San Francisco

“Oh, drat,” said Fiona, throwing her hand down onto the poker table. “I lose again.”

The Dirty Dove Saloon, in the Barbary Coast neighbourhood of San Francisco, was alive with jangling honky-tonk piano music and the sound of boots stomping on floors. Prospectors fresh in from the Sierra Nevada, their pockets so full of gold that their pants kept falling down, whooped it up with showgirls, sailors, card sharps and cowpokes, all of them eager as a pack of Mexican jumping beans to get their hands on some of the gleaming ore. Gold flowed through the city as freely as water, and good times followed wherever it went.

“That’s a shame, my lonesome little chickadee,” drawled Texas Pete, sitting across the table. A fat cigar protruded from his lips, and his moustache was the longest Fiona had ever seen. “I shore do hate to disappoint such a gentle creature. But where I come from, rules is rules.”

“But I’m out of money,” complained Fiona. “You won all of it! And the banks in this town won’t give me any credit! How am I supposed to pay my hotel bill?”

“Well,” said Texas Pete, shifting the cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other. “I s’pose, if I were a thinkin’ man, I might propose that you endeavour to win some of it back. I ain’t too good at this game, after all, bein’ as how it’s the first time I ever did play it.”

“He make ze good point,” said Magda, a Teutonic blonde in a clinging red dress, also sitting at the table, nursing a glass of absinthe. “You not win if you not play. Zis if known.”

“In China, we say, mountain may be tall, but heaven is at top,” said Wong Chang, a slim, pleasant-faced man with a ponytail and silk pajamas. “You play one more round, you win money back, you laugh in stupid face of Pete and buy us all more drink.”

“But I have nothing to gamble with!”

“Say,” said Texas Pete, shifting the cigar back to the original corner of his mouth. “Here’s a thought. What if you was to put down somethin’ you got on your person?”

“Like a pocketwatch, or an umbrella?”

“That ought to do just fine.”

“But I don’t have a pocketwatch, or an umbrella. I left my travel bag in my room, and I have no pockets in my… wait.” A thought had occurred to Fiona. “You don’t suppose I could wager with my dress, do you?”

“I might just be willin’ to allow it,” Texas Pete conceded.

“Oh, but I couldn’t. It’s the only dress I have at the moment, for reasons too complex and frankly embarrassing to go into.”

“Pity,” said Texas Pete, idly dealing out another hand of cards. “S’pose you’ll have to sit this one out, then. Might be best you did, as just lookin’ as this hand I got here, it ain’t goin’ be too easy for y’all to beat.”

Fiona snuck a peek at her own hand, observing that she held four queens. She looked at the enormous pile of Mexican silver dollars, gold nuggets, miscellaneous small gemstones, fragments of Chinese jade and other objects of value that sat on the table in front of Texas Pete, some of which had previously belonged to her, and said “How much would my dress be worth, exactly?”

“Mighty fine article o’ clothin’ you got there. Manufactured by a London tailor, ‘d be my guess. I’d say it’s worth just about the value of, let’s see now, this egg-sized lump o’ solid gold I got rattlin’ around in my personal effects.”

“All in.”

“You sure about that, my reticent little honey-pie gazelle o’ the sceptered isle? I told you, I got me a mighty fine hand o’ cards sitting in front o’ me on this here saloon table.”

“No you don’t. You’re bluffing.”

“Bluffin’? What’s that? I told you, I ain’t never played this game before,” said Texas Pete, revealing his hand. “Now this is one o’ them, what you call, straight flushes, might I be right? And that beats your four queens, mighty beautiful ladies though they are.”

“Zis is true,” Magda said.

“Mountain is very tall today,” intoned Wong Chang.