Someone must have rung, because at that moment the elevator arrived and the four men, with half frightened, incredulous looks, and in silence, got in and were taken down. My friend stood looking at the neatly arranged cards. "Judas!" he said, and started to pick them up. "Will you look at that! My God, what a session...." I helped him and said to come in for a drink and tell me all about it, but I had an idea what I would hear. After a while, he calmed down, but he still seemed dazed. "Never seen anything to equal it," he said. "Wouldn't have believed it. Those guys _didn't_ believe it. Every round normal, nothing unusual about the hands--three of a kind, a low straight, that sort of thing and one guy got queens over tens, until it gets to be _my_ deal. Brother! Straight flush to the king--every time! And each time, somebody else has four aces...." He started to sweat again, so I got up to fix him another drink. There was one quart of club soda left, but when I tried to open it, the top broke and glass chips got into the bottle. "I'll have to go down for more soda," I said. "I'll come, too. I need air." At the delicatessen on the corner, the man gave me three bottles in what must have been a wet bag, because as he handed them to me over the top of the cold-meat display, the bottom gave and they fell onto the tile floor. None of them broke, although the fall must have been from at least five feet. Nat was too wound up in his thoughts to notice and I was getting used to miracles. We left the proprietor with his mouth open and met Danny, the cop, looking in at the door, also with his mouth open. On the sidewalk, a man walking in front of Nat stooped suddenly to tie his shoe and Nat, to avoid bumping him, stepped off the curb and a taxi swerved to avoid Nat. The street was still wet and the taxi skidded, its rear end lightly flipping the front of one of those small foreign cars, which was going rather fast. It turned sideways and, without any side-slip, went right up the stoop of a brownstone opposite, coming to rest with its nose inside the front door, which a man opened at that moment. The sight of this threw another driver into a skid, and when he and the taxi had stopped sliding around, they were face to face, arranged crosswise to the street. This gave them exactly no room to move either forward or backward, for the car had its back to a hydrant and the taxi to a lamp. Although rather narrow, this is a two-way street, and in no time at all, traffic was stacked up from both directions as far as the avenues. Everyone was honking his horn. Danny was furious--more so when he tried to put through a call to his station house from the box opposite. It was out of order. * * * * * Upstairs, the wind was blowing into the apartment and I closed the windows, mainly to shut out the tumult and the shouting. Nat had brightened up considerably.