“And as to the men who played? Oh! well, it would do no good to name names. Some were men whom nothing could injure in reputation. Some are dead. Others are out of politics. And not a few would be sorry indeed to be mentioned in connection with high play at a time when their ostensible income was not sufficient to warrant it. It was a season, however, in which no man prominent in official circles was obliged to be without money, provided he could be induced to accept it. It is enough to say that one of the unwritten rules of the ‘club’--it had no written ones--was that any man’s I. O. U. was good, but that it must be taken up within forty-eight hours. And I never heard of an infraction of the rule. “In one or two cases I would have been glad to hear that the man giving his paper thus, had had the nerve to repudiate it and quit the game. One Congressman in particular I remember who might have been a man of distinction according to all indications, if he had been willing to shoulder the odium of an unpaid ‘debt of honor’ instead of lending himself to the lobby and accepting money for his vote. How do I know it? How does a man know anything he doesn’t actually see? I knew the circumstances leading up to his ruin well enough. “What I did see was the way the lobby tried him night after night, for it was an open secret that this particular poker club was one of the channels through which the crack lobbyists of the season reached their men. A good many games were played to lose, in the big parlor, and more, I reckon, in some of the small rooms, but the man who won in such a game was always a man who was wanted for something. Of course, when it came to handing over the cold cash as a specified payment for a particular service, it was done in private, but different men have to be approached in different ways, and poker affords some peculiar opportunities. “This Congressman--call him Smith for short--was particularly wanted in one scheme that hung fire for a long time in the committee-room. He was a member of the committee, and for local reasons connected with his home district could have decided the matter either way, but being a conscientious fellow, he had held it up in a way that exasperated the lobby greatly. He had been approached in various ways, but had proved obdurate, and not until he had been introduced at the club did there seem to be any chance of winning him. “Even then it was not easy, for he refused at first to play for any considerable money, but he was fond of the game and it undid him at the last. He was led on by degrees--the finesse and astuteness of a really gifted lobbyist is something almost diabolical--until, being a fairly skilful player, he found himself encouraged to plunge. Then the real game began.