“Which goes to show, as I said, that there is times when a man has to rely on outside influences even in playin’ poker.” XVIII PLAYED BY THE BOOK “There’s a powerful lot o’ people in this here world,” said old man Greenhut, as he rinsed out a couple of whiskey-glasses and set them away, “that seems to think they is app’inted by a all-wise Providence to set other folks right. It don’t seem to make no difference what’s done, or who does it, or how it’s done, they’re always ready to chip a lot of advice into the pot, an’ tell ’em how they’d oughter done it different. “Mostly such folks is born fools an’ don’t know no more about things in general than a hound pup in the wilderness knows about the plan o’ salvation, but you couldn’t make one o’ ’em realize what a fool he is if you was to cut his head open an’ try to squirt sense into it. What’s this the Good Book says? It’s somethin’ about if you pound a fool up in a mortar and shoot him out with the bombshells, yet will not his folly depart from him. “There hain’t nothin’, as I said, but what critters like them will try to put right accordin’ to their own notions, an’ the result, so far as I’ve ever seed it, is tol’able certain to be a mixup of the worst sort. An’ when they gets into a game o’ poker there’s more bad blood stirred up in a hour than good, steady play for six months’d be likely to bring up. Sometimes it’s on’y nasty words, an’ sometimes it’s a gun-play. But when such a critter gets hold o’ one o’ these here poker manuals such as I seed the other day that’s just been published in the East, an’ undertakes to make a civilized community swaller his raw notions just because some feller that never played poker on the Mississippi has had ’em printed in a book, he can just about cover the underside o’ the sky with cobwebs o’ perplexity spun out o’ the brains o’ good men that gets bewildered listenin’ to ’em. “The way I come to see this here book I’m tellin’ about was through a little game that the boys got up last week to oblige a travellin’ Easterner that stopped over for a few days to look at some plantations up the river a bit, that was offered to a British syndicate at a figger that wouldn’t ha’ paid more’n 100 per cent. profit to the owners if the deal had went through. They said this here Wanderin’ Willie boy was some sort of a big-bug in business matters when he was to home, an’ he was travellin’ in cogs, whatever them is. Anyway, he didn’t want nobody to know who he was, an’ he was called Mr. Hapgood when he was travellin’, an’ the keeper that had him in charge treated him as if he was made o’ glass. Hapgood called him his valet, an’ ordered him round like he was a hired man, an’ the keeper never made no fuss at all about it.