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Updated: June 16, 2025
Coyote Jim, faro dealer, sauntered in and took his place at the table. His eyes were a steel blue, the kind that men inured to the mining camps of the early west had learned were dangerous. His face was thin and white, hair of a black blue, like a raven's wing, hung half way to his shoulders. His thin hands handled the pasteboards in the box with a dexterity that marked him an expert.
These clean little pasteboards, as harmless as they looked, had the wonderful power of pulling down the highest piles in less time than all the other causes put together.
He had returned in the hopes of this meeting; he had anticipated this game. "What about cards?" said Lablache, as the four men sat down to the table. "Doc will oblige, no doubt," Bunning-Ford replied quietly. "He generally carries the 'pernicious pasteboards' about with him." "The man who travels in the West without them," said Dr.
After her breakfast, my sweet Carry began to play cards with some chaps who had been grubbing at the next table. 'Regular right down card sharpers and macemen, said I to myself, as I watched the way in which they faked the pasteboards.
They had scarcely gone, and I was just breaking the ice in order to get my cold bath, when another lot, a hundredfold more noisy than the first, entered my room unannounced and depositing another lot of "pasteboards," as Yankees term them, in my frozen hands, went on wishing me all sorts of happiness for the New Year, though I for my part wished them all to a place that was certainly not heaven.
Uncle Ezra gave one undecided glance, and then yielded. "You will look after them," he pleaded, "carefully." "You shall have them safe enough," my wife promised. "Blast the pasteboards," Watkins put in under his breath, "the best thing to do with them is to chop 'em up." He was swinging them back and forth under his arm. My wife took them firmly from him.
To uncover these cards and unmask the forces for which they stood was the duty of the cavalry vedettes, whose movements were governed by an elaborate and most vexatious set of rules. It was necessary to feel your way amongst these alarming pasteboards to obtain an inkling of your opponent's plans, and the first dozen moves were often spent in little less.
"Oh, yes, several of the stores sell tickets up to a certain hour. Then they send the balance up here for us to dispose of." "How about their accounts? Have you had them gone over carefully?" "They tally to a penny." "How about the unsold tickets these agents send back to us? Isn't there a chance on the way up for some one to slip out some of the pasteboards, Mr. Moyne?"
Again he looked at the pasteboards in his pale hands. Then he quickly pushed every cent he had into the pot. "I'm seeing it, and I'm elevatin' it every coin on me. It'll cost yuh let's see eight hundred and sixty more!" It was more than the Texan had by four hundred dollars. He could, however, stay for his stack. The man in the green eye shade could take out four hundred to even the bet.
And when he was not feeding the stove's flaming maw with broken boxes, barrel-staves and green wood, his blowzy countenance was suspended over the pasteboards he was thumbing in a game of solitaire. The two outside went under the shaft of light and peeped into the rear of the room. There was Matthews, one of five at a square table. A cigar-box partly filled with coin and chips was before him.
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