ndo_," he stammered, though I had heard him use good-enough
English of a sort in wheedling for tips. Impatient at his stupidity and
my own jumpy nerves, I flung away from him--or, rather, I started to
fling and was halted there in my tracks....

Now the contact of a revolver is something that no man need be taught to
identify. It is a part of instinctive knowledge. When a hard blunt nose
snuggled suddenly under my lowest rib I required no verbal order to make
me stand quite passive and obedient. So I did stand, while still
mechanically resisting the furtive, tremulous fingers that came stealing
round my wrist, trying to force my hand open.

I was not half so frightened as amazed, and certainly not half so
frightened as the creature himself. I knew it must be the wretched
little attendant who was tickling me with that revolver, and that he was
trying to hold me up for something--what it might be I scarcely thought.
If he had been respectable in any way through strength or skill or
personality, I believe I might have yielded. But to be robbed by this
miserable hireling, this pop-eyed dispenser of bad cocktails, himself in
a state of the most abject funk, roused all the stubbornness of which I
was capable. As if a sheep had assaulted me!

I suppose I should have allowed myself to be shot ingloriously had not
the big gambler discovered what was going on. In two steps he was by me,
pouched the weapon with a fist like a muff, and simply abolished
Pop-eye....

"Easy now!" he warned him. "Don't yell!" It was an absurd anticlimax to
see that bold, bad gunman being jammed upright to keep him from falling
in a heap. "Reposo yourself, matey, if you know what's good. Be
quiet--comprendo so much? Nobody's going to hurt you."

Somehow I found myself back at the little table. The gambler occupied
the chair at my right this time, whence he could watch my late enemy,
who hung collapsed over the bar. Except for these trifling changes, the
whole incident might have seemed illusion.

"What was that for?" I managed to ask.

The gambler answered with a negligence that struck me in my condition of
mind like an affront:

"Well, the lad's of no importance--don't you see? He had to do what he
was told and he wasn't up to his job--that's all. But I thought we'd
best keep him in view. No sense having him run off to report."

"How true!" I said with a faint attempt at emulation. "One concedes the
frivolity of having the lad run off to repo