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table fashioned from a white oak tree with a breast circumference of twenty and one-half feet. Four men stood around it talking and smoking. They wore suits. Trent and Rutherford stood in the corner next to a seated black man who was paring his fingernails with a penknife.
    When the door was shut, Henry Trent said, “That makes five.”
    Rutherford walked to Abe and held out his hand and said, “Buy-in.”
    Abe took the fold of notes from his inside jacket pocket. Rutherford licked his thumb and counted five twenties and said to the black man, “Dealer take your seat and split a fresh deck.”
    Abe took off his coat and hat and hung them on one of seven cast-iron coat trees lining the wall.
    He and the other four card players took their seats around the table.
    The dealer wore a black satin bow tie. His suspenders were embroidered in redbirds. His shirtsleeves were rolled and his fingernails were smooth as a shell. Abe had heard how good he was and had played once or twice with his son.
    The man shuffled. He had fast mechanics and a soft touch. “I’m Faro Fred,” he said. “I’ll turn cards till I’m dead.”
    Abe sized up the other men. Each of them he knew, whether by face or by name.
    They had all heard of him.
    Rutherford poured whiskey into a line of cut-glass tumblers with a bullseye design. He set one before each man. Then he sat down in a chair beside the cookstove and took out his chewing tobacco.
    Trent said, “If you’re here, I don’t have to explain a whole lot.”
    One of the men had a short-lived coughing fit. When he finished, Trent went on. “The game is pot-limit short stud.” He looked each man in the eye. “Go on and buy your chips.” He pointed to the orange glow inside the stove and told Rutherford to tend it, and then he sat down in the opposite corner to watch.
    Abe admired the table’s girth and finish. He did not know that it was the very same table where his daddy had signedhis name twenty years before. Do not sit down with Mr. Trent , Al Baach had told him. He does not speak in truths . Abe watched the dealer make his little column of chips and push it forward.
    Faro Fred looked him in the eyes, as he did each man to whom he pushed chips soon to be thinned.
    Abe straightened his stack and kissed the bottom chip and cracked his knuckles.
    He played tight for the first two hours. If his hole card was jack or lower, he threw his two on the pile and spectated. He watched them lick their teeth and grimace and rub at their foreheads and take in their whiskey too quick. He noted the liars and the brass balls. He separated the inclinations of one man from another, and he catalogued who would try to outdraw him when he got what he was after. In the fourth hour, he won a little, twice, on a couple high pairs. Then he lay in wait another two.
    His time came when the drunkest man with the deepest stack raised to the limit three straight rounds. Abe followed him where he was going, and when it came time to flip his hole card, with two pair showing, he turned over that droopy-eyed, flower-clutching queen.
    “I’ll be damn,” Rutherford said. “Queens full of fours.”
    It had taken Abe only six hours at the table to clean out the best stud poker man in all of McDowell County.
    The man’s name was Floyd Staples, and he didn’t muck his cards straightaway. In fact, he flipped his own hole card, as ifhe believed his ace-high flush might somehow still prevail if only everyone could see all those spades. He watched Abe restack the chips. Staples’ eyes narrowed to nothing. He bit at his mustache and breathed heavy through his nose.
    Floyd Staples was unbathed and living in the bottle, and his cardsmanship was slipping. That much was plain to all in the room.
    He pointed across the table and said, “This boy is a cheat.”
    Abe double-checked his stacks. He’d told Goldie he’d cash out if he got to four hundred. He stretched his back and said to the dealer, “I reckon I’ll cash out