University of Virginia Library

4. CHAPTER IV.
HIGH, LOW, JACK AND THE GAME.

THE man did not notice me, but made straight
up to my companion until his mule's opera-glasses
nearly touched the tall man's nose,
who was now in a little trail at my side.

Then the man under the palm-leaf let go the
reins, leaned back as the mule stopped, put his two
hands on the saddle pommel, and slowly, emphatically,
and with the most evident surprise, as he
raised one hand and pushed back the palm-leaf clear
off his eyes to get a good square look at my companion,
said:—

“Well—blast—my sister's cat's-tail to the bone!
Is this you, Prince Hal, or is it Hamlet's daddy's
ghost? You back from the warpath, afoot and
alone! Angels and ministers of grace defend us!
Spirits of the”—

And here as if the mention of the first-named in
the sentence had suddenly inspired him with a new
thought, he leaned forward, unfastened his catenas,

and drew forth a long-necked bottle. He drew the
cork with his teeth, then held the bottle up to the
sun, shut one eye, looked at the contents as if to see
that they had the desired bead, handed it to the man
he had called Prince Hal, said “Boston's best,” and
bowed down his head.

The Prince took the bottle solemnly, held it up to
the light, placed three fingers on a level with the top
of the contents, and then slowly raised the bottom
towards the sun.

A gurgling sound, then the telescope descended,
and the Prince took a long breath as he handed the
bottle on to me.

I had not yet learned the etiquette of the mountain
traveller, and shook my head.

A hand reached out from under the broad hat, as
the Prince returned the bottle in that direction, took
it by the neck, shook it gently, tilted it over as the
broad hat fell back, and consulted the oracle; then
stuck it back in the catenas.

When he had replaced the bottle, he stood in his
great wooden stirrups, rattled the bells of steel on
his great Spanish spurs, and again eyed my companion.

“Well damn old roper!” he again broke forth,
“money, mule, and watch all gone, and you afoot and
alone! Well, how on earth did it happen? And is
it really so? Just to think that Prince Hal, the

man of all others who always made it particular hell
for the rest of us, should travel all the way from
Yreka to Cottonwood to get a game, and then get
cleaned out cleaner than a shot-gun! Too jolly for
anything! And are you really dead-broke?

“Skinned clean down to the bed-rock. Haven't
got the colour,” said the Prince, laconically, as he
again tapped the dust with his boot.

“Well now, do tell a fellow how it happened. I
shall hang up at Cottonwood to-night, and if I don't
make the sports ante, my name ain't Boston. What
did you go through on?”

“Four aces!”

“Four devils! and what did the other fellow have?”

“A pair!”

“A pair of what? You let him take your money
on a pair when you had four aces? Now come! On
the square—how on earth did you get sinched, anyhow?
and did you really have four aces?”

“Yes.”

“And the other fellow?”

“A pair.”

“Of what?”

“Six-shooters!” calmly answered the laconic Prince,
still tapping at the dust and looking sidewise like, to
the right.

“Now look here,” said Boston earnestly, as he dismounted,
stood on one foot, and leaned against his

mule, with the broad hat pressed back and his right
arm over the animal's neck, “do for the love of Moses
tell me all about how this happened!”

Here the Prince stopped looking around, held up
his head, laughed a little, and proceeded to state that
the night before he had a game with two new
gamblers, who claimed to have just come up from
Oregon, long-haired and green, as he supposed, as
Willamette grass, at twenty dollars a corner. That
about midnight he fell heir to four aces, and staked
all his fortune, money, mule and watch on the hand.
“I really felt sorry for the boys,” added the Prince.
“It seemed like robbing, to take their money on four
aces, and I told them not to set it too deep, but they
said they would mourn as much as they liked at their
own funeral, and so came to the centre and called me
to the board.”

“What have you got?”

“Four aces!”

“Four aces! and what else? Skin 'em out, skin
'em out!”

“I put down my four aces before their eyes, when
one of them coolly put his finger down on my fifth
card, pushed it aside, and there lay the sixth card!”

Boston gave a long whistle, and as he could not
push his panama any further back, he pulled it forward,
and looked up with his nose at Mount Shasta.

This was my first lesson in gambling. Here for the

first time I learned that any one caught cheating at
cards forfeits his stakes.

