Now, if you know the game, you are maybe expecting to hear that he had a set of fives, including the joker of course. But it was not Alfred who held them. His four kings were not good. It was the dealer, the man who had dropped out because I had dropped in, who had five fives. But this I did not know until two days later, not until after I had gone to church again and contributed $5.00 to Mrs. Draper’s fund for buying Christmas candies for her Sunday School kiddies. Alfred’s sister Phoeba, as personal representative of our dear old Sunday School Superintendent, took my contribution with gracious acknowledgment, as though it were not tainted money. And Mrs. Draper—the less chivalrous boys called her “Mother Corkscrew” because she wore her gray hair in ringlets at shoulder length—came to me on the double quick, shrieking her praise of me, and intimated that this generous gift might get me places. Alfred said that inasmuch as he surmised he had been cold-decked out of the five—thankfully with no aspersion attachment—that I should have at least given the donation in both our names. But that would have been risky. Alfred was a rather white “black sheep” in a very religious family, and Sis would most likely have wanted to know how come? The fact that Sidney and Willard were keeping company with sisters at that time may have had nothing to do with the introduction of that cold deck. And then again it might have. Sidney said the fellow needed “taking down” a bit — and that it was planned to give the losers back their money. A fat chance they would have of getting their money back now. Until now I had only stood, by and watched a penny-ante game in the new opera house over the Morris store, where the clerks — Dave Clements, Bill McKibbon, George and Chuck Cawood, Bob Graham—and some younger fry, congregated on Sundays. And then, too, as a kid, I had been present on several occasions at a somewhat bigger game in the Neville residence on this same corner. But here I did not have a chance to closely observe the technique of the game—for I was under the table most of the time. The men played altogether then with “shinplaster” money — undersized ten, twenty-five, and fifty cent pieces of U. S. paper currency, and the breeze caused from shuffling the cards would sometimes blow the money off the table. Mr. Jim Neville said I might keep all I could get my hands on — and I think it was a sort of house rule that the players were not to contend roughly with me for the fluttering pieces. Still I think I got more kicks than the law allowed.