"Leave everything to me," Bunch growled as we shaved our hats and Indian-filed to a trough.

"A quart of Happysuds," Bunch ordered. "How about it, Ikey?"

Ikey flashed a grin and tried to swallow12 his palate, so it wouldn't interfere with the wet spell suggested by Bunch.

12

Ikey belonged to the "dis, dose and dem" push.

Every long sentence he uttered was full of splintered grammar.

Every time Ikey opened his word-chest the King's English screamed for help, and literature got a kick in the slats.

He was short and thin, but it was a deceptive thinness. His capacity for storing away free liquids was awe-inspiring and a sin.

I think Ikey must have been hollow from the neck to the ankles, with emergency bulkheads in both feet.

His nose was shaped like a quarter to six13 o'clock. It began in the middle and rushed both ways as hard as it could. One end of it ducked into his forehead and never did come out.

13

His interior was sponge-lined, and when the bartenders began to send them in fast, Ikey would lower an asbestos curtain to keep the fumes away from his brain.

Nobody ever saw Ikey at high tide.

There was surely something wrong with Ikey's switchboard, because he could wrap his system around more Indian laughing-juice without getting lit up than any other man in the world.

But Ikey was the compliments of the season, all right, all right.14

14

Ikey had spent most of his life being a Bookmaker, and when the racing game went out of fashion he sat down and tried to think what else he could do. Nothing occurred to him until one day he discovered that he could push his feet around in time to music, so he became a dancing instructor and could clean up $1,000 per day if the bartenders didn't beckon too hard.

The luncheon had been ordered and Bunch was just about to switch the conversation around to the subject of rebates when 

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