Cheat all you like, but don't get caught. A game
at cards, you see, is much like many other things in
this respect.

The Prince of course remonstrated, but it was no
use. He had not been cheating; they had waxed
his cards together and he did not detect it till too
late.

Appearances were against him; besides a pair of
pistols cocked and at hand, decided the matter. He
acknowledged himself beat. Took a drink good-naturedly
with the crafty gamblers and retired.

For the benefit of ladies whose husbands may profess
ignorance on this subject, I may state that four
aces in a game of poker make a “corner” that cannot
be broken.

The man in the broad hat slowly mounted his
mule, set his feet in the stirrups, stretched his long
legs in the tapideros, unbuckled the catenas, and
again reached the contents of the right-hand pocket to
the Prince, and leaning back as my companion took a
refreshing drink again, said “Well—blast my sister's
cat's tail to the bone!”

“Prince,” said Boston, as he drove the cork home
with his palm and replaced the bottle, “you and I
have set against each other, night after night, and
I have found you a hard nut to crack, you bet your

life, but to see you skinned to the bed-rock, and by
Oregonians at that, is too rough; and here's my hand
on that. You was always best, and I second best,
of the two you know, but no matter; take this.”
And he put his hand down in the other pocket of
his catenas, and drew forth a handful of twenties.
“Take them, I tell you,” as the Prince declined.
“You must and shall take them as a friend's loan
if nothing else. That is, I intend to force you to
take these few twenties, and won't take no for an
answer.”

The Prince took the coins, carelessly dropped
them into his pocket, and again tapped the dust with
his boot, and looked up at the sun as if he wished to
be on his way.

Neither of the men had counted the money, or
seemed to take any note of the amount.

The bottle was again uncorked and exchanged.
Boston gathered up the reins from the neck of his
mule, settled himself in the saddle, stuck his great
spurs in the sinch, and the mule struck out, ambling
and braying as he went, with his opera-glasses held
directly on the river below.

I had not been mentioned, or noticed further.
I might have been invisible as air, so far as my
presence was concerned, after I declined to take a
drink.

California gamblers these of the old and early

type. And they were men! There is no doubt of
that. They were brave, honest, generous men. But
let it be distinctly understood, that the old race is
extinct.

These men described were the cream of their calling,
even at that time when gold was plenty and
manhood was not rare. Such men were the first to
give away their gains, the first to take part in any
good enterprise, not too much freighted with the
presence of a certain type of itinerants, so-called
“Methodist ministers.” In these few first years, they
went about from camp to camp, and won or lost their
money as the men above described.

The man who keeps a gambling den to-day is
another manner of man. The professional gambler
through most of the Pacific cities of to-day is a low
character. The would-be “sport” who would imitate
these men of the early time is usually a broken-down
barber, bar-tender, or waiter in disgrace.

A sudden and short-lived race were these. Gay
old sports, who sprung up mushroom-like from the
abundance and very heaps of gold. Men who had
vast sums of money from some run of fortune, and
no great aim in life, and having no other form of
excitement, sat down and gambled for amusement,
until they came to like it and followed it as a calling,
for a time, at least.

All men have a certain amount of surplus energy

that must be thrown off against some keen excitement.
You see how very naturally very good
men became gamblers in that time. Their successors,
however, gamble for gold and gain; too idle
to toil and too cowardly to rob, they follow a calling,
about the mining camps particularly, that is now
as disreputable as it was once respectable, or rather
aristocratic.

The grand old days are gone. The gay gamblers
with their open pockets and ideas of honour; the fast
women who kept the camps in turmoil and commotion,
are no more. Their imitators are there, but in
camps where men would be glad to pay a woman
well to wash his shirt, and where every man strong
enough to swing a pick can get employment, there
is no excuse for the one nor apology for the other.

Water will seek its level. As a rule, the low are
low—avoid them, particularly in America, more particularly
on the Pacific side of America. Give a man
five years, and, with unfortunate exceptions of course,
he will find his level on the Pacific, and his place,
whether high or low, as naturally as a stream of
water. Many of our old gamblers took up the law.
A great many took to politics; some advanced far
into distinction, even to Congress, and were heard
when they got there. Many fell in Nicaragua. One
or two became ministers, and made some mark in the
world. One is even now particularly famous for his

laconic sword-cuts of speech, born of the gambling
table, when he is excited and earnestly addressing
his congregation of miners in the mountains.

