Read They Don't Dance Much: A Novel for Free Online

stay gone for a couple of months. Nobody ever knew where he went.
    He would stay out at Smut’s till midnight if he could get anybody to sit up that late with him. He bought a pint of liquor from Smut sometimes, but as a general rule he brought a pint along with him. He’d drink that in a couple of hours, then quit for the night. I never saw him drunk.
    Once in a while he’d play one of the slot machines. Now and then he would play me a game of checkers, but he always beat me, and he could beat anybody else around there except sometimes Bert Ford. When there was a poker game going on he got in that. Most of the games they had out there weren’t for any big piles of money, but if anybody wanted to play for high stakes that was all right with Wilbur. His I.O.U. was the same as money in the bank.
    In Corinth the folks of his own class mostly shunned Wilbur Brannon. They hadn’t forgotten him going to the penitentiary. Then he never went to church and never pretended to work. A lot of folks thought it was going against Nature to sit up all night too, and sleep in the daytime. But Wilbur went his own way and let other folks go theirs.
    Bert Ford and Wilbur Brannon were our steady customers. Sometimes Astor LeGrand would drive out and sit on a nail keg, with his hat pulled down almost to the sun glasses he wore. Usually Catfish was there too, if he wasn’t busy making liquor. During the week farmers would drop in sometimes and chat awhile. But beginning with Friday night, after the mill paid off, there was a mob out there. It was risky to gamble in Corinth back then, even in Shantytown. But down at Smut’s place it was all right. The cotton-mill hands spent the week-end down there. They bought some liquor and a little gas. But the way Smut cashed in on them was to wait till most of them had been cleaned out in the poker games and then take on the main winners.
    These fellows played poker mostly, but sometimes they played blackjack. Smut liked blackjack better because it was faster and he could get their money without staying away from the business so long. He could cheat at poker, but it was simpler and faster when they were playing blackjack. All the cards he had down there were shaved decks. He always got decks of cards that had rows of diamonds on the back. He’d shave off the edges of the cards so he could tell what they were. He trimmed aces so there would be half a diamond showing on both ends and sides. The low cards were shaved off so there was a full diamond on both ends and sides. A medium card was fixed so there was half a diamond left on the sides and a full diamond left on the ends. With a full diamond on the sides and half a diamond on the end the card was a ten-spot. I caught him shaving a deck of new cards the Thursday after I went to work for him. He told why he was doing it.
    It looked to me like the mill hands would have caught on after a while, for Smut always took in fifty to sixty dollars a week off them. But they kept on laying for him. They always used the cards he furnished.
    Of course the mill hands weren’t the only fellows that came out over the week-ends. A lot of farmers and country boys hung out there because they could drink with a lot of other fellows there. A number of young sprouts from Corinth would be out there Friday and Saturday nights. They ought to have been home and in bed. They thought it would make them looked up to if it got out that they hung out at Smut Milligan’s joint. On Saturdays we generally sold as much as fifty pints of liquor, corn and government together. Smut took in a lot from the two slot machines—especially from the one that was busted and wouldn’t pay off. He sold some heavy groceries, and tobacco, and odds and ends to the farmers. I could see he was making good money. What I couldn’t see was how he’d managed to run the place before without any help. He said he did it by not sleeping much and having eyes in the back of his head. When Friday night came he