The Insidious Game of Squeeze-Spindle
And How a Whirl at It Came Near Decimating the Population of a Section of the Indian Territory.
“I don’t just recall the name of the cheerful worker who invented that wise phrase, ‘There’s a sucker born every minute, and they never die,’ but whoever he was he had something inside his head besides mayonnaise dressing,” said a giant from the Indian Territory, when the talk among a party of Westerners at a roadhouse the other night switched around to sure-thing games and cinch propositions. “I don’t suppose there ever was yet a sure-thing game rigged up that didn’t get its quota of nibblers, and even its occasional easy marks, who’d go up against it with their whole rolls. I’m not speaking so much now of brace games as I am of layouts that might just as well have the words, ‘You lose,’ painted all over ’em, they’re such obvious air-tights for the dealers. I suppose we’ve all been up against brace faro. That’s something that a man can’t heel himself against; the most he can do when he gets next to it that two of ’em are slipping out of the box at one and the same time is to ‘stick up’ the dealer at the business end of a.45—if he’s quick enough—accumulate all the money in sight, and back toward the door.
“But a man who’ll lay up alongside of a brace faro layout or a brace wheel need not necessarily be sucker enough to hand his dust over to a smooth duck who’s dealing a game that has all the scars, moles, tattoo marks and other perfectly visible Bertillons of a dead open and shut sure-thing layout. Yet I’ve seen men who were wise in their own business—horse-rustling, for instance—go broke against games that you’d think a ten-year-old would size up correctly without the assistance of an X-ray apparatus.
“I’m thinking of the time that Jink McAtee, afterward one of the foxiest horse-thieves who ever used an upside-down brand in the Southwest, got interested in squeeze-spindle in Guthrie. It was in Guthrie, in May, 1889, just after Oklahoma had been opened up, that the two Reeves brothers, Bill and Al, and Arthur Pendleton started an all-round layout in what was the first two-story shack that had been thrown up in the town. The two Reeves boys are still running the biggest layout in Guthrie, but Pendleton is dead. The Reeves-Pendleton brand of faro, as well as their keno, wheel, stud, and other legitimate games, was perfectly on the level, but in addition they had a few games in operation that was plain cases to most of the patrons of the layout of the sure-thing. The Reeves and Pendleton people didn’t club anybody into stacking up against their sure-thing games. They just started ’em going, hired a man named Gately to run ’em, and struck the attitude that if among the sooners and boomers of Guthrie there was people imbecile enough to want to hit up these sure-thing games, it wasn’t their funeral.
“The most alluring among these sure-thing games was the outfit called the squeeze-spindle. You used to run across a squeeze-spindle quite often down in the Southwest, but so many of the dealers of that game got shot up and slithered that it has sort o’ passed out. It’s a lottery game ostensibly, where the player makes what the dealer calls ‘conditional’ winnings, and the dealer has to have the assistance of ‘boosters’ to throw confidence into the suckers. It took a good con man to run a squeeze-spindle game. The sucker would put up a hundred to win five hundred; he’d cop the coin ’conditionally’—that is to say, the arrow that flew around in the middle of the box had to point to another number of the sucker’s selection before the money would be his to walk away with, and in the event of the arrow pointing to the right number the player would get twice the sum.
“Of course the arrow never went the sucker’s way twice hand-running, and equally, of course, it was a game where the dealer got all of the money. The reason it was called a squeeze-spindle was because the dealer had only to squeeze a button beneath the table to stop the arrow at any old point in its flight around the numbers that he wanted to. When a sucker was up against the game, a ‘booster’ would prance in with a big roll of the house’s money, treble it on a couple of straight turns of the spindle, squeezed just his way by the dealer, and then the sucker would conclude that it was only his lack of capital that caused him to lose—just as the pin-head who doubles on favorites at the races tries to convince himself when’s he’s broke and smoking a punk pipe that he’d have been able to put all the bookmakers out of business if he’d just had the capital to keep on with his system. Once in a great while a squeeze-spindle dealer would let one of his good things get away with a bunch of money, if he felt reasonably sure that the sucker would come back at it with the coin later on; and thus the ingenuous little fiction ’ud go around that So-and-So had pasted a squeeze-spindle dealer for his whole roll, and this would make business.
“Now, here was a game that you wouldn’t think a man with the sense he was born with would bet twenty cents worth of zinc money on. But this man Gately, who ran the squeeze-spindle for the Reeves-Pendleton layout on a salary and commission basis, was a pretty smooth gazzabo in his generation, and he landed the good things with his layout right along, and often for sizeable money. He was a quiet, red bearded chap, with a mighty convincing, persuasive way about him, and a man who’d put up a fight, too, in a corner. He had free rein in the running of the squeeze-spindle and two or three other sure-thing devices that formed a sort of side-show to the main Reeves-Pendleton layout, and the proprietors pretended that his outfit was really independent of their plant—that Gately was simply renting space from them and going it alone. But all Guthrie knew differently.