Taking Chances Part 28

"'Queen next.'

"'Queen next here.'

"'Nine next.'

"'Nine next here.'

"'Six next.'

"Tunwell tossed his four that was next on to the table face upward without the movement of an eyebrow.

"'Six wins the $60,000,' said he, and the contractor strolled back from the window.

"'Better luck next time, Tunwell,' said he, smiling, while Burbridge drank a gla.s.s of water.

"'There isn't going to be any next time, my boy,' returned Tunwell. 'I'm no hog.'"

THE INSIDIOUS GAME OF SQUEEZE-SPINDLE.

_And How a Whirl at It Came Near Decimating the Population of a Section of the Indian Territory._

"I don't just recall the name of the cheerful worker who invented that wise phrase, 'There's a sucker born every minute, and they never die,'

but whoever he was he had something inside his head besides mayonnaise dressing," said a giant from the Indian Territory, when the talk among a party of Westerners at a roadhouse the other night switched around to sure-thing games and cinch propositions. "I don't suppose there ever was yet a sure-thing game rigged up that didn't get its quota of nibblers, and even its occasional easy marks, who'd go up against it with their whole rolls. I'm not speaking so much now of brace games as I am of layouts that might just as well have the words, 'You lose,' painted all over 'em, they're such obvious air-tights for the dealers. I suppose we've all been up against brace faro. That's something that a man can't heel himself against; the most he can do when he gets next to it that two of 'em are slipping out of the box at one and the same time is to 'stick up' the dealer at the business end of a .45-if he's quick enough-acc.u.mulate all the money in sight, and back toward the door.

"But a man who'll lay up alongside of a brace faro layout or a brace wheel need not necessarily be sucker enough to hand his dust over to a smooth duck who's dealing a game that has all the scars, moles, tattoo marks and other perfectly visible Bertillons of a dead open and shut sure-thing layout. Yet I've seen men who were wise in their own business-horse-rustling, for instance-go broke against games that you'd think a ten-year-old would size up correctly without the a.s.sistance of an X-ray apparatus.

"I'm thinking of the time that Jink McAtee, afterward one of the foxiest horse-thieves who ever used an upside-down brand in the Southwest, got interested in squeeze-spindle in Guthrie. It was in Guthrie, in May, 1889, just after Oklahoma had been opened up, that the two Reeves brothers, Bill and Al, and Arthur Pendleton started an all-round layout in what was the first two-story shack that had been thrown up in the town. The two Reeves boys are still running the biggest layout in Guthrie, but Pendleton is dead. The Reeves-Pendleton brand of faro, as well as their keno, wheel, stud, and other legitimate games, was perfectly on the level, but in addition they had a few games in operation that was plain cases to most of the patrons of the layout of the sure-thing. The Reeves and Pendleton people didn't club anybody into stacking up against their sure-thing games. They just started 'em going, hired a man named Gately to run 'em, and struck the att.i.tude that if among the sooners and boomers of Guthrie there was people imbecile enough to want to hit up these sure-thing games, it wasn't their funeral.

"The most alluring among these sure-thing games was the outfit called the squeeze-spindle. You used to run across a squeeze-spindle quite often down in the Southwest, but so many of the dealers of that game got shot up and slithered that it has sort o' pa.s.sed out. It's a lottery game ostensibly, where the player makes what the dealer calls 'conditional' winnings, and the dealer has to have the a.s.sistance of 'boosters' to throw confidence into the suckers. It took a good con man to run a squeeze-spindle game. The sucker would put up a hundred to win five hundred; he'd cop the coin 'conditionally'-that is to say, the arrow that flew around in the middle of the box had to point to another number of the sucker's selection before the money would be his to walk away with, and in the event of the arrow pointing to the right number the player would get twice the sum.

"Of course the arrow never went the sucker's way twice hand-running, and equally, of course, it was a game where the dealer got all of the money.

