Billy doesn’t know how to read a book, but give him a racing form and he can tell you everything about a pony that you’d ever want to know. He and his father live on the road, traveling from Aqueduct to Hialeah and back again, until an overzealous Welfare lady demands they settle somewhere more wholesome than the track. Not knowing anyplace wholesome, Billy’s father takes him to Texas instead, to live on his brother Sagamore’s farm.

 

There Billy meets bootleggers, gangsters, and the beautiful Miss Choo-Choo Caroline, a Chicago stripper who is wearing nothing but a tiny, diamond-encrusted G-string when she disappears. Uncle Sagamore, an enterprising brute, sees this as a chance for profit. For a boy with gambling in his veins, there could be quite a lot to learn.