Now it
happened that he had a brother who was not a bit like
himself, but was a sort of ne'er-do-well, always hard-up
and sponging on other people, and never working.
And when the schoolmaster came to the city and his brother
knew that he had eight hundred dollars, he came to him
and got him drinking and persuaded him to hand over the
eight hundred dollars and to let him put it into the
Louisiana State lottery. In those days the Louisiana
Lottery had not yet been forbidden the use of the mails,
and you could buy a ticket for anything from one dollar
up. The Grand Prize was two hundred thousand dollars,
and the Seconds were a hundred thousand each.
So the brother persuaded the schoolmaster to put the
money in. He said he had a system for buying only the
tickets with prime numbers, that won't divide by anything,
and that it must win. He said it was a mathematical
certainty, and he figured it out with the schoolmaster
in the back room of a saloon, with a box of dominoes on
the table to show the plan of it. He told the schoolmaster
that he himself would only take ten per cent of what they
made, as a commission for showing the system, and the
schoolmaster could have the rest.
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