80
” ” double, 3 high, 3 low, 3 fair, with box	2 00
” ” LOADED, ” ” ” ”	5 00
” ” ” ⅝ inch, each	1 25
” ” ” ¾ ” ”	1 50
Craps ” ½ inch, Ivory, per set of 6	1 50
Ball ” Hyronemus, per set of 3, 1 inch	3 00
” ” ” ” ” 1¼ inch.	4 50
” ” ” ” ” 1½ inch.	6 00
” ” ” ” ” 2 inch.	10 50
Measured by the diameter of ball.
Ivory Dice Tops, to throw high or low	1 50

SHORT GAMES.

Monte Tickets, or “Broads,” per doz., by express	5 00
Patent Knives, with lock, new pattern	5 00
Tobacco Boxes, to lock and unlock	1 50
Patent Safes, with two openings, ebony	2 00
Padlocks, per pair	50
Penny Game, complete with dice	60
Bank Note Reporters, by mail	50
Sliding Boxes, for street work, per 100	1 00
Double Boxes, with Soap, per doz., 75c., per 100	5 00
Vest Hold Out, with late improvements	10 00
Table Hold Out, something new, works with knee	10 00
The “Bug,” for holding out an extra card	1 00

SHORT CARD GAMES.

Sleeve Hold Out, arm pressure		$25 00
” ” ” ” Keplinger’s patent		0000
Nail Pricks, for finger nails		50
Shiner, for reading cards dealt opponents		1 00
” ” ” ” ” in half dollar		2 00
Poker Table Plates, each	50c. and 75
Floor Telegraph, for Poker Rooms		5 00
Marked Back Cards, per doz., round corners, by express		12 00
” ” ” Flag Backs, per doz.		12 00
Strippers, for any game, cut to order	$6 00 to 8 00
Crayon Pencils, case of 12 colors		1 00
Spanish Monte Cards, will wash, per doz.		9 00
Dealing Boxes, for Monte		10 00
☞ Monte cards cut and prepared in any manner.

NUMBER OF DRAWINGS PER YEAR.	NO. TICKETS PRINTED.	PRICE PER TICKET.	VALUE TICKETS SOLD.	PRIZES WON.	PAID OUT FOR SALARIES AND COMMISSIONS.
2 Grand Semi-Annual,	200,000	$40.00	$5,600,000	$3,080,000	$600,000
10 Monthly,	1,000,000	20.00	13,000,000	7,150,000	1,200,000
313 Daily,	21,900,000	1.00	1,320,000	892,000	198,000
325 Drawings,	23,100,000	——	$19,920,000	$11,122,000	$1,998,000

477
		PROFITS OF BROKERS,
DESCRIPTION OF GAMBLING.	AMOUNTS CHANGING	GAMBLERS,
	HANDS.	LOTTERY CO. AND
		DEALERS IN T’KS.
Speculation in Stocks, Futures, etc.	$82,000,000	$10,145,945
Lottery Tickets,	18,600,000	8,370,000
Policy Playing,	8,000,000	3,200,000
Regular Gambling,	30,000,000	3,400,000
Total,	$138,000,000	$25,115,945
Note.—The figures given include only the local business. The total amount received from sales is vastly greater.

493
Salaries of dealers	$3,000
Rents	840
Gas	300
Porter	520
Police-court fines	100
Incidental expenses, including refreshments	500
	———
Total	$5,260

PURSE $400—WEST SIDE TRACK, CHICAGO.
First Race, Maidens, Seven Furlongs.
20	Emma McDowell	105	1
10	Dora Morne	105	1
10	Jack Staff	106	1
50	Norwood	107	1
40	Flora McDonald	98	1
10	Jennie Gronnod	105	1
10	John Clarkson	103	1
3	Corticelli	110	1
20	Imogene	105	2
30	Council Platt	100	5
2	Later On	106	1
5	Jack Batcheler	107	1
10	Tall Bull	110	1
20	Arizone	105	5
50	Miss Longford	105	1
10	Jasper	107	1
15	Rock	111	2
315			27

WEST-SIDE TRACK, CHICAGO.
First Race. Purse $400. Six Furlongs.
NO.
50	Tom Karl	109	10
51	Prophecy	100	12
52	Fayette	109	3
53	Hornpipe	100	8
54	Susie B.	109	20
55	Famous	112	5
56	Catherine B.	102	6
57	Donovan	106	4
58	Tall Bull	107	10
59	Only Dare	106	2
			80

PLACE.
60	Hornpipe	11
61	Susie B.	19
62	Famous	8
63	Tom Karl	12
64	Fayette	5
65	Prophecy	10
66	Tall Bull	10
67	Donovan	8
68	Only Dare	2
69	Catherine B.	5
		90

			SADDLES.	GIGS.	HORSES.
2	Numbers	make	1	0	0
3	”	”	3	1	0
4	”	”	6	4	1
5	”	”	10	10	5
6	”	”	15	20	15
7	”	”	21	35	35
8	”	”	28	56	70
9	”	”	36	84	126
10	”	”	45	120	210
11	”	”	55	165	330
12	”	”	66	220	495
13	”	”	78	286	715
14	”	”	91	364	1001
15	”	”	105	455	1305
16	”	”	120	560	1820
17	”	”	136	680	2380
18	”	”	153	816	3060
19	”	”	171	969	3876
20	”	”	190	1140	4845
21	”	”	210	1330	5985
22	”	”	231	1540	7315
23	”	”	253	1771	8855
24	”	”	276	2024	10620
25	”	”	300	2300	12650
[The above is page 64 of a little green pamphlet, “The Wheel of Fortune and Egyptian Dreamer, with numbers for any dream, also tables of lucky numbers.” 12 mo., pp. 73, published by Joseph Noehler, 120 Chatham Street, N. Y. It is very popular and has an extensive sale among the negroes.]