Poker

de Achmed Abdullah

Jimmy was tall and strong. He looked like a paperback edition of a Twentieth-Century Magog, and at a distance he seemed to show breed from head to foot. He radiated it. Girls just out of boarding school who saw him swing down the main street of the little Northwestern town where he had been born and bred spoke of his fascinating virility.But when he came nearer, and chiefly when he raised his olive-green velvet hat with the twisted, many-colored pugaree band, you changed your first impression. For he pompadoured his hair in the manner of the statuesque child-men in the streetcar ads, who picture the latest extravaganzas in five-ply, guaranteed-linen, long-point collars; he was suspected of using a Rachel shade of face powder; and it took him years of hardy effort to graduate from peg-tops and padded shoulders to chaste, Manhattan-cut trousers and coat.His character was half drizzle and half sleet; his was the gift of mean and useless things charmingly done, the sort of mind which tries to fill an empty well with dew drops and to attach handles to an egg.But he could split a pair of aces and draw to a flush, and never change a muscle.

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