them on my side of the game, some on the other, and some neutral. One of the second lot was “Trick-hat” Schultz. At our last meeting—a copper was leading him out of a Philadelphia court room toward a fifteen-year bit—he had promised to open me up from my eyebrows to my ankles the next time he saw me. He greeted me this afternoon with an eight-inch smile, bought me a shot of what they sell for gin under the grandstand, and gave me a tip on a horse named Beeswax. I’m not foolish enough to play anybody’s tips, so I didn’t play this one. Beeswax ran so far ahead of the others that it looked like he and his competitors were in separate races, and he paid twenty-something to one. So Trick-hat had his revenge after all.
After the last race, I got something to eat at the Sunset Inn, and then drifted over to the big casino—the other end of the same building. A thousand or more people of all sorts were jostling one another there, fighting to go up against poker, craps, chuck-a-luck, wheels of fortune, roulette and twenty-one with whatever money the race track had left or given them. I didn’t buck any of the games. My playtime was over. I walked around through the crowd looking for my men.
I spotted the first one—a sunburned man who was plainly a farm hand in his Sunday clothes. He was pushing toward the door, and his face held that peculiar emptiness which belongs to the gambler who has gone broke before the end of the game. It’s a look of regret that is not so much for the loss of the money as for the necessity of quitting.
I got between the farm hand and the door.
“Clean you?” I asked sympathetically when he reached me.
A sheepish sort of nod.
“How’d you like to pick up five bucks for a few minutes’ work?” I tempted him.