d if you've got a
twenty-five dollar bill in your pocket, or its equivalent in dust,
you can observe the experiment.'

"'I'll go you, by gosh!' says the bull-whacker, slapping his hat on
the ground and digging for his pile.

"'Say, if you're referring to me, Ag,' I says, 'it's kind of a
sudden spring--I ain't what you might call in training, and that
steer is full of triple-extract of giant powder.'

"'G'wan!' says Ag. 'You can do it--and then we're twenty-five
ahead.'

"'But suppose we lose?'

"'Well . . . It won't be such an awful loss.'

"'Now you look here, Agamemnon G. Jones,' says I, 'I ain't going to
stand for putting up a summer breeze ag'in' that feller's good
dough--that's a skin game, to speak it pleasantly.'

"Then Aggy argues the case with me, and when Aggy started to argue,
you might just as well 'moo' and chase yourself into the corral,
because he'd get you, sure. Why, that man could sit in the cabin
and make roses bloom right in the middle of the floor; whilst he
was singing his little song you could see 'em and smell 'em; he
could talk a snowbank off a high divide in the middle of February.
Never see anybody with such a medicine tongue, and in a big man it
was all the stranger. 'Now,' he winds up, 'as for cheating that
feller, _you_ ought to know me better, Red--why, I'll give him my
note!'

"So, anyhow, I done it. Up the street we went, steer bawling and
buck-jumping, my hair a-flying, and me as busy as the little bee
you read about keeping that steer underneath me, 'stead of on top
of me, where he'd ruther be, and after us the whole town, whoopin',
yellin', crackin' off six-shooters, and carryin' on wild.

"Then we had twenty-five dollars and was as good as anybody. But
it didn't last long. The tin-horns come out after pay-day, like
hop-toads after a rain. 'Twould puzzle the Government at
Washington to know where they hang out in the meantime. There was
one lad had a face on him with about as much expression as a hotel
punkin pie. He run an arrow game, and he talked right straight
along in a voice that had no more bends in it than a billiard cue.

"'Here's where you get your three for one any child may do it no
chance to lose make your bets while the arrow of fortune swings all
gents accommodated in amounts from two-bits to double-eagles and
bets paid on the nail,' says he.

"'Red,' says Aggy, 'I can double our pile right here--let me have
the money. I know this game.' You'