The gambler in this story came from the West to get a little New York money. He had been getting it for years from the Sierra Nevadas to El Paso, and from Seattle as far east as Omaha, which he said was far enough for anybody who liked fresh air, but he had struck a run of bad luck and one of his pals told him that the best way to break it was to trim a New York sucker.
“They’re fly guys there all right,” remarked this same man, casually, “but the flyer they are the easier it is to trim them. I would sooner stack up against a stock broker that runs one of those bubble machines and can speak sixteen different languages than get into a game with a Kansas farmer any day. The farmer knows he ain’t in it and he’s got his eye out for a job every time; his coat is buttoned up so tight that he has contraction of the lungs and his heart doesn’t beat right, but the gink that knows it all thinks he’s so damned smart that he’s got everybody in the world in his corral, and those are the fellows you catch with their vests open.”
All homely philosophy, but as true as gospel and worth looking into.
So Big Ben—that was his name in the country where slouch hats are the real thing—pulled his freight one night and hit the Overland Flyer for
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 Gotham. His name was Big Ben no longer, for the cards he carried in his vest pocket read:
Benjamin F. Van Buren, Mining Engineer.
He bought tickets for two at the station, and there is the heart of the story, as one of the tickets was for Cheyenne Nellie.
The lady in the case is worth a paragraph at the very least, for she had the reputation of being the best short-card dealer in Texas, and at a game of bank, whether playing the cards or handling the box, she was there with the goods and never asked any odds on account of her sex.
She had the long, slim hands of a card player, and if she hadn’t taken to the pasteboards she might have been a piano player and getting all kinds of money for hitting up the ivories at swell concerts. She was soft of voice and soft in manner, and all you had to do to make a lady out of her was to wrap her in a silk robe and she’d make the horses in the street turn around and look after her.
On one memorable occasion she went into the smoking car of a Denver train and calmly lighting a cigarette, smoked it without deigning to notice the men around her.
The trip was settled in a minute and in this way.
“It’s a long ride, Nell,” observed Ben, “to the place I’m going, and I’m afraid I’ll get lost or lonely, so if you’ll come along with me I’ll tog you out like a queen and give you the time of your life. Will you carry my brand for the trip?”
“How big is your bank roll?” she asked, with an eye to the practical side of the proposition.
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“Twenty-seven hundred, and two thousand to draw on if I lose out.”
“That’s enough for a starter. What are you going to do—short-card ’em or bank ’em?”
“Anything and everything including stud, and if I get the big bundle we’ll hike for that place across the big pond where the real games are. What’s the name of it—I forget now. I had it written down somewhere, but I guess I’ve lost it. It begins with an M I think, and there was a fellow at the show the other night who had it in his song about how he broke the bank there.”
“Oh, you mean Monte Carlo.”
“Yes, that’s it. We’ll go there and I’ll put you up against the game, for you always were hell when it came to a no-limit play.”
One night stop-over in Chicago to see a show, and then, twenty-four hours later, Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin F. Van Buren, of Portland, Oregon, registered at the Waldorf-Astoria.
“Kind of like a theatre, ain’t it?” remarked Ben, as they sat in the palm room after dinner. “Looks like Romeo and Juliet where the gal is on the gallery and the fellow with the skin-tight pants is asking her to come down and talk it over.”
Men who are supposed to know say that New York is the loneliest place in the world, that is, if you don’t know anyone, and that a desert island is a center of population compared to it if you are not in right. On the face of it that looks like a good argument, but it is going to be disproved right here. Go to a big and fashionable hotel and register, then sit around and be a bit conspicuous, look like ready money, and
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 above all, easy money, and you’ll draw people like a Jack rose draws bees. They’ll find you out just as easily as the ferret gets to the timid rabbit—by going after you—and unless your heart is covered with callous spots and your pockets are fastened with safety pins, when you come to count up at night you’ll find you are short a bit of change. In this world, you know, things are not always what they seem, and the fellow who looks the wisest and talks the loudest isn’t the smartest any more than the man with the retreating forehead is the stupidest. The one with the cranium of a cocoanut may have spent all of his life developing the instinct of the hunter and the cunning of the fox, and that queer-shaped thing on top of his shoulders is the sign which he has hung out and which says as plainly as if the words were printed on his forehead: “Come on, boys, I’m easy; come and get my change.” I know all about this and speak from experience, for I used to sit in a poker game with a Dutchman who looked like a pinhead, and when the rest of us walked home he used to take a cab, because he had all the money, and his name was Schneider, too. What do you think of that?
So before a week had gone by, Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin F. Van Buren were nodding and saying “How do you do?” and “Good morning” and “Good evening” to about twenty or thirty men who made the hotel their headquarters. Incidentally it was given out that Ben was on here to buy some machinery for one of his mines in Nevada and that he wouldn’t mind having a little fun with anything that came along so long as the stakes were not too big for a man of his modest disposition.
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The tip went down the line in the usual channels and then one rainy night a man who said confidentially that he was a banker suggested that as there was nothing else to do Mr. Van Buren could, if he felt so disposed, walk around to his hotel where there were two or three other good fellows, and they might have a little game of draw.
“None of us want to go into big money, you know,” he said, apologetically, “for it’s simply a game among friends and it’s about as good a way to pass the time away as I know of. We don’t, as a rule, play with strangers, but I guess you’re all right, so come along.”
“Look out for a cold deck, Ben,” whispered Nell as he started; “play light and close to your skin at the go-off, and it won’t hurt to lose a little at the start.”
Wherever you go or whatever you do in this world, always take a woman’s tip—not the tip of every woman of course, but when you find one who d............