“So with poker. No man that knows poker is goin’ to get beat at it all the time, an’ the man that does get beat nine times out o’ ten beats hisself. ’Tain’t the other fellers’ play half as much as it is takin’ fool chances that makes men walk home ’stead o’ takin’ the cars. There’s a heap o’ talk about one man playin’ better poker than another man, but my experience tells me that the principal trouble is not that one man plays better than another, but that one man don’t play so well as another. An’ it stands to reason that when a man don’t play as well as the other feller he’s goin’ to beat hisself. “There was Jake Winterbottom,” continued the old man, as he straightened himself up and walked around to his favourite seat by the window. Winterbottom wasn’t in the room at the time, or probably Greenhut would not have mentioned him by name. “There was Jake Winterbottom. Jake is a powerful good player now, an’ I reckon he can hold his end up in the most select circles. He’s played steady with the best talent of Arkansas City for a good many years, an’ any man that can do that don’t have to have no trepidation about settin’ in with the best of ’em. “But I remember the time when Jake was about the easiest proposition there was to be found all up an’ down the river. ’Peared like there wa’n’t no possible way o’ losin’ money at the game that he hadn’t studied out an’ practised till he had ’em all down pat. He c’d lay down three of a kind against aces up with the same monotonous regularity that he’d bet a straight against a full. An’ he didn’t have no sense about the draw. He’d pull for a flush every time he got four of a suit, an’ sometimes when he had only three, no matter what the odds was in the bettin’. An’ when he did happen to have the winnin’ hand, if he bet it at all, which he wouldn’t half the time, he never got nothin’ to speak of out of it. “I used to reason with him. There wa’n’t no reason as I know on why I should, for he wa’n’t nothin’ to me, more’n a fair, average customer, but somehow or other I allus cottoned to Jake f’m the time he struck the town till he’d come to be recognized as one o’ the leadin’ citizens. ’Peared like he made a impression on me f’m the first. Anyway, I felt kind o’ sorry to see him everlastin’ly buckin’ up ag’in a game that was too much for him, an’ I told him so, many’s the time. “‘Jake,’ I used to say to him, ‘you hain’t no business playin’ with the Arkansas City crowd. They’ll do you, sure.’ But he’d always say: ‘Greenhut, I’m learnin’, an’ learnin’ is allus expensive. One o’ these days I’ll do ’em.’ So I let him alone.