Casino Joe, when thirty years ago he came about the Bowery, was in
manner and speech a complete expression of the rustical. His brow was
high and fine and wise; but lank hair of yellow spoiled with its ragged
fringe his face--a sallow face, wide of mouth and with high cheek bones.
His garb was farmerish; kip-skin boots, coat and trousers of gray jeans,
hickory shirt, and soft shapeless hat. Nor was Casino Joe in disguise;
these habiliments made up the uniform of his ancestral New Hampshire.
Countryman all over, was Casino Joe, and this look of the uncouth served
him in his chosen profession.
Possibly “chosen” as a term is indiscreet. Gamblers are born and not
made; they occur and they do not choose; they are, compared with more
conservative and lawful men, what wolves are to honest dogs--cousins,
truly, but tameless depredators, living lean and hard, and dying when
die they do, neglected, lone and poor. Yet it is fate; they are born to
it as much as is the Ishmael wolf and must run their midnight downhill
courses.
Gamblers, that is true gamblers, are folk of specialties. Casino Joe’s
was the game which gave to him his name--at casino he throve invincibly.
“It is my gift,” he said.
Two things were with Casino Joe at birth; the genius for casino and that
jack-knife talent to whittle which belongs with true-born Yankees.
Of this latter I had proof long after poor Casino Joe wras dead and
nourishing the grass. The races were in Boston; it was when Goldsmith
Maid reigned Queen of the trotting turf. Her owner came to me at the
Adams House and told how the aged sire of Goldsmith Maid, the great
Henry Clay, was in his equine, joint-stiffened dotage pastured on a not
too distant farm. He was eager to have a look at the old horse; and I
went with him for this pilgrimage.
As we drove up to the tavern which the farmstead we sought surrounded,
my curious eye was caught by a fluttering windmill contrivance perched
upon the gable. It was the figure of a woman done in pine and perhaps
four feet of height, carved in the somewhat airy character of a ballet
dancer. Instead of a dance, however, the lady contented herself with an
exhibition of Indian Club swinging--one in each pine palm; the breeze
offering the whirling impulse--in the execution wherof she poised
herself with one foot on a wooden ball not unlike the arrowing bronze
Diana of Madison Square. This figure, twirling clubs, as a mere windmill
would have been amazing enough; but as though this were not sufficiently
wondrous, at regular intervals our ballet dancer shifted her feet on
the ball, replacing the right with the left and again the left with the
right in measured alternation. The miracle of it held me transfixed.
The host came fatly to his front stoop and smiled upon my wide-eyed
interest.
“Where did you get it?” I asked.
“That was carved with a jack-knife,” replied mine host, “by a party
called ‘Casino Joe.’ It took him’most a year; he got it mounted and
goin’ jest before he died.”
For long I had lost trace of Casino Joe; it was now at this change house
I blundered on the news how my old gambling friend of the Bowery came
with his consumption and some eight thousand dollars--enough to end
one’s life with--and made this place home until his death. His grave lay
across a field in the little rural burying ground where he had played
when a boy, for Casino Joe was native of these parts.
There were no cheatings or tricky illicitisms hidden in Joe’s
supremacies of casino. They were works of a wax-like memory which kept
the story of the cards as one makes entries in a ledger. When the last
hands were out between Joe and an adversary, a glance at his mental
entries of cards already played, and another at his own hand, unerringly
informed him of what cards his opponent held. This he called “Telling
the last four.”
It was as an advantage more than enough to enable Joe to win; and while
I lived in his company, I never knew him to be out of pocket by that
divertisement. The marvel was that he could keep accurate track of
fifty-two cards as they fell one after the other into play, and do
these feats of memory in noise-ridden bar-rooms and amid a swirl of
conversation in which he more or less bore part.
Those quick folk of the fraternity whom he encountered and who from time
to time lost money to Casino Joe, never once suspected his victories to
be a result of mere memory. They held that some cheat took place. But
as it was not detectable and no man might point it out, no word of fault
was uttered. Joe took the money and never a protest; for it is as much
an axiom of the gaming table as it is of the law that “Fraud must
be proved and will never be presumed or inferred.” With no evidence,
therefore, the losing gamblers made no protesting charge, and Joe went
forward collecting the wealth of any and all who fought with him at his
favorite science.
Casino Joe, as I have said, accounted for his mastery at casino by his
power to “Tell the last four,” and laid it all to memory.
