Morning journal and courier., 1885-04-15
STORY OF A FARO DEALER.


 reporter for the San Francisco Call. ''I was on the Comstock for good many years, and was there during the booming times, after Crown Point ard Belcher began to pour out wealth from their lower levels. Every hu- man being in that region took to gambling in one more forms; the women and even the children going in for stocks, while the men used to fill in all their spare time with faro and poker. The same spirit exists there yet, but the capital is gone and only small risks can be taken instead of heavy ones. In the flush days on the Comstock money was so plenty that people could not believe dull time could ever come, and if they lost anything to-day were comforted by the thought that they would have plenty of chances to make raise tomorrow. The most plentiful commodity seemed to be coin and twenty dollar piece then was thought to be scarcely more worth keeping than a two bit piece nowadays.
 "For years the pay-rolls of the mines along that lode ran from $700, 900 to $960, 900 a month, and faro banks ran twenty-two hours out of the twenty-four. As protec- tion to the banks the bets were usually limit ed to twenty-five dollars, but when a man planked down capital enough would sometimes take the bridle off, and I have turned the cards for as high limit as four hundred dollars. A crooked game couldn't last there week, and the result was that the gamblers all played dead on the square; while the hogging men might catch flat now and then, but shortly after such a per formanoe would find it beneficial to skip the place.
 E'One evening Uncle Jimmy Whelan- everybody knew Uncle Jimmy-came out of the mine in which he worked and drifted up town, tin pail in hand. Uncle Jimmy was broke, but on his way to his cabin he bor- | rowed ten dollars from a man for luck and stopped in at the faro game. He left there next morning and deposited s1 TOO in the bank. For the next two or three days he did nothing but play faro, but at the end of that time he dropped back to the mine, having lost every cent of his winnings.
 "Dave Jones played big game at Gibson's bank in '72 He kept four twenty dollar gold pieces on every card from soda to hook, that is, from the first card dealt to the last one, and never took chip as he played, and took his winnings in coin. He stuck to the game for two hours, and during that time had st1eaks of luck that almost paralyzed the dealers-s fact that I can assert from personal experience, as I dealt goed part of the time. Dave rose from the table, win ming something over six thousand dollars, and bought a house and lot with the money. I never saw as much excitement in my life over game as there was over that, for the place was crowded day and night with spec tators, who would every and then chip in on their own account, and who crowded around the table in such mass that the people in the back rows couldn't see a card. Notwithstanding the loss to Dave, the bank made money that month, and, for that matter, Gibson's bank, than which a squarer one was never known, only got to the bad one month out of the eleven years that it was running.
 ''The most extraordinary instance I have known of in a faro game happened to a man who used to work in the Alpha mine. One night he dreamed that he had won eight hundred dollars with four bits for starter. He had lost his last cent at the game on the previous evening, and told his dream with & laugh as he started for work in the morning. While telling it he put his hand into his overcoat pocket and found there fifty-cent check that must have been accidentally dropped by some one on the pre- vious evening.
 ''Instead of going to the mine he walked into the faro bank where I was dealing and staked his check. He won twenty-nine bets running, then lost one and then won thirteen running, and at the end of a few hours raked in the last stake, that made him exactly an eight hundred dollar winning He stopped right there, and the strangest thing of all, stranger even than the fulfllment of his dream, was the fact that from that time on he never gambled a dollar on faro.
 ''Faro was well enough for a light diet, but the great game on the Comsteck in those days was poker, and it was played strictly on the honest, and for all it was worth. There may have been more or less hogging in the petty games played by outsiders, but mean that everything was above board when the great poker sharps met in council. Their regular game was unlimited as to stakes, and a twenty dollar ante apiece when only three or four were playing, and 8 one hundred dol lar ante from the dealer when five were play ing, in the latter the deal passing to the winner. Those were the days when you saw tidy bluffng, or guessed at it rather, for you rarely got chance to look into the players | hands.
 "Steve J. made the largest winning at one l poker sitting that I saw on the Comstock, on | which occasion he pocketed good ten thou | sand dollars. Bill Gibson lost in two nights | at poker fifteen thousand dollars; $9, 400 the l first night and S5, 600 the next. The work | of those two nights, by the way, cost him a | huge fortune. He had just got a sure point | CT on Crown Point, which was then selling at | seven or eight dollars, and started down town | to give an order for as much as his fifteen | thousand dollars in cash would cover. On 1 the way he stepped into his house and found | the boys waiting for him to open poker game. The result was that he sat down to play with them for little while, took header in bad luck and dropped his cash, en- tirely forgetting the pointer that had been given him. Crown Point went up to $1 300, | SO that Gibson, if he had carried out his orig | inal intention, would have cleared anywhere 1 between three and four million dollars.