church, and the gambling-dens, and the newspaper office, and the
streets of brick blocks had been, was nothing now but a wide and
beautiful expanse of green grass, a peaceful and charming solitude. Half
a dozen scattered dwellings were still inhabited, and there was still
one saloon of a ruined and rickety character struggling for life, but
doomed. In its bar was a billiard outfit that was the counterpart of the
one in my father-in-law's garret. The balls were chipped, the cloth was
darned and patched, the table's surface was undulating, and the cues
were headless and had the curve of a parenthesis--but the forlorn
remnant of marooned miners played games there, and those games were more
entertaining to look at than a circus and a grand opera combined.
Nothing but a quite extraordinary skill could score a carom on that
table--a skill that required the nicest estimate of force, distance, and
how much to allow for the various slants of the table and the other
formidable peculiarities and idiosyncrasies furnished by the
contradictions of the outfit. Last winter, here in New York, I saw Hoppe
and Schaefer and Sutton and the three or four other billiard champions
of world-wide fame contend against each other, and certainly the art and
science displayed were a wonder to see; yet I saw nothing there in the
way of science and art that was more wonderful than shots which I had
seen Texas Tom make on the wavy surface of that poor old wreck in the
perishing saloon at Jackass Gulch forty years before. Once I saw Texas
Tom make a string of seven points on a single inning!--all calculated
shots, and not a fluke or a scratch among them. I often saw him make
runs of four, but when he made his great string of seven, the boys went
wild with enthusiasm and admiration. The joy and the noise exceeded that
which the great gathering at Madison Square produced when Sutton scored
five hundred points at the eighteen-inch game, on a world-famous night
last winter. With practice, that champion could score nineteen or
twenty on the Jackass Gulch table; but to start with, Texas Tom would
show him miracles that would astonish him; also it might have another
handsome result: it might persuade the great experts to discard their
own trifling game and bring the Jackass Gulch outfit here and exhibit
their skill in a game worth a hundred of the discarded one, for profound
and breathless interest, and for displays of almost superhuman skill.

In my experienc