A short story

Honest John Baudine's Glass Eye
By Big Jim Williams

An Old West superstition said bad luck would follow anyone playing poker with a one-eyed gambler.

Some claim that during the frontier Gold Rush and cattle days of America there lived a gambler who drifted from one boomtown to another. He called himself “Honest John” Baudine. He was tall and skinny, like a hair-thin stalk of yeller sun-dried wheat.

Honest John wore all black—boots, pants, string tie, and double-breasted frock coat—except for a fancy white shirt, diamond studs, and shiny gold vest. A tall stovepipe hat ringed an outcropping of long white hair that tumbled below his stiff collar.

His face was long and thin. He weren’t ugly, just on the bad side of looking good, like an undertaker missing out on a $500 funeral. He wasn’t a Boot Hill planter. He was a professional gambler.

One bowlegged miner back then said, “He looked a little like Abraham Lincoln who was hankerin’ to be president.”

Honest John’s right eye was blue. His left eye was made of glass that changed colors in or out of its socket. Sometimes it was blue, brown, hazel, chestnut, or looked like a drunken rainbow.

“Strangest dern thing I’d ever seen,” said Milo S. Loudermilk, a California miner. “Y-You d-didn’t want that gl-glass eye of Baudine’s to s-settle on ya. It’s w-was bad l-luck!”

Loudermilk stuttered when losing to Honest John. He stuttered a lot.

Honest John’s glass eyeball became a legend in the Old West’s mining camps and cow towns. Feared and respected it was, as much as outlaws, or a mattress-Madam’s garter-belt gun.

The agate seemed to move on its own inside Honest John’s skeletal head. It could watch a high-flying hawk, or just stare at you, un-blinking, un-winking, un-moving, while the gambler’s good eye checked your boots or scouted for more suckers.

When ready for poker, Honest John puckered up his gaunt face. He then flexed, squeezed and contorted his face muscles, while sending his head through gyrations a whirling dervish would envy. Within seconds, to the gasp of onlookers, out popped his glass eye, leaving behind an empty socket resembling a toothless mouth.

The glass eye “plopped” in the middle of the table, where it scurried among the whiskey bottles, glasses, greenbacks, gold dust, cards, overflowing ashtrays, and astonished looks. Before Honest John dealt the first hand, the eye made a final turn around the edge of the table, changing colors like a chameleon, sizing up John’s open-mouthed competitors.

“Damned unnervin’ gamblin’ with a rollin’ eyeball!” recalled Peaches, a “fancy” lady workin’ the Buckeye Belle Saloon. “Had a customer like that once in Deadwood,” she said.

When Honest John opened a card game, he said: “Try your luck, lads?” He revealed a grin of uneven teeth and a strange accent, a heritage never divulged. Then his bony fingers shuffled and dealt the cards with the delicate touch of a surgeon.

He didn’t smoke or chew tobacco, or touch alcohol. Few ever saw him eat. The game was his full concentration.

The ace of spades was his favorite card, behind a royal flush, full house, or five of a kind.

The evil eye in the middle of the table turned bright red if Honest John was losing; a contented blue-—matchin’ John’s good eye—-if he was winning.

Some believed the meandering marble could see right through the greasy pasteboards clutched to every player’s heart-thumping chest.

He weren’t no bottom-dealer and he weren’t no saddle-blanket gambler, least that’s what most of those being skinned claimed. That skeptical bunch followed Honest John’s every move.

Or, so they thought.

Although Honest John and his eyeball won one hell of a lot of gold and cash-money, they never caught him doing anything wrong.

“Ain’t right havin’ an extra eye in the game.” Soapy Smith, another loser, unleashed a stream of tobacco juice for emphasis. But he admitted there was somethin’ fascinatin’ about playing a one-eyed gambler.

Few asked Honest John how he lost his eye, or found a replacement. HJ’s vest-pocket derringer discouraged most queries.

Some called him “Cyclops,” but not to his face.

At a game’s closing, Honest John scraped his loot into his stovepipe hat, bowed to the defeated, and said:

“Come, eye!”

The spankling orb raced across the table and jumped into the cavity in Honest John’s head. Then the gambler shook his head like a wet dog. The false eye spun like a spinning cherries in a slot machine, and then snapped back into place, and stared straight ahead.

“Would-a made a dead man shiver,” added Soapy Smith.

Did Honest John control the glass eye, or did the eye control Honest John?

“In or out of its socket—-it never blinked,” grunted Soapy, cards clinched under double chins. “Ain’t natural.”

Honest John won most every pot, but no ever left his table broke. He always flipped a silver dollar to those he’d just skinned.

“Keep your eyes on John’s glass eye,” they whispered to others. It was impossible to keep your eyes off an eyeball that zigged and zagged in the middle of a poker game.

Honest John’s secret: while everyone was watched his roll-around eye, they ignored his good one. Aces and deuces slid up and down inside his sleeves faster than a greased yo-yo, while he quick-glanced at the underbelly of a ring on the little finger of his dealing hand that secretly reflected the face of every card dealt.

When a boomtown folded, so did Honest John. He left to find new victims.

As he rode off into the sunset, Honest John always dropped an ace of spades on the trail—-his trademark. (He usually left in the mornin’, but it’s better if you say it was sundown, because most people like old stories that end at sundown.)

The whiskered miner who told this tale said it had a moral: “Never play poker with anyone named Honest John, even if he puts two glass eyes on the table.”

Honest John’s legend lives, because they’re still talkin’ about his glass eye in old mining towns, cow towns, and dusty saloons.

Some swear that when Honest John died his glass eye struck out on its own. Claim it’s recently been seen working late night poker tables as far away as Deadwood, South Dakota.

It’s said there’s a weedy cemetery someplace in the West with a fading headstone, shaped like the ace of spades, that reads:

“Honest John” Baudine
1820-1880
“My Luck Just Ran Out”

Let the author know if you find it.

This story is in Big Jim Williams’ audio book, The Old West, in the five-book package, Best of Westerns (Topics/Countertop books), with authors Louis L’Amour, Jack London, Owen Wister and Bill Brooks.