Casino Joe, when thirty years ago he came about the Bowery, was in manner and speech a complete expression of the rustical. His brow was high and fine and wise; but lank hair of yellow spoiled with its ragged fringe his face—a sallow face, wide of mouth and with high cheek bones. His garb was farmerish; kip-skin boots, coat and trousers of gray jeans, hickory shirt, and soft shapeless hat. Nor was Casino Joe in disguise; these habiliments made up the uniform of his ancestral New Hampshire. Countryman all over, was Casino Joe, and this look of the uncouth served him in his chosen profession.
Possibly “chosen” as a term is indiscreet. Gamblers are born and not made; they occur and they do not choose; they are, compared with more conservative and lawful men, what wolves are to honest dogs—cousins, truly, but tameless depredators, living lean and hard, and dying when die they do, neglected, lone and poor. Yet it is fate; they are born to it as much as is the Ishmael wolf and must run their midnight downhill courses.
Gamblers, that is true gamblers, are folk of specialties. Casino Joe’s was the game which gave to him his name—at casino he throve invincibly.
“It is my gift,” he said.
Two things were with Casino Joe at birth; the genius for casino and that jack-knife talent to whittle which belongs with true-born Yankees. Of this latter I had proof long after poor Casino Joe wras dead and nourishing the grass. The races were in Boston; it was when Goldsmith Maid reigned Queen of the trotting turf. Her owner came to me at the Adams House and told how the aged sire of Goldsmith Maid, the great Henry Clay, was in his equine, joint-stiffened dotage pastured on a not too distant farm. He was eager to have a look at the old horse; and I went with him for this pilgrimage.
As we drove up to the tavern which the farmstead we sought surrounded, my curious eye was caught by a fluttering windmill contrivance perched upon the gable. It was the figure of a woman done in pine and perhaps four feet of height, carved in the somewhat airy character of a ballet dancer. Instead of a dance, however, the lady contented herself with an exhibition of Indian Club swinging—one in each pine palm; the breeze offering the whirling impulse—in the execution wherof she poised herself with one foot on a wooden ball not unlike the arrowing bronze Diana of Madison Square. This figure, twirling clubs, as a mere windmill would have been amazing enough; but as though this were not sufficiently wondrous, at regular intervals our ballet dancer shifted her feet on the ball, replacing the right with the left and again the left with the right in measured alternation. The miracle of it held me transfixed.
The host came fatly to his front stoop and smiled upon my wide-eyed interest.
“Where did you get it?” I asked.
“That was carved with a jack-knife,” replied mine host, “by a party called ‘Casino Joe.’ It took him’most a year; he got it mounted and goin’ jest before he died.”
For long I had lost trace of Casino Joe; it was now at this change house I blundered on the news how my old gambling friend of the Bowery came with his consumption and some eight thousand dollars—enough to end one’s life with—and made this place home until his death. His grave lay across a field in the little rural burying ground where he had played when a boy, for Casino Joe was native of these parts.
There were no cheatings or tricky illicitisms hidden in Joe’s supremacies of casino. They were works of a wax-like memory which kept the story of the cards as one makes entries in a ledger. When the last hands were out between Joe and an adversary, a glance at his mental entries of cards already played, and another at his own hand, unerringly informed him of what cards his opponent held. This he called “Telling the last four.”
It was as an advantage more than enough to enable Joe to win; and while I lived in his company, I never knew him to be out of pocket by that divertisement. The marvel was that he could keep accurate track of fifty-two cards as they fell one after the other into play, and do these feats of memory in noise-ridden bar-rooms and amid a swirl of conversation in which he more or less bore part.
Those quick folk of the fraternity whom he encountered and who from time to time lost money to Casino Joe, never once suspected his victories to be a result of mere memory. They held that some cheat took place. But as it was not detectable and no man might point it out, no word of fault was uttered. Joe took the money and never a protest; for it is as much an axiom of the gaming table as it is of the law that “Fraud must be proved and will never be presumed or inferred.” With no evidence, therefore, the losing gamblers made no protesting charge, and Joe went forward collecting the wealth of any and all who fought with him at his favorite science.
Casino Joe, as I have said, accounted for his mastery at casino by his power to “Tell the last four,” and laid it all to memory.
“And yet,” said Joe one evening as I urged him to impart to me his secret more in detail, “it may depend on something else. As I’ve told you, it’s my gift. Folk have their gifts. Once when I was in the town of Warrensburg in Western Missouri, I was shown a man who had gifts for mathematics that were unaccountable. He was a coarse, animalish creature, this mathematician; a half idiot and utterly without education. A sullen, unclean beast of a being, he shuffled about in a queer, plantigrade fashion like a bear. He was ill-natured, yet too timid to do harm; and besides a genius for figures, his distinguishing characteristics were hunger measured by four men’s rations and an appetite for whiskey which to call swinish would be marking a weakness on one’s own part in the art of simile. Yet this witless creature, unable to read his own printed name, knew as by an instinct every mathematical or geometrical term. You might propose nothing as a problem that he would not instantly solve. He could tell you like winking, the area of a seven or eight-angled figure so you but gave him the dimensions; he would announce the surface measurements of a sphere when told either its diameter or circumference. Once, as a poser, a learned teacher proposed a supposititious cone seven feet in altitude and with a diameter of three feet at the base, and asked at what distance from the apex it should be divided to make both parts equal of bulk and weight. The gross, growling being made correct, unhesitating reply. This monster of mathematics seemed also to carry a chronometer in his stomach, for day or night, he could and would—for a drink of rum—tell you the hour to any splinter of a second. You might set your watch by him as if he were the steeple clock. I don’t profess,” concluded Casino Joe, “to either the habits or the imbecility of this genius of figures, yet it may well be that my abilities to keep track of fifty-two Cards as they appear in play and know at every moment—as a bookkeeper does a balance—what cards are yet to come, are not of cultivation or acquirement, but were extant within me at my birth.” When Casino Joe appeared in the Bowery he came to gamble at cards. That buzzing thoroughfare was then the promenade of the watchful brotherhood of chance. In that hour, too, it stood more the fashion—for there are fashions in gambling as in everything else—to win and lose money at short-cards, and casino enjoyed particular vogue. There were scores of eminent practitioners about New York, and Joe had little trouble in securing recognition. Indeed, he might have played the full twenty-four hours of every day could he have held up his head to such labors.
There was at the advent of our rural Joe into metropolitan circles none more alert or breathless for pastmastery in unholy speculation than myself. About twenty-one should have been my years, and I carried that bubbling spirit for success common to the youth of every walk. Aut Cosar aut nullus! was my warcry, and I did not consider Joe and his career for long before I was slave to the one hope of finally gaining his secret. One might found fortune on it; like the philosopher’s stone it turned everything to gold.
With those others who fell before Joe I also believed his success to ............