The reason it was called a squeeze-spindle was because the dealer had only to squeeze a b.u.t.ton beneath the table to stop the arrow at any old point in its flight around the numbers that he wanted to. When a sucker was up against the game, a 'booster' would prance in with a big roll of the house's money, treble it on a couple of straight turns of the spindle, squeezed just his way by the dealer, and then the sucker would conclude that it was only his lack of capital that caused him to lose-just as the pin-head who doubles on favorites at the races tries to convince himself when's he's broke and smoking a punk pipe that he'd have been able to put all the bookmakers out of business if he'd just had the capital to keep on with his system. Once in a great while a squeeze-spindle dealer would let one of his good things get away with a bunch of money, if he felt reasonably sure that the sucker would come back at it with the coin later on; and thus the ingenuous little fiction 'ud go around that So-and-So had pasted a squeeze-spindle dealer for his whole roll, and this would make business.

"Now, here was a game that you wouldn't think a man with the sense he was born with would bet twenty cents worth of zinc money on. But this man Gately, who ran the squeeze-spindle for the Reeves-Pendleton layout on a salary and commission basis, was a pretty smooth gazzabo in his generation, and he landed the good things with his layout right along, and often for sizeable money. He was a quiet, red bearded chap, with a mighty convincing, persuasive way about him, and a man who'd put up a fight, too, in a corner. He had free rein in the running of the squeeze-spindle and two or three other sure-thing devices that formed a sort of side-show to the main Reeves-Pendleton layout, and the proprietors pretended that his outfit was really independent of their plant-that Gately was simply renting s.p.a.ce from them and going it alone.

But all Guthrie knew differently.

"Well, up against this squeeze-spindle plant goes this here Jink McAtee that I started to tell you about. Jink wasn't then known as a horse-thief. He had been a sooner-he got in long before the trumpet call on a thoroughbred Kentucky horse that he was afterward found to have pinched out of a barn-and he had made a pretty good thing out of the Guthrie corner lot that he had staked off. He sold it three days after the dash for $6000, and then he laid back on his liquor with a whole lot of content. He was a low forehead in looks and manners. He was the veriest duffer in his attempts to make the Reeves-Pendleton combination put up their shutters by attacking their square games, and he lost over $3000 of his corner-lot money at their faro tables. He blew in another couple of thousand of the bunch at the honkatonks around town before his little beady eyes fell on Gately's squeeze-spindle, and he perceived a chance to get all of his money back in jig-time. Gately pointed it out to him just how easy it was.

"Before McAtee put a dollar down on the spindle Gately got Jink's eyes to popping by roping in a booster who pulled $3200 out of the squeeze-spindle in quicker time than a cayuse could make two jumps, and when Gately looked chagrined and sorrowful McAtee bit. Gately knew his man pretty well, and he permitted Jink to not only win $1600 'conditionally,' right off the reel, but he actually pa.s.sed $400 of Jink's winnings over to him. Then he proceeded to wipe Jink out. When McAtee was all trimmed up, Gately looked sad.

"'You didn't have quite enough along with you, McAtee,' he said, shaking his head real mournfully. 'If you'd had another $200 to cover that $1600 that you'd won and left in the hole, why, you'd had me heading for the Canadian River by this time.'

"McAtee ate this spiel of Gately's up as if it was so much lunch on a counter, and went away filled with the idea that there was riches in the squeeze-spindle if it was. .h.i.t right, and with enough money to back up the plays. So he went to just eleven of his sooner friends and talked squeeze-spindle to 'em. He put it to them just what a good thing the squeeze-spindle was rightly hammered. He told 'em how near he'd been to pulling out his losings, and more besides, through the medium of Gately's squeeze-spindle at the Reeves-Pendleton layout. They took Jink's word for it, and they all joined the pool that McAtee organized to smash that spindle. They got together $2600, and on the afternoon following Jink's play they walked down to the Reeves-Pendleton plant in a body. Each man had a rifle along with him. There wasn't anything remarkable about that. During the first year of Guthrie's existence every man carried a long-iron over his arm. If twelve men, all with rifles, were to line up in front of the Reeves-Pendleton layout in Guthrie to-day there'd be good reason for the people inside to suppose that they were going to be 'stuck up,' but there was no reason to suppose anything of the kind when Jack McAtee brought along his eleven subscribers to his squeeze-spindle-smashing pool that afternoon. Gately wasn't worried a little bit.

