The player uses a cue that is like a broom-handle with a quarter-moon of wood fastened to the end of it.  With this he shoves wooden disks the size of a saucer—­he gives the disk a vigorous shove and sends it fifteen or twenty feet along the deck and lands it in one of the squares if he can.  If it stays there till the inning is played out, it will count as many points in the game as the figure in the square it has stopped in represents.  The adversary plays to knock that disk out and leave his own in its place—­particularly if it rests upon the 9 or 10 or some other of the high numbers; but if it rests in the “10off” he backs it up—­lands his disk behind it a foot or two, to make it difficult for its owner to knock it out of that damaging place and improve his record.  When the inning is played out it may be found that each adversary has placed his four disks where they count; it may be found that some of them are touching chalk lines and not counting; and very often it will be found that there has been a general wreckage, and that not a disk has been left within the diagram.  Anyway, the result is recorded, whatever it is, and the game goes on.  The game is 100 points, and it takes from twenty minutes to forty to play it, according to luck and the condition of the sea.  It is an exciting game, and the crowd of spectators furnish abundance of applause for fortunate shots and plenty of laughter for the other kind.  It is a game of skill, but at the same time the uneasy motion of the ship is constantly interfering with skill; this makes it a chancy game, and the element of luck comes largely in.

We had a couple of grand tournaments, to determine who should be “Champion of the Pacific”; they included among the participants nearly all the passengers, of both sexes, and the officers of the ship, and they afforded many days of stupendous interest and excitement, and murderous exercise—­for horse-billiards is a physically violent game.

The figures in the following record of some of the closing games in the first tournament will show, better than any description, how very chancy the game is.  The losers here represented had all been winners in the previous games of the series, some of them by fine majorities: 

Chase,102 Mrs. D.,57 Mortimer, 105 The Surgeon, 92
Miss C.,105 Mrs. T.,9 Clemens, 101 Taylor,92
Taylor,109 Davies,95 Miss C., 108 Mortimer,55
Thomas,102 Roper,76 Clemens, 111 Miss C.,89
Coomber, 106 Chase,98

And so on; until but three couples of winners were left.  Then I beat my man, young Smith beat his man, and Thomas beat his.  This reduced the combatants to three.  Smith and I took the deck, and I led off.  At the close of the first inning I was 10 worse than nothing and Smith had scored 7.  The luck continued against me.  When I was 57, Smith was 97 —­within 3 of out.  The luck changed then.  He picked up a 10-off or so, and couldn’t recover.  I beat him.