As a rule, these men remained true to the Pacific,
and refused to leave it. The miners gathered up
their gold, and returned to their old homes; the
merchants did the same as the camps went down, but
these men remained. They have, to use their own
expression, mostly “passed in their checks,” but what
few of them are still found, no matter what they follow,
are honest, brave old men.

Nature had knighted them at their births as of
noble blood, and they could not but remain men even
in the calling of knaves.

It was late in the day when we passed, on
one side of the dusty road we had been travelling
but a short distance, a newly-erected gallows,
and a populous grave-yard on the other. Certain
evidences, under the present order of things, of the
nearness of civilization and a city.

Mount Shasta is not visible from the city. A long
butte, black and covered with chapparal, lifts up
before Yreka, shutting out the presence of the
mountain.

It was a strange sort of inspiration that made the
sheriff come out here to construct his gallows—out
in the light, as it were, from behind the little butte
and full in the face of Shasta.

A strange sort of inspiration it was, and more
beautiful, that made the miners bring the first dead
out here from the camp, from the dark, and dig his
grave here on the hill-side, full in the light of the
lifted and eternal front of snow.

Dead men are even more gregarious than the
living. No one lies down to rest long at a time
alone, even in the wildest parts of the Pacific. The
dead will come, if his place of rest be not hidden
utterly, sooner or later, and even in the wildest
places will find him out, and one by one lie down
around him.

The shadows of the mountains in mantles of pine
were reaching out from the west over the thronged
busy little new-born city, as we entered its populous
streets.

The kingly sun, as if it was the last sweet office
on earth that day, reached out a shining hand to
Shasta, laid it on his head till it became a halo of
gold and glory, withdrew it then and let the shadowy
curtains of night come down, and it was dark almost
in a moment.

The Prince unfastened his cloak from the macheers
behind my saddle, and as he did so, courteously
asked if I was “all right in town,” and I boldly
answered, “Oh yes, all right now.” Then he bade
me good bye, and walked rapidly up the street.

If I had only had a little nerve, the least bit of

practical common-sense and knowledge of men, I
should have answered, “No, sir; I am not all right,
at all. I am quite alone here. I do not know a
soul in this city or any means of making a living. I
have nothing in the world but a half-dollar and this
pony. I am tired, cold, hungry, half-clad, as you
see. No, sir, since you ask me, that is the plain
truth of the matter. I am not all right at all.”

Had I had the sense or courage to say that, or
any part of that, he would have given me half, if
not all, the coins given him on the trail, and been
proud and happy to do it.

I was alone in the mines and mountains of California.
But what was worse than mines and
mountains, I was alone in a city. I was alone in
the first city I had ever seen. I could see nothing
here that I had ever seen before, but the cold far
stars above me.

I pretended to be arranging my saddle till the
Prince was out of sight, and then seeing the sign of
a horse swinging before a stable close at hand, I led
my tired pony there, and asked that he should be
cared for.

A negro kept this stable, a Nicaragua negro, with
one eye, and an uncommon long beard for one of his
race. He had gold enough hung to his watch-chain
in charms and specimens to stock a ranch, and
finger-rings like a pawn-dealer. He was very black,

short and fat, and insolent to the white boy who
tended his horses. I was afraid of this man from the
first, instinctively, and without any reason at all.

When you fear a man or woman instinctively,
follow your instincts. I shrank from this short,
black, one-eyed scoundrel, with his display of gold,
in a strange way. When he came up and spoke to
me, as I was about to go out, I held my head down
under his one eye, as if I had stolen something and
dared not look into it.

Permit me to say here that the idea that the honest
man will look you in the face and the knave will not,
is one of the most glaring of popular humbugs that I
know. Ten chances to one the knave will look you
in the eye till you feel abashed yourself, while the
honest, sensitive man or woman will merely lift the
face to yours, and the eyes are again to the ground.

“Look me in the eye and tell me that, and I will
believe you,” is a favourite saying. Nonsense! there
is not a villain in the land but can look you in the
eye and lie you blind.