"Abilene rather surprised me at first. I at least expected to have my hat shot off a few times in the course of an hour’s rambling around, and, in fact, I was prepared to do a little impromptu dancing for the edification of Abileneites, who enjoyed toying with strangers. Nothing of the sort happened. Instead, the fellows hanging around the whisky mills and the brace faro layouts good-naturedly took me in hand and started in to give me a good time. I was a breezy young chap, you see, and able to hold my own in any public exhibition of the swelled head I unquestionably possessed at that time. Anyhow, things had not thoroughly warmed up for the night when I fell in with the gang early in the evening. It all looked so smooth and easy, and the heavy-artilleried chaps that I ran into seemed so square and peaceable that I drank a good deal more sagebrush whisky than I had any right to drink or than I had ever drank before.
"Around about midnight five of us, including Jim Cathcart, a bad man who was hanged a few years later for the murder of a Sheriff in Texas, pulled up at Toole Kingsley’s ’Kansas or Bust’ saloon and faro bank. The three other fellows I was with were outlawed cowboys, although I didn’t know it then, and even if I had it wouldn’t have made any difference in the shape I was in. Cathcart suggested a game of draw. He had probably noticed my good-sized wad of money, and I guess he reckoned on getting it. I didn’t have any more sense than to agree, and, the other three chaps being willing, of course, we went up to the second floor of Kingsley’s rum and faro honkatonk and waded in. When Cathcart suggested the game I noticed that a tall, broad-shouldered, very muscular-looking man, with long hair and a heavy mustache, who was standing with his back to the bar, eyed us pretty carefully, and at the time I rather wondered what he meant by it, though I forgot all about him five minutes later in the intensity of the game.
"’Intense’ is not the word to describe that game of poker. I had been plugging along at the game of draw more or less ever since I was a growing lad, and after I had begun to shoulder an azimuth I had been an onlooker at some mighty queer games. But I never saw cards run the way they did that night. I was just about a fair to middling poker player; certainly nothing extra, although I was deft of hand and knew how to riffle cards in a way to bluff fellows not acquainted with my comparative inferiority as a poker player into the belief that I was some pumpkins with the pasteboards. But, second-rate player as I was, and something over two parts loaded as I was, besides, in common with my four fellow-players, the luck that I had from the very beginning of the game was positively miraculous. None of the other men had a half-skilletful of luck. It all came my way. It was embarrassing for a while, but later on it became dangerous; for I was a total stranger to these four men and a good deal oilier in manners and speech than they—a thing that was likely to excite suspicion in towns like Abilene in those days, especially in the minds of men steadily losing in a game of draw.