“Speakin’ by an’ large,” said old man Greenhut, as he bit off the end of a fresh cigar and settled himself in his favourite seat at the window, “there ain’t no question but what the game o’ draw-poker is about as nigh perfect as anything that was ever devised by the mind o’ man, an’ developed by the constant study o’ countless generations. They say there ain’t no record o’ poker bein’ played in former ages, an’ that faro was played hundreds of thousands of years ago, when a feller named Faro was King of Egypt, but it stands to reason there ain’t no truth in that. Like enough faro is a old game. I ain’t a-sayin’ nothin’ against faro. It suits them that likes it, but it’s gamblin’, an’ naturally it belongs to the heathen that started it. “But poker’s teetotally different. No such system as that of draw-poker ever growed up in a night like Jonah’s gourd, nor it wa’n’t put together by no single set o’ fellers. Stands to reason it’s the crownin’ development of all the civilization the world ever seen. An’ it don’t seem likely, now that the straight an’ the straight flush has been discovered, an’ universally recognized, that there’s ever goin’ to be no changes into the game. It’s perfect as it is, an’ there ain’t no chanst o’ makin’ it any more perfect. “An’ yet there is times when even the best players is obliged to rely on outside influences to help ’em out o’ some great emergency o’ the game. That ain’t no fault o’ the game, for as I said, the game is all right, but it goes to show that a man as relies on on’y one thing is goin’ to get left when he stacks up against some feller that relies on the same thing an’ has something else up his sleeve besides. An’ that there somethin’ else is got to be more’n a knowledge o’ cards. “O’ course if a man reely understands the game as he’d oughter, an’ can handle the cards so’s to give himself what he needs in the draw when it comes to a desprit struggle between him an’ the other feller, an’ can read the backs o’ the cards well enough to have a good general idee o’ what the other feller is holdin’, why he can worry along under ordinary circumstances so’s he can hold his own most o’ the time, an’ make enough over from time to time to pay his livin’ expenses. But that’s all a part o’ draw-poker, same as it’s a part o’ the game not to be found out when you’re obliged to change the natural order o’ the cards. There is folks that has prejudices against them things, an’ if a man is clumsy enough to get found out, why, o’ course he’s goin’ to get hisself in more or less trouble, but I maintain so long as they’re done slick enough to not be seen, they are as legitimate as anything else in draw-poker. That’s the way Arkansas City has come to have the reputation it has. There’s some o’ the slickest players on the river right there in that town, an’ nobody has ever caught ’em usin’ marked cards, or holdin’ out, or dealin’ out o’ the middle or off’n the bottom of the deck.