Our committee has decided to take up your offer to make our big
temperance speech at Piperock. The evening before election will
be about right. We will give you the fifty dollars after the
speech.
Yours truly and respectfully,
WICK SMITH, Chairman and Treasurer.
“What do you think of that?” I asks.
“Any old time they imports talent to dry up our homes, Ike, it’s time
for us to hurry back. Hump yourselves, you flea-bitten cousins to a
rabbit!”
We enters the portals of Eagle after dark. Eagle is some hook-billed
town if anybody rises to inquire. We irrigates our necks and has a bit
to eat, and then we opines to outguess the wheel, the same of which
wasn’t hung on a spindle for no such purpose.
We ain’t placed more than a couple of bets when in comes a individual
who roars like a bull-fiddle, slaps a twenty-dollar gold piece on the
layout and howls:
“Let her spin, feller! That’s what is left of my gun.”
He sees the dealer pay a couple of piker bets and rake in his twenty.
He stands there sort of in a trance and watches the wheel spin gold for
the house.
“You got a system?” asks Dirty Shirt, and the big feller stares at him.
“System? On that wheel? That wheel has got any system on earth hog-tied
and staked out!”
“Meaning which?” snaps the gambler, and the crowd splits.
The big feller is leaning with his hands on the back of a chair. When he
straightens up, he brings the chair up.
“Meaning,” says he, grinning, “that the law of averages was fixed by you
before you opened the game.”
He whirls that chair across the layout and crowns the gambler complete.
The gambler goes over backward with the layout, wheel and all on top of
him, the same being assisted by me and Dirty Shirt.