“Play numbers,” they told her. “That’s the only way to get action.”
“But I don’t know what numbers to play,” she said.
Then another fella in her crowd spoke up.
“Play your age,” he says. “You wouldn’t tell us at dinner how old you are. But you just play number twenty-seven or twenty-eight or whatever it is and I bet it’ll come for you.”
The others said it was a great hunch.
“But you’re flattering me,” says Mrs. Hunt. “I hate to confess it, but I’ll have to play Number Thirty.”
So she put two five-dollar checks on No. 30. The ball stopped in No. 34.
“Double up on ’em,” says the fella that had had the hunch.
So she played twenty dollars on No. 30 and No. 34 repeated. Then she begin playing twenty-five dollars at a crack, always on No. 30, and she kept playing it till the first two stacks and two more was all gone. In all, she made fifteen plays. No. 30 never showed up, and No. 34 come five times. She and the four people with her quit and went out in the other room to have some more drinks and play bridge or something.
After a while her husband and another man in the party left Joe’s table and come to mine.
“I won’t bother you long,” Hunt says to me. “I’ve got fifty dollars left and I’m only going to make two plays.”
I gave him two twenty-five-dollar checks and he turned to the fella with him.
“What shall I play?” he says.
“Well,” says the fella, “this is your wife’s birthday. Why don’t you play her age?”
“That’s a good idear,” says Hunt, and he laid a check on No. 34. Plop! went the ball into No. 34 and Hunt was $875 ahead, probably four or five times as much as the party had cost him. And right there he cashed and quit and went out to tell the news to Mrs. Hunt and the four that had been “in” with her.
You asked me a while ago what had think became of Jess Dorsey. I told you he wasn’t dealing anymore, but I didn’t want to tell you, in front of them other people, what stopped him.
Jess never had no business behind a wheel. He was all right if some millionaire was playing, but he hated to see anybody lose that he thought couldn’t afford it. Many is the night he laid awake worrying because somebody, usually a dame, had dropped fifty or sixty dollars at his table and acted like it hurt them. He wouldn’t of lasted much longer at this game anyway, but the thing that happened to him was enough to break fellas a lot harder-boiled than Jess.
You know he never was a very cheerful fella and he had the blues so bad when his wife died, three years ago, that we used to take turns sitting up with him and trying to keep him entertained after working hours.
We was scared he’d do something to himself if he was left alone too much.
Well, the season before last started out terribly dull. The hotel was less than half full and except one or two nights a week, all we done was play pinochle there in the other room. Only for a couple of live regulars, like Jarvis Ralston, the boss might of been tempted to let us all go and close the house.
One night early a beautiful young gal come in and registered and got her card at the desk. We all scurried to our tables. She glanced around the room and then went to the table where Jess was dealing. It was his good looks that drew them. She bought ten dollars’ worth of fifty-cent checks, made them last about half an hour and then sat for half an hour more, talking to Jess.
She was a gal about twenty-two or twenty-three, kind of quiet and soft-spoken, and, as I say, beautiful, especially her eyes. She used them for all they was worth and when she looked right at you in a kind of a pleading way, well, you couldn’t help liking her and feeling sorry for her, though for all we knew, she didn’t need no sympathy from us or anybody else.
She showed up again the next night, lost another ten dollars and spent some more time talking. We asked Jess what they talked about and he said just the climate and the bathing and different places they’d both been, and so forth.
“Her name is Bennett, Amy Bennett,” said Jess. “She’s here all alone.”
“Well, you can fix that for her,” I said.
“No,” says Jess. “She wouldn’t have nothing to do with a fella like me. But I like to have her around. She reminds me of my wife.”
After he’d said that, none of us felt like kidding him about her, and when she’d come in nights and play, we’d leave them to themselves.
She come in every night for almost a week and went through the same performance, losing her ten dollars and then sitting there, talking.
Towards the end of the week, he made a date to meet her on the beach one morning and when he showed up for work that night, he acted like he was still under water.
I said to him: “Jess,” I said, “are you falling in love?”
“It’s past that,” he says. “I’ve already fell. I didn’t think I’d ever be interested in a woman again, but this one is different than any I ever met, except my wife.”
“What do you know about her?” I asked him.
“They ain’t much to know,” he said.
“She lives in Hartford, and she ain’t got much money.”
“Well,” I says, “she won’t have as much as she’s got if she keeps playing roulette. Ten dollars a night runs into important figures if you stick at it long enough.”
“I’ve told her she ought not to play,” he said, “but she likes the excitement and she always thinks her luck is going to change. And besides,” he said, “it wouldn’t look good, her coming here and not playing.”
Well, she interrupted us herself