“And yet,” said Joe one evening as I urged him to impart to me his
secret more in detail, “it may depend on something else. As I’ve told
you, it’s my gift. Folk have their gifts. Once when I was in the town
of Warrensburg in Western Missouri, I was shown a man who had gifts
for mathematics that were unaccountable. He was a coarse, animalish
creature, this mathematician; a half idiot and utterly without
education. A sullen, unclean beast of a being, he shuffled about in
a queer, plantigrade fashion like a bear. He was ill-natured, yet too
timid to do harm; and besides a genius for figures, his distinguishing
characteristics were hunger measured by four men’s rations and an
appetite for whiskey which to call swinish would be marking a weakness
on one’s own part in the art of simile. Yet this witless creature,
unable to read his own printed name, knew as by an instinct every
mathematical or geometrical term. You might propose nothing as a problem
that he would not instantly solve. He could tell you like winking,
the area of a seven or eight-angled figure so you but gave him the
dimensions; he would announce the surface measurements of a sphere when
told either its diameter or circumference. Once, as a poser, a learned
teacher proposed a supposititious cone seven feet in altitude and with a
diameter of three feet at the base, and asked at what distance from the
apex it should be divided to make both parts equal of bulk and weight.
The gross, growling being made correct, unhesitating reply. This monster
of mathematics seemed also to carry a chronometer in his stomach, for
day or night, he could and would--for a drink of rum--tell you the hour
to any splinter of a second. You might set your watch by him as if he
were the steeple clock. I don’t profess,” concluded Casino Joe, “to
either the habits or the imbecility of this genius of figures, yet it
may well be that my abilities to keep track of fifty-two Cards as
they appear in play and know at every moment--as a bookkeeper does
a balance--what cards are yet to come, are not of cultivation or
acquirement, but were extant within me at my birth.” When Casino
Joe appeared in the Bowery he came to gamble at cards. That buzzing
thoroughfare was then the promenade of the watchful brotherhood of
chance. In that hour, too, it stood more the fashion--for there are
fashions in gambling as in everything else--to win and lose money at
short-cards, and casino enjoyed particular vogue. There were scores
of eminent practitioners about New York, and Joe had little trouble in
securing recognition. Indeed, he might have played the full twenty-four
hours of every day could he have held up his head to such labors.
There was at the advent of our rural Joe into metropolitan circles none
more alert or breathless for pastmastery in unholy speculation than
myself. About twenty-one should have been my years, and I carried that
bubbling spirit for success common to the youth of every walk. _Aut
Cosar aut nullus!_ was my warcry, and I did not consider Joe and his
career for long before I was slave to the one hope of finally gaining
his secret. One might found fortune on it; like the philosopher’s stone
it turned everything to gold.
With those others who fell before Joe I also believed his success to be
offspring of some cheat. And while the rustic Joe was engaged against
some fellow immoralist, I’ve sat and watched for hours upon end to
discover what winding thing Joe did. There was no villainy of double
dealing or chicane of cut-shifting or of marked cards at which I was
not adept. And what I could so darkly perform I was equally quick to
discover when another attempted it. But, albeit I eyed poor Joe with a
cat’s vigilance--a vigilance to have saved the life of Argus had he but
emulated it with his hundred eyes--I noted nothing. And the reason was a
simple one. There was literally nothing to discover; Joe played honestly
enough; his advantage dwelt in his memory and that lay hidden within his
head.
Despairing of a discovery by dint of watching, I made friendly overtures
to Joe, hoping to wheedle a secret which I could not surprise. My
proffers of comradeship were met more than half way. Joe was a kindly
though a lonely soul and had few friends; his queer garb of the
cowpastures together with his unfailing domination at casino kept
others of the fraternity at a distance. Also I had been much educated of
books by Father Glennon, and put in my spare time with reading. As Joe
himself had dived somewhat into books, we were doubly drawn to each
other. Hours have we sat together in Joe’s nobly furnished rooms--for
he lived well if he did not dress well--and overhauled for our mutual
amusement the literature of the centuries back to Chaucer and his Tabard
Inn.
At this time Joe was already in the coils of that consumption whereof at
last he died. And what with a racking cough and an inability to breathe
while lying down, Joe seldom slept in a bed. The best he might do was to
gain what snatches of slumber he could while propped in an arm-chair. It
thus befell that at his suggestion and to tell the whole truth, at
his generous expense, I came finally to room with Joe. Somebody
should utilize the bed. Being young and sound of nerves, his restless
night-roamings about the floors disturbed not me; I slept serenely
through as I doubtless would through the crack of doom had such calamity
surprised us at that time, and Joe and I prospered bravely in company.
Beseech and plead as I might, however, Joe would not impart to me that
hidden casino strength beyond his word that no fraud was practiced--a
fact whereof my watchings had made me sure--and curtly describing it as
an ability to “Tell the last four.”
While Joe housed me as his guest for many months and paid the bills, one
is not to argue therefrom any unhappy pauperism on my boyish part. In
good sooth! I was more than rich during those days, with a fortune of
anywhere from five hundred to as many as four thousand dollars. Like all
disciples of chance I had these riches ever ready in my pocket for what
prey might offer.
