“Smith didn’t know it, but there were three against him that night, although one of them was a fellow-Congressman who was not known to be interested in the scheme, and another was a Westerner, who had only been introduced at the club two or three nights before, and had only played there once. The fourth man, of course, was Jones. “The play went on for half an hour before anything serious happened. Occasionally there would be some pretty big bets, but they all won and lost so nearly even that no one was much ahead. Then to an outsider it became evident that each of the other three was playing for Smith’s money, although Smith himself did not, I believe, suspect anything of the sort. As I said, the play was straight enough, but three first-class players can bring any ordinary player to grief easily enough in a four-handed game without any crooked manipulation of the cards, if they work in concert, and Smith was soon losing heavily. “They knew the size of his pile pretty accurately, for they had kept tabs on him closely ever since he began playing, and there wasn’t a detail of his outside business that hadn’t been studied carefully beforehand. So when he had been coaxed along to a ten-dollar ante, with occasional bets of as much as five hundred, they knew that they could reach his uttermost limit easily enough, for he couldn’t have raised much over twelve thousand dollars in cash to save his life, without getting outside help somewhere. Twelve thousand dollars isn’t much of a wad to sit in a game with, if there is unlimited money against you, and the betting runs up into the hundreds, so Smith was on pretty thin ice all the time, though he didn’t realize it until it was too late. “He had four or five thousand with him in money, but when that was gone the rule of the place made it fatally easy for him to go on, and I really believe that he lost his head as the play went on, and he gave check after check in payment for more chips. The proprietor understood well enough what was going on, and he took the checks with perfect readiness, knowing that he would be protected. Smith bought again and again, keeping no memorandum, until he was in it for over ten thousand. “Then came the deciding hand. We did not play straight flushes then, so fours of any denomination made even a stronger hand than they do now, and Smith caught four eights. There isn’t a poker player on earth who wouldn’t look on that as a chance to recoup, and very few who wouldn’t risk their pile on the chance. Smith did it anyhow, and came to grief. He risked more than his pile, for, as it happened, the other Congressman held a good hand, too, and bet freely for a little while. Jones had four queens and scooped the pot. The Westerner wasn’t in it.