“Sam Nichols was in here only the other night an’ somebody ast him to take a hand in a little game that was goin’ on in the back room, an’ he laughed an’ says: ‘No, I ain’t a-playin’ poker anywheres now ’ceptin’ at home. My wife, she’s learned the game an’ some o’ the neighbours comes in with their wives, an’ we plays ten-cent limit. You have all the fun o’ poker an’ it don’t cost nothin’ to speak of.’ An’ Sam, he used to be one o’ the stiffest players in Arkansas City. “Just naturally, I was disgusted for fair. ‘Yes, Sam,’ I says, ‘you can have all the fun o’ poker if you leave out all there is in the game that makes it worth playin’. Certainly you can. An’ you could have all the fun of eatin’, too, if you was to take all your teeth out an’ gum it on a piece o’ sponge. But you wouldn’t get no nourishment out of it, I reckon. An’ similar, I’d like to know what sort o’ nutriment for a grown man there is in a ten-cent limit game. You sure make me sick.’” The old man smoked in silence for a few minutes after he had got all this out and then began to chuckle. “It wasn’t no ten-cent limit game they was playin’ in here the night Park Halloway made his big haul,” he said, still chuckling. “That was a grown man’s game. The boys had been a little short o’ money for three or four weeks, an’ had got to playin’ a table stakes game among themselves. You see there hadn’t been no strangers in town since Three-finger Pete an’ his pal come in an’ done up the crowd with some marked cards they’d had sent here ahead of ’em. “That was the slickest trick that was ever played on this community. Didn’t you never hear of it? Why that was told all up an’ down the river for years an’ years. It ’peared that Three-fingered Pete was special sore on Arkansas City for doin’ him up bad the first time he come here, an’ he swore he’d get even. So he waits a long time an’ he gets in with a feller that dealt in cards wholesale. That feller was afterward shot, but we never caught Pete. “Well, Pete managed to get a line on everybody in Arkansas City that bought an’ sold cards. There was only three stores where they kept ’em, an’ this feller that I’m tellin’ about sold to all three. Well, Pete, he fixed up a set o’ marks entirely original an’ clever enough to fool the devil himself, an’ for three whole years he marked every pack that came to Arkansas City, so’s to be sure that no other kind o’ cards would be in use in the town when he come. He was a good stayer, Pete was, an’ he played a long game on this.