Abroad At Home Part 24

I wished to uphold the honor of New York as best I could, so I tried to reply gamely.

"Oh, yes," I said. "Whenever anybody wants a game they'll find us ready."

Again I saw them exchange glances.

"You tell him, Major," said Colonel Hawkins, walking away.

"Young man," said Major Wald, placing his hand kindly on my shoulder, "I played poker before you were born. I know a good deal about it. You wouldn't take offense if I gave you a pointer about your game?"

"On the contrary," I said, thinking I was about to hear the inner secrets of Missouri poker, "I shall be most grateful."

"If I advise you," he pursued, "will you agree to follow my advice?"

"Certainly."

"Well," said the Major, "don't you play poker any more while you're in the West. Wait till you get back to New York."

Seeing the houses of the players next day as I drove about the county, I suspected that even these had been built around the game of poker, for each house has ample accommodations for the "gang" in case the game lasts until too late to go home. In the winter the games occur at the houses of the different Colonels, and there is always a dinner first.

But it is in summer that the greatest games occur, for then it is the immemorial custom for the Colonels (and Major Wald and Mr. Matson, too, of course) to charter a steamer and go out on the river. These excursions sometimes last for the better part of a week. Sometimes they cruise. Sometimes they go ash.o.r.e upon an island and camp. "We take a tribe of cooks and a few cases of 'essentials,'" one of the Colonels explained to me, "and the game never stops at all."

My companion and I were tired. The mental strain had told upon us. Soon after the Colonels, the Major, and Mr. Matson went, we retired. It seemed to me that I had hardly closed my eyes when I heard a faint rap at my bedroom door. But I must have slept, for there was sunlight streaming through the window.

"What is it?" I called.

The voice of our host replied.

"Breakfast will be ready any time you want it," he declared. "Will you have your toddy now?"

Ah! Pike is a great county!

And what do you suppose we had for breakfast? At the center of the table was a pile of the most beautiful and enormous red apples--fragrant apples, giving a sweet, appetizing scent which filled the room. I had thought before that I knew something about apples, but when I tasted these I became aware that no merely good apple, no merely fine apple, would ever satisfy my taste again. These apples, which are known as the "Delicious," are to all other apples that I know as Missouri poker is to all other poker. They are in a cla.s.s absolutely alone, and, in case you get some on a lucky day, I want to tell you how to eat them with your breakfast. Don't eat them as you eat an ordinary apple, but either fry them, with a slice of bacon, or cut them up and take them as you do peaches--that is, with cream and sugar. Did you ever see an apple with flesh white and firm, yet tender as a pear at the exact point of perfect ripeness? Did you ever taste an apple that seemed actually to melt upon your tongue? That is the sort of apple we had for breakfast.

CHAPTER XXI

OLD RIVER DAYS

Later we motored to the town of Clarksville, some miles down the river--a town which huddles along the bank, as St. Louis must have in her early days. Being a small, straggling village which has not, if one may judge from appearances, progressed or even changed in fifty years, Clarksville out-Hannibals Hannibal. Or, perhaps, it is to-day the kind of town that Hannibal was when Mark Twain was a boy. In its decay it is theatrically perfect.

Our motor stopped before the bank, and we were introduced to the editor of the local paper, which is called "The Piker."

The bank is, in appearance, contemporary with the town. The fittings are of the period of the Civil War--walnut, as I recall them. And there are red gla.s.s signs over the little window grilles bearing the legends "Cashier" and "President."

In the back room we met the president, Mr. John O. Roberts, a gentleman over eighty years of age, who can sit back, with his feet upon his desk, smoke cigars, and, from a cloud of smoke, exude the most delightful stories of old days on the Mississippi. For Mr. Roberts was clerk on river boats more than sixty years ago, in the golden days of the great stream. There, too, we had the good fortune to meet Professor M. S.

Goodman, who was born in Missouri in 1837, and founded the Clarksville High School in 1865. The professor has written the history of Pike County--but that is a big story all by itself.

In the old days Pike County embraced many of the other present counties, and, running all the way from the Mississippi to the Missouri River, was as large as a good-sized State. Pike has colonized more Western country than any other county in Missouri; or, as Professor Goodman put it, "The west used to be full of Pike County men who had pushed out there with their guns and bottles."

"Yes," added Mr. Roberts in his dry, crackling tone, "and wherever they went they always wanted office."

I asked Mr. Roberts about the famous poker games on the river boats.

"I antedate poker," he said. "The old river card game was called 'Brag.'

It was out of brag that the game of poker developed. A steward on one of the boats once told me that he and the other boys had picked up more than a hundred dollars from the floor of a room in which Henry Clay and some friends had been playing brag."

