The Legend of Bass Reeves by Gary Paulsen Page B

the mister in two days, and everything that had been done, he had done himself.
    On a Saturday near his seventeenth birthday, the mister came to the door of the house and motioned for Bass to come inside.
    “It’s time you learned how to play poker. Sit at the table.”
    Bass had only been in the mister’s house four times, to help Mammy move furniture. Going inside to play cards was strange, almost spooky. Had the mister gone crazy?
    “He’s just sick of sitting alone,” Mammy told him that evening as they ate. “He don’t go to town anymore, but he wants to play a little cards, it ain’t going to hurt. Just make sure you lose most of the time.”
    Bass knew nothing of cards and couldn’t read or write numbers or letters, though he could count cattle by fives, and then fives of fives. He had to memorize the face cards and aces and count the spots on the numbered cards. Then he learned the rules, what beat what, and all this took a month, playing two or three times a week with a grubby old deck.
    They would play for lucifer stick matches. They played five-card stud, one card down and four up, betting on eachcard—the mister said it was the only true kind of poker. After the strangeness of the situation had worn off, Bass found that he actually enjoyed it.
    Cards came easily to him, especially poker, because he was observant and alert to changes in the mister’s manner. After a time he could read the mister’s playing.
    Soon he had to force himself to lose once in a while, especially when the mister was drunk and sloppy about his cards.
    At first the mister was content to play for matches or colored pebbles. But after a couple of months, he wanted to play for something more valuable.
    The problem was that Bass owned nothing. Not a thing in the world belonged to him, not his clothes or even his own body, so how could he play for something of value?
    So the mister “loaned” him some money to start— twenty-five pennies—and they began playing five-card stud for pennies.
    It seemed silly to Bass, who thought of the pennies as no more than lucifer sticks or pebbles, which they kept in a jar in the main house. The pennies remained in two jars, one for him, one for the mister.
    Bass didn’t think of himself as owning the pennies. He won slightly more than he lost and didn’t try to win a lot— as Mammy had advised him—but even so, in a couple of weeks he had nearly forty cents in his jar.
    It still would have meant nothing to him, except that the mister decided to harness the mules for one of his rare trips into Paris and take Bass with him. Before leaving, Mister took out twenty-five of Bass’s pennies and gave them to him. “Here. You can spend this in town.”
    Bass was stunned. He knew nothing of money, and he talked to Mammy about it before they left.
    “Well, things cost money. Those candies you brought back that time might have cost a penny for five of them.”
    “So with twenty-five pennies I could buy …” He trailed off. The number eluded him, but he knew it was huge. “A whole big bag of them.”
    “Yes. Or you could buy sugar and cinnamon, and I could make you some sweet cakes to take with you on your cattle-gathering rides.”
    And that was what Bass had done. He had spent five of the pennies on candy—they were three for a penny—and bought a bag of sugar and some cinnamon. He had sweet cakes when he did the long rides.
    And he understood what money meant.
    Which made him play harder and win more. That was when the mister increased the limit of their play to a nickel instead of a penny, and soon Bass had more than a dollar in his jar.
    He knew a nickel was five pennies, knew it was a great amount of money for him, but did not quite understand how it fit in with the rest of the world. He did not know that a good man could be hired for fifty cents a day, that much of the land in Texas could be bought for twenty and even ten cents an acre or that he was worth eight or nine hundred dollars