"Didn’t have a bit o’ trouble teaching him the game, I suppose?" asked one of the men at the table.
"Well," replied the fox terrier’s owner, striking a match on his diamond-incrusted match safe, "I can’t say that teaching him the hands was altogether a snap. At first he used to get the kings and jacks mixed once in a while, and then he had a habit, when he was learning the game, of getting the eights and tens twisted, too. But I broke him of those defects after a while. It wasn’t so much trouble teaching him the value of the hands in poker as it was to fix up a sign manual by which he could express himself and tip me off on the hands held by the other fellows. But patience was my long suit in teaching that dog the game of poker, and in less than a year after I showed him the first pack of cards he ever saw, he was able to put me onto the worth of every hand around a table without any of the marks falling to the scheme. His method of communicating such information to me during the progress of a game is a bit involved and intricate, and we’ve got a lot of little code signs that would require too much elaboration in the explaining, but I’ll just give you a little idea of the way the thing works.
"Suppose I’m sitting in a four-handed game. The dog is nosing around the room, not in any ostentatious kind of way and not getting himself noticed at all by the other three in the game. A hand is dished out. The dog noiselessly rubbernecks behind the chair of the first player on his route. The first player, we’ll say, has got a pair of sevens, and I’ve got my eye on the dog. The dog quietly gapes twice, to indicate that player No. 1 has a pair, and then blinks both of his eyes seven times in rapid succession. See? Of course I know then that No. 1 has only got a pair of bum sevens. I pretend to scan my hand, while the dog quietly gets behind the chair of player No. 2. We’ll say No. 2 has three queens. The dog passes his right paw over his right eye three times. If it’s three kings, left paw over his left eye three times. If it’s three bullets he puts his left paw at his nose and holds it there for a second, and, if three jacks, his right paw at his nose. Savvy? And so on. He’s got the whole manual and code worked out to a stretch finish. If No. 3 has got a pat flush he closes his left eye and keeps it closed until he sees I’m noticing him. If No. 3 has got a pat full house he shuts up his right eye in the same way.