Word: gamblers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
FORTY YEARS A GAMBLER ON THE MISSISSIPPI-George H. Devol -Henry Holt ($2). An inland buccaneer tells many disconnected anecdotes of fleecing the not-so-innocents who traveled up and down the great valley before, during and after the Civil War. The chief characters are the three little pasteboards of three-card monte; the marked poker deck; palmed aces, loaded dice and Devol, who never would give up his takings, preferring a rough-and-tumble every time. He was an expert rough-and-tumbler and left a trail of broken noses behind him by his deftness at ramming with...
...niggers and roustabouts and plenitude of suckers has produced its own school of chroniclers. By the works of its sons do we know it. And faro and monte are not unknown mysteries even in the modern and effete east; we have met the southern planter and the river boat gambler before, and still do we, their unworthy descendants, endeavor to fill on kings or bluff a bobtailed flush...
...seems a pity that this book, with a subject so rich, and fragrant, po- tentially as full of life and color as the Mississippi in the old days, should be dull. For a gambler's anecdotes to be flat it is unforgiveable. Every now and then some life breaks through the crust of monotonous, disorganized narative--it is impossible to pass soberly by the time when the boiler burst and killed fourteen preachers, while the only people saved on the boat were the abandoned souls who were playing roulette in the barber shop under Mr. Devol's chaperonage...
Stimulated by Mr. Rupert Hughes' assertion that George Washington was a tosspot and rollicking gambler...
...Splendid Road. Back in '49 there were a good many people going out to the gold fields by the water route around the Horn. Herein you follow the travels of one of them, impersonated by Anna Q. Nilsson. In California she encounters Lionel Barrymore, playing a gambler. Later there is a flood...