A Gambler’s Pistol Play _ENDING OF A POKER GAME IN FLOOD TIME IN ARKANSAS CITY_ “I notice that the stories of lawlessness and rambunctious violence printed in the papers from time to time are told, as a rule, of places far West or out of the usual run of travel,” said the gray-haired young-looking man who sat in the card-room of an up-town club the other night after the game had broken up. “I don’t mean by that,” he continued, “to question the truth of any of these stories. It only occurs to me that the writers take unnecessary pains in going so far away for their material. I have seen, right along the banks of the Mississippi River--and we call that pretty well East now--some things as exciting as any of the mining-camp yarns. And everything was wide open in some of the towns, too. I haven’t been out there since ’82, but that’s not so long ago, and then it was not uncommon to find a gambling saloon on the main floor of the principal hotel in a flourishing town. You could walk in as freely as you could into the barroom and play faro, keno, or poker at any hour of the day or night. “The great flood of ’82 rather accentuated the devil-may-care condition of things; partly, I suppose, because there was not so much traveling on the river as usual and none at all by rail. Strangers were scarce in the river towns, and the inhabitants were reduced to the necessity of gambling among themselves. No, there wasn’t what you might call very much shooting, but every man carried a pistol, and occasionally there would be some. There was enough, at all events, to make the citizens of Memphis enforce pretty strictly a city ordinance against carrying concealed weapons.” “That’s right,” said a drummer who was of the party. “I was in Memphis then, and I remember the Mayor of a Kentucky city being sent to jail for ten days for carrying a pistol. He had plenty of money and plenty of influence, too, but neither could save him from jail.” “Well, Memphis was the only city I struck on the river,” said the first speaker, “where such a law was observed. I got caught in Arkansas City, I remember, when I was trying to get to Little Rock. I arrived there just after the train had gone, so I had to stay over for forty-eight hours. It’s only about a hundred miles, but there was only one train, and that took all day going up and all next day coming down. It was an accommodation train, and I saw it stop fifteen minutes for a darky who signaled from a distance, with a basket of eggs on his arm which he wanted to ship as freight. The conductor told me, when I asked about it, that that was quite usual, and a little while afterward he stopped the train to let a passenger get off and get a quail that he shot from the car.