It was now and then well for Joe that I went thus provided. That badly
garbed squire of good dame Fortune, who failed not of a profit at
casino, had withal an overpowering taste to play faro; and as if by some
law of compensation and to preserve an equilibrium, he would seem to sit
down to a faro layout only to lose.
Time and again he came to his rooms stripped of the last dollar. On
these harrowing occasions Joe would borrow a round-number stake from me
and so return to the legitimate sure harvests of casino, vowing never to
lose himself and his money in any quicksands of farobank again.
It must be admitted that these anti-faro vows were never kept; once firm
on his feet by virtue of casino renewed, it was not over long ere he
“tried it just once more,” to lose again. These faro bankruptcies would
overtake Joe about once a month.
One day I made a mild plot; I had foregone all hope of coaxing Joe’s
secret from him; now I resolved to bring against him the pressure of a
small intrigue. I lay in ambush for Joe, waylaid him as it were in the
weak hour of his destitution and ravished from him at the point of his
necessities that which I could come by in no other way.
It was following a disastrous night at faro when Joe appeared without
so much silver in his pockets as might serve to keep the fiends from
dancing there. Having related his losses he asked for the usual five
hundred wherewith to re-enter the sure lists of casino and begin the
combat anew.
To his sore amazement and chagrin--and somewhat to his alarm, for at
first he thought me as poor as himself from my refusal--I shook my sage
young head.
“Haven’t you got it?” asked Joe anxiously.
“Oh, yes,” I replied, “I’ve got it; and it’s yours on one condition.
Teach me how to ‘Tell the last four,’ and you may have five hundred and
five hundred with it.”
Then I pointed out to Joe his mean unfairness in not equipping me with
this resistless knowledge. Save for that one pregnant secret I was
as perfect at casino as any sharper on the Bowery. Likewise, were the
situation reversed, I’d be quick to instruct him. I’d lend no more;
there would come no further five hundred save as the price of that
touchstone--the golden secret of how to “Tell the last four.” This I set
forth jealously.
“Why, then,” said Joe, “I’ll do my best to teach you. But it will cost
a deal of work. You’ll have to put in hours of practice and curry and
groom and train your memory as if it were a horse for a great race. I
tell you the more readily--for I could elsewhere easily get the five
hundred and for that matter five thousand other dollars to keep it
company--since I believe I’ve not many months to live at best”--here, as
if in confirmation, a gust of coughing shook him--“and this secret shall
be your legacy.”
With these words, Joe got a deck of cards and began a game of casino
with me as an adversary. Slowly playing the cards, he explained and
strove to illustrate those mental methods by which he kept account and
tabbed them as they were played. If I could lay bare this system here
I would; but its very elaboration forbids. It was as though Joe owned a
blackboard in his head with the fifty-two cards told off by numbers in
column, and from which he erased a card the moment it appeared in play.
By processes of elimination, he came finally to “Tell the last four,”
and as the last hands were dealt knew those held by his opposite as
much as ever he knew his own. This advantage, with even luck and perfect
skill made him not to be conquered.
It took many sittings with many lessons many hours long; but in time
because of my young faculties--not too much cumbered of those thousand
and one concerns to come with years and clamor for remembrance--I grew
as perfect as Joe.
And it was well I learned the secret when I did. Soon after, I became
separated from Joe; I went southward to New Orleans and when I was next
to New York Joe had disappeared. Nor could I find trace or sign of
his whereabouts. He went in truth to his old village, and my earliest
information thereof came only when the tavern host told the origin
of the club-swinging ballet dancer then toeing it so gallantly on his
gables.
But while I parted with my friend, I never forgot him. The knowledge he
gave double-armed me at the game. It became the reason of often riches
in my hands, and was ever a resort when I erred over horse races or was
beaten down by some storm of faro. Then it was profitably I recalled
Casino Joe and his instructions; and his invincible secret of “How to
tell the last four.”
“Is it not strange,” said the Jolly Doctor, when the Red Nosed Gentleman
had finished, “that I who never cared to gamble, should listen with
delight to a story of gamblers and gambling? But so it is; I’ve heard
scores such in my time and always with utmost zest. I’ll even tell one
myself--as it was told me--when it again becomes my duty to furnish this
good company entertainment. Meanwhile, unless my memory fails, it should
be the task of our descendant of Hiawatha”--here the Jolly Doctor turned
smilingly to Sioux Sam--“to take up the burden of the evening.”
The Old Cattleman, joining with the Jolly Doctor in the suggestion,
and Sioux Sam being in no wise loth to be heard, our half-savage friend
related “How Moh-Kwa Fed the Catfish.”