A wonderfully interesting confession of a con man who was a contemporary of Erdnase, and just like him operated for a time while traveling with small circuses in Illinois and surrounding states. Of particular interest is a full dialog of how an unsuspecting person on the train was lured into gambling 3 card monte. The dialog demonstrates how skillfully these operatives were and how well they understood human nature. Other cons are also described in detail.
Excerpt from the preface:
When these confessions appeared serially, friends and distant enquirers took it for granted that they were fiction; that I had stitched together, from the experiences of many grafters, the biography of a typical one. I hasten to assure the reader that this is a genuine confession; that I figure in it but as the transcriber of a life story told me—I believe with every conscientious effort at truth—during a month of pleasant association in New York. As a reporter, a little skilled in distinguishing the truth from the lie, I believed, when I wrote, in the sincerity of this story. Since then letters from his old companions of the road, who wished to be put into communication with him again, have confirmed detail after detail. I have disguised a name or a locality here and there; otherwise I have set down only what he told me, trying through it all to give some flavor of the man and his vocabulary. The vocabulary is not the least interesting thing about that personality of mud-and-rainbows. Uneducated and unread, he has a keen perception of the value of words, and especially of those Latinate words which express an intellectual idea. He pounces upon a new phrase; he makes it his own upon the moment. I mention this, lest I be charged with dressing these plain tales of the highway in a vocabulary too pretentious for the subject or the man.
Preface
Chapter I. I Learn To Cheat With Marked Cards
An Optical Illusion In Anilin Dye
Off To St. Louis For A Good Time
Lumber Swede’s Squeeze Wheel
The Phony Poolroom Enterprise
A Winter At Hot Springs
The Luck Of Slippery Sills
Chapter II. I Join The Circus And Elope With Minnie, The Elephant
Wheels Within Wheels
The Booster And His Business
Working The Railroad Trains
Introducing Jakey, The Grafter
Working On The Sheriff’s Sympathies
Good-Natured Little Minnie
The Circus That Disappeared
Chapter III. I Become An Eminent Fixer And An Adept At Big Joint
Why Twenty-Three Means Down And Out
Squaring The Mayor And His Minions
Trouble In A Lumber Camp
Clanking Days In Texas
A Wild-Goose Chase To Australia
Chapter IV. I Rejuvenate Three-Card Monte
How I Worked The Day Coaches
I Play The Part Of A Texas Cattleman
The Tough Citizen Of Breathitt
Working A Bluff
What Mr. Belmont Missed
Chapter V. Why I Cut It Out
The Collapse Of The Gold-Brick Industry
An Alliance With Soapy Smith
The Yellow Diamond Game
Cutting It Out For Keeps
