When there was no game, the sharks sat around practicing their tricks and bewailing their bad luck. Sometimes a poker player would show me how to “shuffle up a hand,” or cut the cards at a given place or “go out” with a hand. The dice shakers and crap shooters showed me their favorite shots. I was an apt scholar, absorbing everything like a young sponge. Tex, my boss (if he had any other name I never heard it), admonished me never to gamble. “Lay away from it, kid; it’s a tough racket. Look at me and my gatherings of forty years. I ain’t got a white quarter to my name; if it was rainin’ soup I couldn’t buy myself a tin spoon, and I’ve got a string of debts longer than a widow’s clothesline.”

Next door to the cigar store there was a small milk depot kept by a man and his wife. I used to go in every day for a glass of milk, and got acquainted with them. He delivered milk around his routes and the wife minded the shop. He was forever complaining about not being able to collect his money from “them women.” “Them women” were women who kept “parlor houses” in the Tenderloin district a few blocks from his milk store. They were good pay, but he could not get away from his work at the right hour to find them.