“Maybe you folks’d like to play cards.”
“O’ course not,” I says. “We want to blow soap bubbles.”
“They’s seven of us here,” says Hatch. “Poker’s about the only game seven can play.”
“Oh, I adore poker!” says the bride, gigglin’. “Old sweetheart was learnin’ me the fine points of it last night.”
“Who’s old sweetheart?” I ast her.
“My own husband,” she says. “He told me we might play poker here tonight and he thought I better brush up my game.”
“We don’t play much of a game,” says the Missus. “Just ten-cent chips and a twenty-cent limit, and deuces wild in the jackpots.”
I didn’t make my speech on this occasion, because I’ve noticed that the wilder the deuces is, the wilder the women plays. So I says:
“To make it livelier, why not play nothin’ but jackpots and let the deuces run amuck all evenin’?”
The Missus looked at me like she thought I’d gone crazy.
“I thought that’s just what you didn’t like,” she says.
“I’m willin’ to sacrifice my own preferences,” says I. “I know the majority is against me.”
“I haven’t been in a real game for a long time, myself,” says Quinn, “and probably I won’t play very good. And we can’t afford to lose a whole lot. So, if luck runs against us, you won’t mind if we quit early.”
“Certainly not,” says Hatch.