I rolled a three. Dead man Captain John said that he had a seven. I put a dollar bill in his bony hand when it came up. I shivered when I touched its bones. I was never meant to play games with a dead man.
-- R. A. Lafferty, “Gray Ghost: A Reminiscence”
A personal note about the first part of the story:
Growing up in Tulsa, I lived close enough to the Arkansas river that I was regularly warned from playing on the islands of sand that formed when the water ran low. The river ran low often because it was choked by the Keystone Dam. The islands that appeared were full of air pockets and loose sand and were wholly unstable. The street runs close to the river in several spots and you'd occasionally see someone doing something foolish out there in the middle of the water. I had never heard of anyone digging into the sand as they do in the story, but the threat of the environment was very real as a part of my childhood.
Growing up in Tulsa, I lived close enough to the Arkansas river that I was regularly warned from playing on the islands of sand that formed when the water ran low. The river ran low often because it was choked by the Keystone Dam. The islands that appeared were full of air pockets and loose sand and were wholly unstable. The street runs close to the river in several spots and you'd occasionally see someone doing something foolish out there in the middle of the water. I had never heard of anyone digging into the sand as they do in the story, but the threat of the environment was very real as a part of my childhood.
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