The Glass at Dunphy's

by Wild Bill Hickok, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The boy had the wall seat when I came in.

That was the first thing I saw in Dunphy's, and I saw it before I had the door shut behind me, before I had stamped the snow off or got the scarf down from my mouth. Leadville in February is two miles up and the cold comes in with you. Men at the bar turned to see who had let it in. I was looking past them to the card room at the back, and the table under the lamp, and who was sitting where.

Four men. One empty chair. The empty chair had its back to the door.

The boy sat against the far wall with Dunphy's glass above his head. Dunphy was proud of that glass. It was six feet long in a walnut frame and he had freighted it up the Arkansas from Cañon City in October on a mule wagon, packed in straw, and he told everybody so. The boy was nineteen or twenty. He wore a new pistol on the left side, butt forward, which is a way a man wears a pistol after he has read about it. His hat was new. His hands were not. They were cracked across the knuckles the way a man's hands get in the drifts on Fryer Hill.

I went back and stood by the empty chair and did not sit in it.

"You're welcome to set," said the man at the boy's right. He was an assayer named Ostrander and I had played with him before. He was a careful man with good money who did not mind losing some of it. "Dollar ante. Draw. Nothing wild."

"I'd as soon have that seat," I said to the boy. "If it's all the same."

The boy put his hand flat on the table. "It ain't all the same," he said. "I got here first."

"So you did."

"A man ought to sit with his back to the wall," the boy said. He said it loud enough for the table. "You read what happened to Wild Bill. Up in Deadwood. Fellow walked in behind him and shot him in the head while he was playing cards. They hung the fellow at Yankton. It was in the papers."

"I read it," I said.

"Well then."

Pike, the teamster, laughed into his collar. Ostrander looked at his cards, which were not dealt yet. The fourth man did not look at anything. He was a stranger to me, in a good grey coat with velvet on the collar, and he had a stack in front of him that was not a large stack and not a small one. He had the look of a man who has just sat down, though he had not just sat down. The chair under him had been warm a while. I could tell from the ash in his saucer.

I sat in the empty chair with my back to the door.

---

My mother read to us from the Book every night of my boyhood, and one of the things she read was that a man should not think more highly of himself than he ought. I have always taken that to mean a man should know which way he is facing. I was facing the wall. Behind me was the whole of Dunphy's: the bar, the door, the stove, forty men, any one of whom might have a reason. I could not see any of it.

Except that I could. Above the boy's head was Dunphy's glass, six feet of it, and in it was the room behind me. The door. The stove. The end of the bar. Every man in it was backward and a little green from the lamp, but I could see them. I had seen the glass from the doorway. I had seen it before I asked the boy to move. It was the reason I asked him politely and only once.

The boy had the wall at his back and the room in front of him. He was looking at his cards.

---

Ostrander dealt. I won nothing and lost the ante, and that was fine, because the first few hands at any table are not for winning. They are for learning what the table is.

Ostrander bet his good hands and checked his bad ones and never once drew to an inside straight in his life. He was easy to read and easy to like and he would leave when he had lost forty dollars, not forty-one.

Pike could not afford to be there. He had his wages in a buckskin poke and every time he put a coin in the pot he looked into the poke after it, as if to see how many were left down there. A man like that will fold too soon on a good hand and then, along about midnight, he will stay too long on a bad one, because he is trying to get back to where he started. He was the man at that table I did not want to take money from.

The boy played every hand. He drew three cards to a pair of anything and was surprised each time it did not come.

The stranger played seldom. When he played, he drew one card.

One card is a good draw to show. A man who draws one has two pair, or four to a flush, or four to a straight, and the table has to decide which. Most of the time it is the straight or the flush, and most of the time it does not fill, and he must either quit or bluff. The stranger drew one card five times in the first hour. He quit twice, cheap. Three times he bet, and each time he bet against me, and each time he bet exactly right. When I had a pair of kings he bet just enough to move me off it. When I had trips he checked and let it go. When I had nothing and tried to steal a small pot, he raised me out of it without looking twice.

A man can do that once by luck and twice by skill. Three times, the same night, against the same man, and the man is reading something.