"'My friends is all got a interest in this, podner,' explained Jink to Gately, 'and they come along jest t' see th' play.'

"'Certainly,' said Gately, and then Jink and his bunch began to get action on the spindle. It all went their way at first. Gately didn't actually hand them any money out, but he let 'em make 'conditional' wins until they had their whole $2600 on the layout. Another correct twist of the arrow would enable Jink to double the money; on the other hand, if the arrow didn't hit the right number, Jink and his bunch only stood to lose, as Gately explained, $600 of their 'conditional' winnings.

"Now, the situation was one calculated to rattle almost any man. Gately didn't intend that Jink or his twelve stalkers with the long-irons should get away with any of that money, and it shows that he was a man of nerve in making up his mind to that idea. He intended to get the $2600 after a long series of plays, and then take a chance on the Jink McAtee gang roaring and opening up on him. That's what he intended to do. But he was a bit rattled and stampeded over the intense way the gang had of looking upon the plays, and that's how he happened to make a mistake. He gave his b.u.t.ton too short a squeeze, and blamed if the arrow didn't stop at precisely the number that stood to win Jink and his gang $2600 of the house's money, in addition to pulling down the $2600 they had in!

"Gately saw his mistake almost as soon as he had made it, but a booster named Gilpin, who was watching the play, was the quicker thinker of the two. He jumped off a stool upon which he had been standing looking over the heads of Jink's crowd, and yelled out:

"'Stand clear, there! Don't shoot!'

"It was a ruse. n.o.body had any idea of shooting. Jink and his gang were simply flooded with joy over their winning. But when they heard Gilpin's warning, they all jumped back, and that was Gately's chance to redeem his bad break. He s.n.a.t.c.hed up the $5200-the rule of the spindle game is that the dealer must show the same amount of money the sucker has got in play, and Gately had $2600 of the house's money spread out-and back he jumped through the door, which led out into an alley. Jink and his crowd were stupefied. They stood stock still. Gately had gone with their money and the house's money, and they didn't think of taking after him. They figured it that the house would make good, perhaps. Anyhow, by the time they came to, Gately had mazed it through the wilderness of shacks of which Guthrie was already composed, and Bill Reeves had appeared on the scene.

"I had been with Bill in the main layout in the next room, and we heard the shout of Gilpin. That's what took us in there. Jink made his talk, which was a pretty hot and threatening one, and he was backed up in it pretty forcibly by all the rest of his gang.

"'Well, Gately jumped, that's all,' said Reeves. 'What am I going to do about it?'

"'Hand over $5200, quick,' said McAtee and some others of his bunch.

"'I haven't got anything like that much money in the place,' said Reeves. 'But I'll give you a check for it on the bank down the way.'

"They demurred over the check proposition for awhile, but they finally took Bill Reeves's check for $5200. While they were demurring, Bill Reeves had a chance to scribble a note to the cashier of the bank, telling him not to cash the check when it would be presented-to make some excuse about not having just that amount of money on hand, or something of that sort. Now, I didn't want to be in that place at all just then, but there was no way of my getting out. I had come into the room with Bill Reeves, and I knew that if I tried to mosey away I'd be called back; that they figured me to have some sort of connection with the layout, which I didn't.

"Jink took the check and went over to the bank to get the money. The cashier turned the check down on the ground that he had just shipped most of the bank's money to St. Louis. We knew that there was going to be trouble and a whole lot of it when Jink got back from the bank with that word, and I don't think any of us expected to last much longer.

