fond of children and would enjoy their familiarity. Whether it was the
shaggy beard or the assumed intoxication of Rip, a child refused to
clamber up on Rip's back. The stage was waiting; that the scene should
not be marred, seventeen year old Alfred attempted to perch himself on
Rip's back. It was not the Jefferson of later days but the Jefferson of
middle manhood. Alfred was dropped to the floor amid laughter that the
scene never evoked previously. Instead of the great actor being peeved,
he kindly inquired of Alfred if the fall had hurt him. As a matter of
fact Alfred purposely made the fall awkward.

Dick Cannon had a number of young friends--Billy Conard, Clarke Winnett,
Charley Smith, Billy Kane and Alfred. Dick had a large luxuriously
furnished room in the hotel. One evening each week he set apart to
entertain his young friends. To pass the time away Dick introduced a
game he had played a few times while tending lock at Rice's Landing. It
was a Greene County game, new to Fort Duquesne but universally popular
in Pittsburgh since. The game was known as "Draw Poker" in Greene
County.

After several lessons, in which Dick's courtesy and unusual interest in
his young friends was evidenced at the end of every deal, as Dick raked
in the pot with the air and manner of a learned professor of a college,
he explained to each player who had lost--and his lecture always
embraced the entire class, for when the pot justified it, they all
lost--just how they should have played their hand to win. "It's just as
important to learn how to lay 'em down as it is to play 'em up," was his
advice.

Alfred had failed, notwithstanding Dick's teachings, to learn even the
rudiments of the game, so he sought the dictionary. He had become
convinced that a person to be proficient should, as Dick advised in one
of his lectures, not only study the game but human nature as well.
Therefore, Alfred decided to start right. He found the word "draw"
signified "to drag, to entice, to delineate, to take out, to inhale, to
extend." The word "poker" signified any frightful object, a "spook."

[Illustration: The Old Greene County Game]

The echoes of Gideon's words were daily percolating through Alfred's
gray matter: "Don't know enough to quit the game when you got velvet in
front of you."

When questioned as to the cause of his absence from the weekly seance,
Alfred replied that, as he understood it, the object of Dick was to
teach and enlighten eac