I did not think it was me. I have been read before by men who were good at it, and I know what it feels like. It feels like being looked at. The stranger did not look at me. When I picked up my cards, he looked a little over my left shoulder, and then he looked at his own.

I looked up into Dunphy's glass.

There was a man by the stove. He wore a buffalo coat that came to his boot tops, and he stood with his hands spread to the stove as if he was warming them. The stove was behind me and to my left, about the distance a man can see a pasteboard card clear by lamplight. He had been warming his hands, so far as I could tell, for the better part of an hour. In the glass he was backward, so it took me a moment to understand what I was seeing. When I tipped my cards up, he took his hat off and turned it in his fingers. Then he put it back on.

---

I am not a man who calls a cheat on what he thinks. I have seen men die of that, and the men who did the calling died as often as the men who were called. A man in a buffalo coat can have most anything under it.

So I tried him first.

Next deal, I picked up my cards and held them low, under the edge of the table, tipped toward my belly, the way a farmer holds them at a church social. I had a pair of nines and a king. I bet two dollars. Pike called. The boy called. The stranger looked over my shoulder, and then he looked again, and then he looked at his cards a long time, which he had not done once all night. He called. When we drew, I took three and the stranger took one.

I filled nothing. I bet five dollars, which is a big bet on a pair of nines.

The stranger studied me. It was the first time he had done me that courtesy. He touched his stack and took his hand away. He touched it again. He was breathing a little quicker through the nose, and the velvet on his collar went up and down with it. Then he folded, and it was the wrong fold, because when Pike called me and turned his cards over he had queens, and the stranger, if he had been reading me as he read me earlier, would have known what I had.

Pike took the pot. He put the coins in his poke one at a time and counted them going in.

The hand after, I held my cards up natural and the man by the stove took off his hat. The stranger drew one card and bet me off a pair of aces, and he was right to.

That was enough for me.

---

The boy was raking in a small pot of his own and talking about it. I let him finish. Then I said, without turning round, in the voice a man uses for asking the time:

"Friend. That stove's been warm for an hour now. Come and sit in, or go stand somewhere else."

Nobody at the table moved. The boy stopped talking. Ostrander laid his cards face down very square and folded his hands on them.

In the glass I watched the man in the buffalo coat. He stood a while with his hands out to the stove. Then he put his hat on and walked down the length of the bar and out the door, and the cold came in, and the door swung shut on him.

The stranger lit a cigar. He did it slowly and well, and he did not look at me while he did it. He played two more hands. He drew two cards on the first and three on the second, which he had not done all night, and he lost both of them to Pike, who had sat there three hours waiting for cards and now got them. Then the stranger said he believed he was done for the evening and counted his stack into his coat and stood up. He was down about what he had come in with. He nodded to the table. He did not nod to me.

When he was gone, Pike said, "What was that about?"

"I don't care for a man standing behind me," I said. "It's a peculiarity."

Ostrander dealt.

---

Along about midnight Pike had got back what he came in with and eleven dollars over, and Ostrander, who knew him, said, "John, that's a good night," in a way that meant go home, and Pike went home. Ostrander went soon after. That left the boy and me.

"You couldn't see him," the boy said. "That fellow by the stove. He was behind you the whole time. How'd you know?"

I nodded at the glass over his head.

He turned in his chair and looked up at it. He looked a long time. In it was the room, backward and green, and the door, and the stove with nobody at it, and the back of his own new hat.

"Well," he said. "Then the wall seat ain't worth anything."

"The wall seat is worth a great deal," I said. "It's worth the whole room. It's only worth it if a man looks up."

He thought about that. He was not a stupid boy, only a new one. He looked at the door, and at the bar, and back at me.

"I was watching my cards," he said.

"I know you were. Your cards will be there when you look down again. They won't have gone anywhere."

I gathered up the deck and squared it and left it in front of his place, because it was his deal if he wanted one. He did not want one. He sat with his back to Dunphy's wall and his hands on the table, and every time the door opened he looked up to see who it was, and the third time he did it he took his hand off the pistol to do it, and did not put it back.

I got my coat. At the door I stood a while with my hand on the latch, as I always do, and listened to the street, before I opened it.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Octōbribus (1 October 2026), ā Guilielmō Hickok per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Wild Bill Hickok, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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