Night after night, Headquarter Mess resounded to, “Raise you fifty, sir,” “All right, P.J., I’ll see you.” Even Lodden caught the infection.
They played high; and they played fast: but they played neither high enough nor fast enough to catch the Weasel. Always, he defeated them; his hard blue eyes, his firm lips, gave never a hint of the cards in his hand. Even Conway, who had learned his poker wisdom in Iquique (where there is no rain but much whisky) and completed his education at the “Spotted Dog” in Kualalumpur (where there is much rain and still more whisky) acknowledged himself overmastered. Sandiland, the newcomer,—a blond clean-shaven Regular who looked more like an actor than a soldier—stone-walled in vain; was lured from his caution; heavily mulcted: Lodden, the richest member of the party, found bluff met with counter-bluff. Only Peter held his own. For Peter, in addition to knowing the game, knew his Colonel.
“Very wrong for me to play so high with my juniors,” Stark used to say—crushing notes into his pocket-book after the defeated ones had gone; “but they’ll only rob each other if I don’t rob them. Where did you learn the game, P.J.?”
“I, sir.” Peter would smile. “Oh, I’ve sat in some rather hot games in my time. In Havana, with the Tobacco Trust crowd; and when I was in New York.”
Then they would sit up over a last whisky-and-soda, discussing the play of this hand or that; till Stark produced his pet theory: “Say what you like, P.J., no man ever knows another till he’s drunk port and played poker with him.”
Good days! but they came to an end: and once again the Brigade marched out, polished to the last bandolier-buckle, for Neuve Eglise.
“A mighty good place,” assured the Canadians—serious-minded men—from whom they “took over.” And so indeed, with one or two exceptions, they found it.
Batteries barked from a pleasant valley, under real trees: a valley down which a man might ride in safety. Peasants still lived, close to the firing line, in unshelled farms; crops were reaped within two miles of the trenches. Headquarters, instead of rat-infested cellars, found an unholed house—fields in rear, farm in front, Belgian landlady in the kitchen—at the foot of the village, below the skeleton of the Church.