Explore "The Cruise of the Violetta" by Arthur Willis Colton on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
THE deck of the _Violetta_ had resumed its ordinary domestic look. True, no Dolores lay on the carpet, no Georgiana pecked and scratched in the scuppers. At some distance apart on his rug, his basket behind him, in deep abstraction, sat Ram Nad.
Ram Nad had absent-mindedness down to a science. He could roll up his eyeballs and go off like a bullet. When not abstracted he usually played jackstraws. What recondite connection there was between him and jackstraws I never made out, but I suspected it was the delicate sleight of hand required, and the practice it gave him, which fastened him to that Occidental game. Certainly I would back him against any jackstraw player -- But there never was such a jackstraw player before. The laws of physics were nothing to him. Gravitation in jackstraws he ignored.