Some men are born rascals. Others have rascality thrust upon them. George H Devol was an infamous gambler - though cheat would be a more accurate word. In his Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi Devol recounts dozens of anecdotes of how he plied his Three-Card Monte and sharp dealing skills to cheat the cheaters and/or suckers on steamboats and in river towns over more than four decades in the mid-nineteenth-century South.