Jink came a-loping back from the bank, and when he came into the room and tore up the check with appropriate remarks his gang all lined up together, and we figured it that the shooting was going to begin right then. When the whole situation looked so squally that I had my eye on the nearest window to drop out of, Arthur Pendleton popped into the room.

"'What's all this?' he yelled, for there was a lot of clicking going on in the room. Jink and his gang thought they saw a final chance of getting their money. So, smoldering, they told the story to Pendleton.

Pendleton was a shrewd man, a forceful talker, and a diplomat from away back.

"'All the money I've got, or that there is in the roll just now,' he said, 'is $600,' pulling the roll out of his pocket. 'You are perfectly welcome to that. When Gately comes back, or when you get him, as I wish you would, you can have the rest that's coming to you out of the roll he pinched.'

"Well, the $600 looked like better than no bread to Jink and his bunch, and they took it and went out after Gately. It was getting along toward twilight. Reeves and Pendleton figured it that Gately, in pulling down the roll, had been acting in the interest of the house. They hadn't the slightest notion that Gately had eloped with the $5200. They thought he'd plant the money, keep out of sight for a few days until the Jink McAtee push could be compromised with, and then come back.

"McAtee's gang beat up every shack in town thoroughly, but there was no Gately. They whipped the prairie for miles around, but they didn't spring Gately. Gately had gone. The gang came back to the Reeves-Pendleton layout, all of 'em pretty ugly. Pendleton got them bunched, made a speech to them to the effect that if Gately wasn't corralled within a week he'd make good the whole amount coming to them out of his own pocket, and soft-soaped them into accepting those terms.

They dispersed.

"When Gately didn't come back the next day, or give any indication to his employers where he was, they got worried.

"'I think Gately has drilled,' Pendleton said to me that day. 'He's an Iowan, and there's going to be a big conclave and tournament of firemen in Council Bluffs next week. I'll bet Gately has made for Council Bluffs. I'm going after him. Come along with me.'

"I told Pendleton that I hadn't anything to do with the game, but I wasn't overlooking business propositions, and when he offered me 50 per cent. of all the money we might reclaim from Gately, I went with him. We got onto Gately's trail in Council Bluffs, as Pendleton had shrewdly guessed we might, but he had been tipped off that we were after him, and he chased over to Omaha. We were right after him, and he jumped for a town in Southwestern Iowa called Red Oak. We were hot on his trail, and we met up with him squarely next day in Red Oak.

"'Let's have the money, Gately,' said Pendleton.

"'I'll pa.s.s you back the house bunch, $2600,' said Gately, 'but the rest of it I keep,' and he looked as if he meant it, good and hard, at that.

"'How do you make that out a square deal?' asked Pendleton.

"'Because,' replied Gately, pretty convincingly, 'it was me that took the chance. I made a mistake, and stood to lose the house's $2600. If I hadn't taken a chance, they'd have got the coin. If I'd have won their $2600, your shack would have been shot into a sieve, and me into the bargain. It was a case of run. I had to do the running. I earned the $2600, and I hang on to it.'

"It struck me that this was pretty square talk, and I told Pendleton so, and advised him to cut out any idea of getting all the money back from Gately through the medium of a gun-play. Gately handed out $2600, and then he told us how he had got away. He had struck across the prairie for Mulhall, and some of the McAtee gang, in scouring the country a-horseback, had not only been right behind him, but they had pa.s.sed him. He heard them coming from behind, and he thought they had recognized him in the twilight. He didn't dare to look back, but he stooped down as if to tie his shoe, and looked at them under his arm while in that stooping posture. They didn't figure that the man they were after would be taking things so leisurely as all that, and so they pa.s.sed right by him in the gathering gloom, a-hunting Gately. Gately got to Mulhall, and took the first train up for Omaha.