practically sold a worthless pony for $40.00, and had it not
been for his innate passion for gambling, would have done a very good
day's business. A few hours later, however, he was found looking very
disconsolate, and trying very hard to sell some supposed curiosities for
a few dollars with which to buy a blanket he sorely needed. His
impecuniosity was easily explained. Instead of proceeding at once to
sell his second pony, he turned his attention first to gambling, and in
less than an hour his last dollar had gone. Then, with the gamester's
desperation, he had put up his second pony as a final stake, with the
result that he lost his money and his stock in trade as well. He took
the situation philosophically and stoically, but when he found it
impossible in the busy pioneer town to get even the price of a drink of
whisky for his curiosities, he began to get reckless, and was finally
escorted out of the town by two or three of his friends to prevent him
getting mixed up in a fight.

When the Indians have enough energy they gamble almost day and night.
The women themselves are generally kept under sufficient subjection by
their husbands to make gambling on their part impossible, so far as the
actual playing of games of chance is concerned. But they stand by and
watch the men. They stake their necklaces, leggings, ornaments, and in
fact, their all, on the play, which is done sometimes with blue wild
plum-stones, hieroglyphically charactered, and sometimes with playing
bones, but oftener with common cards. Above the ground the tom-tom would
be sounded, but below ground the tom-tom was buried.

An Indian smokes incessantly while he gambles. Putting the cigarette or
cigar to his mouth he draws in the smoke in long, deep breaths, until he
has filled his lungs completely, when he begins slowly to emit the smoke
from his nose, little by little, until it is all gone. The object of
this with the Indian is to steep his senses more deeply with the
narcotizing soporific. The tobacco they smoke is generally their own
raising.

"The thing that moved me most," writes a traveler, describing a visit to
an Indian gambling den, "was the spectacle in the furthest corner of the
'shack' of an Indian mother, with a pappoose in its baby-case peeping
over her back. There she stood behind an Indian gambler, to whom she had
joined her life, painted and beaded and half intoxicated. The Indian
husband had already put his saddle in pawn to the whit