Golden days indeed!--and for every one. The steamboat companies made fabulous returns on their investments.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Mr. Roberts is a wonder--nothing less. There's a book in him, and I hope that somebody will write it, for I should like to read that book]

"In '54 and '55," said Mr. Roberts, "I worked for the St. Louis & Keokuk Packet Company, a line owning three boats, which weren't worth over $75,000. That company cleaned up as much as $150,000 clear profit in one season. And, of course, a season wasn't an entire year, either. It would open about March first and end in December or, in a mild winter, January.

"But I tell you we used to drive those boats. We'd shoot up to the docks and land our pa.s.sengers and mail and freight without so much as tying up or even stopping. We'd just sc.r.a.pe along the dock and then be off again.

"The highest fare ever charged between St. Louis and Keokuk was $4 for the 200 miles. That included a berth, wine, and the finest old Southern cooking a man ever tasted. The best cooks I've ever seen in my life were those old steamboat cooks. And we gave 'em good stuff to cook, too. We bought the best of everything. You ought to see the steaks we had for breakfast! The officers used to sit at the ladies' end of the table and serve out of big chafing dishes. I tell you those were _meals_!

"There was lots going on all the time on the river. I remember one trip I made in '52 in the old 'Di Vernon'--all the boats in the line were named for characters in Scott's novels. We were coming from New Orleans with 350 German immigrants on deck and 100 Californians in the cabin.

The Californians were sports and they had a big game going all the time.

We had two gamblers on board, too--John McKenzie and his partner, a man named Wilburn. They used to come on to the boats at different places, and make out to be farmers, and not acquainted with each other, and there was always something doing when they got into the game.

"Well, this time cholera broke out among the immigrants on the deck.

They began dying on us. But we had a deckload of lumber, so we were well fixed to handle 'em. We took the lumber and built coffins for 'em, and when they'd die we'd put 'em in the coffins and save 'em until we got enough to make it worth stopping to bury 'em. Then we'd tie up by some woodyard and be loading up with wood for the furnaces while the burying was going on. Some twenty-five or thirty of 'em died on that trip, and we planted 'em at various points along the way. And all the while, up there in the cabin, the big game was going on--each fellow trying to cheat the other.

"After we got to St. Louis there was a report that we'd buried a man with $3,500 sewed into his clothes. Of course we didn't know which was which or where we'd buried this man. Well, sir, that started the greatest bunch of mining operations along the river bank between New Orleans and St. Louis that anybody ever saw! Every one was digging for that German. Far as I heard, though, they never found a dollar of him."

Some one in Clarksville (in my notes I neglected to set down the origin of this particular item) told me that the term "stateroom" originated on the Mississippi boats, where the various rooms were named after the States of the Union, a legend which, if true, is worth preserving.

Another interesting item relates to the origin of the slang term "piker," which, whatever it may have meant originally, is used to-day to designate a timid, close-fisted gambler, a "tightwad" or "short sport."

When one inquires as to the origin of this term, Pike County, Missouri, begins to remember that there is another Pike County--Pike County, Illinois, just across the river, which, incidentally, is I think, the "Pike" referred to in John Hay's poem.

A gentleman in Clarksville explained the origin of the term "piker" to me thus:

"In the early days men from Pike County, Missouri, and Pike County, Illinois, went all through the West. They were all good men. In fact, they were such a fine lot that when any crooks would want to represent themselves as honest men they would say they were from Pike. As a result of this all the bad men in the West claimed to be from our section, and in that way Pike got a bad name. So when the westerners suspected a man of being crooked, they'd say: 'Look out for him; he's a Piker.'"

In St. Louis I was given another version. There I was told that long ago men would come down from Pike to gamble. They loved cards, but oftentimes hadn't enough money to play a big game. So, it was said, the term "Piker" came to indicate more or less the type it indicates to-day.

No bit of character and color which we met upon our travels remains in my mind more pleasantly than the talk we had with those fine old men around the stove in the back room of the bank of Mr. John O. Roberts, there at Clarksville. Mr. Roberts is a wonder--nothing less. There's a book in him, and I hope that somebody will write it, for I should like to read that book.

As we were leaving the bank another gentleman came in. We were introduced to him. His name proved also to be John O. Roberts--for he was the banker's son.

"Yes," the elder Mr. Roberts explained to me, "and there's another John O. Roberts, too--my grandson. We're all John O. Robertses in this family. We perpetuate the name because it's an honest name. No John O.

Roberts ever went to the penitentiary--or to the legislature."