Girls Don't Gamble

In a sun-baked pastoral limbo where rust and clover commingle, James Fisher—calloused dreamer, grease under every fingernail—sacrifices the only certainties he owns: a patch of Kansas loam and the meager coin earned by coaxing life from it. His gamble is a battered truck, a mechanical beast that promises velocity over furrows; one moonlit collision later, the chassis lies twisted like a promise betrayed, and the horizon yawns wider than any cornfield. He bolts for the city’s cathedral of neon, a department-store empire humming on the backs of delivery boys. Behind the wheel of a clattering van he becomes a courier of desire—silk stockings, perfume atomizers, impossible hopes—until a single doorstep encounter with Madge Rathbone detonates his measured solitude. She is both flapper and sphinx, her smile a semaphore of risk; her father, Wilbur, a mercantile patriarch who smells of ledgers and pipe smoke, blesses the courtship with a pat on the shoulder that feels like absolution. Yet the Rathbone sisters—those gilded gatekeepers of respectability—recoil: their boyfriends, a coterie of tailored scorn, frame James for pilfered merchandise, stripping him of job and dignity in one surgical stroke. The city, once a promise, congeals into a courtroom of whispers. Redemption arrives as kinetic coincidence: an armed holdup, a split-second rescue, a headline that flips the script overnight. Ten thousand dollars—blood-warm cash—lands in his palm like a second sunrise; he parlays it into a fleet of smoke-belching wagons bearing his name, and at story’s end he and Madge exchange vows under a canopy of exhaust and orange blossom, the farm boy turned captain of asphalt now immune to the sisters’ sneers.