"’Hold on there a minute,’ said the man with the three fours—as I thought—when he saw me reaching for the pot, ’I’ve got a nice pat straight, from one to five,’ and he showed the cards up in their order on the table.
"’The dust is yours,’ said I, choking back a lot of cuss words, and just then I looked behind the chair of the winner and caught the eye of that dog. If there wasn’t a gleam of triumph in his eye, damme! He looked square back at me for ten straight seconds, as much as to say, ’You didn’t think I’d dish you in the game, did you?’ and then he walked over in front of the fireplace, plunked himself down, and that was the finish of that four-handed game. I knew that I couldn’t get any good out of the dog for the rest of that night, and I did a sudden watch-studying act, told the jays of a forgotten engagement, and got out. I had expected to clean up about $10,000 out of those three jays, and durned if I didn’t quit more’n $2,000 loser on account of that dog, for I had only begun to win back what I had let them take away from me when the mutt turned me down. The mutt followed me back to the hotel with a sulky eye, as if he expected to be clubbed for his little game of crooked steering, but you can gamble that I cut out the clubbing so far as he was concerned for good. I had won him back inside of a week or so, and he never did me dirt on calling the turn after that.
"Me and the dog were covering Kansas City, St. Louis, Memphis, and that circuit about three years ago, taking it off easy ones in comfortable hunks, when I stacked up against a pretty wise one. It was in Knoxville, where I had got together a playing squad of three young ones that looked ripe for plucking. I got into ’em pretty fairly after a week’s work, and the mutt was in great form. One of the good things—the one that I got into the hole worse than any of the others—seemed to be taking a great interest in the mutt after he had been stacking up, a bad loser, against our game for ten days or so, but there wasn’t a pin-head of suspicion in his face. He just seemed to like to watch the dog’s rubber-necking antics, and one night, when he was dropping slathers of it to me, he studied the moves of the dog with unusual intentness.