Evening star., 1899-03-11
worker sgain takes his thrashing in sood

lily ncdu CiOSea, ne says.
after the euchre game has gone on for a
while again. the other sharper does sud
den-startirg act when his confederate
uls mes out hand,1 Then, without word,
ne dives 1ntos his wallet and deliberat tely
counts out big pile-three, four, or even
five hundred dollars
Wen, he saysrJI may be doing Reu-
ben trick; but IL any man at this table
thinks ne has ,got ne beat ON a poker hand
at this trip. all he has got to do is to skate
the equivalent of that pile to the center Of
DaintiIy Done.
1.-THE passenger who has a straight flush.
from nine to king ican't let good thing
like that get by him. and in four cases out
OF nve he produces the equivalent of the
roll on the table-for. as I said at the he
ginnlng' the sharpers have. through long
experience. an almost infalible knack Of
picking out the men on the train who have
Money. And the thing has been so daintily
leo up to, and everything has been so ap-
pSrently on the level and four-squars, that
the passenger, no matter how put out he
may nWardly feel, cannot see that he has
any KICK coming when the sharper, ON the
showdown. displays a royal flush, and
hauls down the pot. Oddly enough, passen-
gers who permit themselves to get done in
this way rarely arrive at the belief that
lhey We Deen SWindled until 1t Is too late
LOT tnem to openly accuse their swindlers
NOW, there is nothing new about this
method at all. 1t has been worked along
the same general principles for twenty
years TO my certain knowledge. But it Is
simply amazing how many men get nipped
at lt-men who think themselves pretty
smooth, and who look and act the part, too.
Seems Extraordinary.
Then there are a lot of train workers,
oud Tor big money, who do not go to all of
this trouble to lead up to a winning, but
simply get the victims into small poker
games to relieve the tedium of travel, raise
the stakes almost imperceptibly, and finally
get the men they intend to pluck into the
biggest kind of no-limit game. 1t might
at first thought seem extraordinary that
travelling business and professional men of
wealth should permit themselves to be in
duced TO get into poker games with stran-
gers on railroad trains, but when you stop
TO reflect upon how thoroughly well these
train workers play their parts, how polish
ed, we'll gotten up, well educated and per-
suasive most of them are it does not seem
wonderful, after all. l myself had an ex-
perience less than year ago with of
these men that he is likely to remember
long time after it has become vague in my
memory.
Has Turned Many a Trick.
II started on a trip from Chicago to Den
yer last April to attend a convention of
railroad men. Two friends of mine, bound
for the same convention, accompanied me.
The palace car was pretty well flied, most
ly with men bound further west. 1 had
not been on the car more than ten minutes
before a man, whose face looked very IA
miliar to me, came into the car, carrying
his travelling gear along with him. and took
the seat the conductor assigned him. /
had to do quite a bit of mental cudgeling
before / remembered where l had seen the
man before, and then il all came back to
me with rush. l had last seen him about
three years before, when he was chief clerk
of OF Ule most famous hotels In ('llc2-
go.
This hotel chief clerk was, one of the
smoothest articles in the way of a high
stepping young man. in the town of wind
He perfect dresser, "a perfect rider,
perfect billiardist, a perfect drinker, a
perfect everything. Not more than three
| months after L had seen him at the Michi-
gan avenue hotel where he was employed,
and become fairly well acquainted with
him, the Chicago newspapers came out
with a big story of how the chief clerk CT
! the famous hosiery had been fired for
plucking the guests of the house at the
game of poker, at which the young man
was also perfect. The immediate cause of
his having been fired, as related in the Chi
| cago newspapers was that by playing
short cards in poker with a distinguished
Englishman who came over to this country
and wrote a book about us he. had done
| the Englfshman out of a large sum of
money. The proprietor Of the hotel had
often been spoken to by his, guests with
| reference to the, remarkable poker playing
ability of his warm membe of a chief
clerk, and when the Britisher fatty accused
| the clerk-Tl1 call him Marlson, which Is
pretty close to his real name-of swindng
| at cards the proprietor of the hotel prompt
| ly fired his employe. i read all of this in
| the Chicago papers with the thought that,
| after all, Marlson had always seemed to me
! trifie too smooth to be precisely on the
| level. Less than six months later 1 read of
| Marison again in the New York papers He
was said to have cleaned a well-known New
| York business man out of $35,G0 at short
cards. believe he compromised that mess
somehow. Later on I heard that he was
working the ocean steamships.
| The Bitter Bitten
| when he came into the car, then, and
| / had had a chance to bring all of this
| back and to get my line on him, l knew
| that he had taken to working the trains
/ My conclusion was correct l pointed him
| out to my two friends sketched what 7
| knew of his record to them, and told them
| that he would be asking somebody into a
game before long. In less than three hours
| he had invited me-he had quite forgotten
| my face, no doubt-into a little quarter
| limit game. l consented, kicked my two
| friends in the legs and asked them to sit
in, too. They were agreeable seeing that
| l wanted them to hitch UP with me for
some purpose. and we got into the smoking
| room and started the game. Marlson didn't
/ adopt the old-time system of the short
caro- men. ana let US do the winning
| first. He began to win immedia tely, and
1 kept on winning for couple of hours. when
| l suggested that the limit be raised.
| '"Then Marlson was in clover-on his own
/ deals-and put it on the three of us good
and hard 1 guess the three of us were
| something like 5000 loser each by the time
| tie limit had been off for an hour I had
| been bluffing a good deal. but finally 1 got
| a pat full hand on the dish-out of one of
| my friends. 1 played it for all it was worth.
! for 1 had the hunch that I had MarIson
| beat-well. l don't mind saying that | knew
| I had Marlson beat, for my friend who
! dished out the hand knew something about
! the dec. himself. and he could catch a sig
| nal quick as the next man. My two
| friends dropped out and it was between
Marlson and myself. 1t was easy to see he
| had me charted as a buffer on this hand.
| and he began throwing $50 bets at me. |
| came back at him every time, and when he
! called me there was about thousand of
! lis money in the center of the table He
only had three aces. and, of course nv
| full house beat him. l counted out two 5000
| piles of bills and handed one of them to
| each of my friends. Then l stuffed the re-
| manning 81 900 into my wallet, Marlson
| meanwhile looking like a man stupefied
At His Own Game.
| caid he srola