"I spread out my three royal gentlemen topping the pair of tens, and was just about to make some good-natured crack about getting a hoe to scoop in my winnings on the first hand, when he spread out his hand and raked in the pot with a smile. His hand consisted of a pair of aces up on a pair of sixes and the joker.
"’What the dickens are you doing there?’ I asked him when he raked in the pot. ’Can’t you see it’s a misdeal? I forgot to take the joker out of the deck.’
"’Misdeal nothing,’ he said, still smiling. ’You had a good hand all right, but aces beat kings, you know, anywhere from Tuolume to Tucson.’
"’Yes,’ said I, ’but you’ve only got aces up, and I’ve got a full hand, kings up, and it’s a misdeal, anyhow’——
"Well, they all looked at me like they thought I ought to be in a lunatic asylum.
"’Misdeal?’ said my friend who had swiped the pot. 'What the deuce are you giving us, anyhow? I caught the joker on the draw, and it just filled my hand—three aces and a pair of sixes. Don’t an ace-full beat a king-full in that desolate Atlantic coast region you hail from?’
"’You mean you call the joker an ace?’ said I, the thing beginning to dawn upon me.
"The three fellows gazed at me as if they were trying to find out if I was drunk or not.
"’Why, do you mean to say,’ said the man I had played with, ’that you don’t know that in poker the joker is any old thing you choose to make it—that, when you get it either on the deal or on the draw, you can call it anything you want to call it to eke out a pair, flush, full house or anything else? Tell you what, old man, you need sleep. You’ve been working too hard. Turn in and have a long night of it.’
"’Well,’ said I, ’you people may call this joker-jiggling poker, but somehow or another it suggests tag and I-spy and little girls singing "London Bridge is falling down" to me. Why in the devil don’t you play poker with a pinochle deck and be done with it? Come on, and we’ll build card houses, or what’s the matter with playing casino for chalk or pin-wheels?’
"’Why, don’t you benighted people back East use the joker?’
"’Yes,’ said I, ’we do. We always give the joker in a new deck to babies in arms to cut their teeth on.’
"Another queer kink in the slope game of draw is that straights don’t go. I’ve been catching occasional pat straights and drawing to ’em all my life, and I think the straight is one of the prettiest plays in poker. In playing straights, if the chap across the table draws one card, you’ve got the fun of trying to figure out whether he’s drawing to a couple of pairs or bobbing to a straight or a flush, and it’s interesting work. If he stands pat, it’s up to you to determine by the mind-reading process whether he’s simply bluffing or actually has a pat straight or full hand or flush in his paws.