“Your story,” remarked the Red Nosed Gentleman to the Jolly Doctor, “and the terrific blow which this Menares dealt the Dublin Terror brings to mv mind a blow my father once struck.” This was a cue to the others and one quickly seized on; the Red Nosed Gentleman was urged to give the story of that paternal blow. First seeing to it that the stock of burgundy at his elbow was ample, and freighting his own and the Jolly Doctor’s glasses to the brim, the Red Nosed Gentleman coughed, cleared his throat, and then gave us the tale of That Stolen Ace of Hearts. CHAPTER VIII.--THAT STOLEN ACE OF HEARTS. When I, at the unripe age of seventeen, left my father’s poor cottage-house on Tom’s Run and threw myself into life’s struggle, I sought Pittsburg as a nearest promising arena of effort. I had a small place at a smaller wage as a sort of office boy and porter for a down-town establishment devoted to a commerce of iron; but as I came early to cut my connection with that hard emporium we will not dwell thereon. I have already told you how by nature I was a gambler. I had inborn hankerings after games of chance, and it was scant time, indeed, before I found myself on terms of more or less near acquaintance with every card sharper of the city. And I became under their improper tutelage an expert cheat myself. At short cards and such devices as faro and roulette, I soon knew each devious turn and was in excellent qualification to pillage my way to eminence if not to riches among the nimble-fingered nobility of the green tables into whose midst I had coaxed or crowded my way. Vast was my ambition to soar as a blackleg, and no student at his honest books burned with more fire to succeed. I became initiate into such mysteries as the “bug,” the “punch,” the “hold-out”; I could deal “double” or “from the bottom;” was a past master of those dubious faro inventions, the “snake,” the “end squeeze,” and the “balance top;” could “put back” with a clean deftness that might deceive even my masters in evil doing, and with an eye like a hawk read a deck of marked cards with the same easy certainty that I read the alphabet. It was a common compliment to my guilty merit that no better craftsman at crooked play ever walked in Diamond Alley.