Scared Money

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He drove fast through the night, thinking of that last hand. Damn that Devlan, suggesting raising the limit for that last hand. As though he knew he was going to get the case ace in the hole. It had been a long and very expensive hand. As he drove, Harry Varney figured he had dropped forty dollars on that last hand. Poker seemed to be getting too rich for his blood, lately. The disastrous last hand had left him with almost an eighty dollar deficit for the evening.

And that was too much. Way too much. He remembered with self-contempt the elaborate casualness with which, as the game broke up and as Dick Winkler was paying off the chip stacks from the bank, he had suggested to Devlan that they cut high card for twenty dollars. Devlan, he knew, had not been derived. But Devlan, as big winner, couldn’t very well refuse.

Harry Varney remembered the bright light shining down on the green table top. The others were over putting their coats on. He remembered his own hand reached out, taking a thin cut, remembered the hot good feeling as he turned the thin stack just enough so that he caught a glimpse of the spade jack. But Devlan, almost contemptuously, had cut the remaining cards, flipped over the heart king. And Harry Varney, taking the last two tens out of his wallet, instinctively turned so that Devlan could not see the two remaining bills — two lonely and ineffectual one-dollar bills left out of the hundred dollars he had taken to the club with such high hopes at eight o’clock.

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