Snippet #1523193

"Looks like I win again, Itch." Hanzel hears Gilfried cheer as he lay down the cards in his hand on the stump the two sat at, holding the usual grin on his face.
"How do you win so much, Gilfried", says Hanzel in a frustrated tone, he didn't like being beaten, but he could handle it; besides, poker wasn't his best game, despite how much he liked to play.
"It's your face, Hanz, you can't expect to be good at poker with a face as revealin' as yours, you can't keep from bitin' that bottom lip whenever you get a bad hand. You gotta keep a poker face, like me; I always wear a grin when I play poker, no matter when I'm losin' or winnin'." Gilfried grins a bit wider.
Hanzel looks at him with dull disbelief, seeing his grin alter just slightly. "You always wear a poker face, then. Maybe you've been hiding more from me than just your cards..." Hanzel leans in looking closely at Gilfried, then leans back excited, "Another hand?"
"Well, Itch, we could pretend to."
"Pretend?", Hanzel asked, confused as to what he meant.
Gilfried passes out cards, "You hear anything, Itch?"
Hanzel listens, things were very silent in the forest. "No, I don't."
"Exactly." Gilfried mumbles, grinning through his cigarette, but you could tell he was tense or at least very focused on directing his attention to something else. "No owls hooting, no leaves rustling, no cheeky little laughs that freak me the fuck out", Gilfried takes out his cigarette and extinguishes it, looking at his cards as if nothing was happening, "and you know what that means."
Hanzel nodded, slowly turning his head to his cards, looking casual so as not to alert the predator of their awareness of it. "Something freaked the fuck out of the laughing things." He had no idea what they were, but there had been rustles of bushes and little laughs that sent chills up your spine all night.
"Yup, i got my gun at the ready." He snapped his fingers and motioned to one of the four men besides Horris, who was standing just a few feet off and never left Hanzel's side unless Hanzel told him to. He had heard the conversation but kept doing what he was doing for the past half hour--scanning the campsite calmly. Gilfried made a series of hand signs and the men started to fan out around the fog, looking over the ground with rifles at the ready.
Hanzel shifted his eyes around, Gilfried had returned to playing mock cards with Hanzel; both were laying down random cards at random intervals, and going on making idle chit-chat. Besides the orders to the men, no one looking from a distance would have noticed a thing different about what they were doing apart from what they had been doing for a good hour.