t. If not, he kept it open a few minutes longer till he had
enough people inside to warrant closing. But never, never unless he was
assured that Pepperleigh, the judge of the court, and Macartney, the
prosecuting attorney, were both safely in the bar, or the bar parlour,
did the proprietor venture to close up. Yet on this fatal night
Pepperleigh and Macartney had been shut out--actually left on the street
without a drink, and compelled to hammer and beat at the street door of
the bar to gain admittance.

This was the kind of thing not to be tolerated. Either a hotel must be
run decently or quit. An information was laid next day and Mr. Smith
convicted in four minutes,--his lawyers practically refusing to plead.
The Mariposa court, when the presiding judge was cold sober, and it
had the force of public opinion behind it, was a terrible engine of
retributive justice.

So no wonder that Mr. Smith awaited with anxiety the message of his
legal adviser.

He looked alternately up the street and down it again, hauled out his
watch from the depths of his embroidered pocket, and examined the hour
hand and the minute hand and the second hand with frowning scrutiny.

Then wearily, and as one mindful that a hotel man is ever the servant of
the public, he turned back into the hotel.

"Billy," he said to the desk clerk, "if a wire comes bring it into the
bar parlour."

The voice of Mr. Smith is of a deep guttural such as Plancon or Edouard
de Reske might have obtained had they had the advantages of the hotel
business. And with that, Mr. Smith, as was his custom in off moments,
joined his guests in the back room. His appearance, to the untrained
eye, was merely that of an extremely stout hotelkeeper walking from the
rotunda to the back bar. In reality, Mr. Smith was on the eve of one of
the most brilliant and daring strokes ever effected in the history of
licensed liquor. When I say that it was out of the agitation of this
situation that Smith's Ladies' and Gent's Cafe originated, anybody who
knows Mariposa will understand the magnitude of the moment.

Mr. Smith, then, moved slowly from the doorway of the hotel through the
"rotunda," or more simply the front room with the desk and the cigar
case in it, and so to the bar and thence to the little room or back bar
behind it. In this room, as I have said, the brightest minds of Mariposa
might commonly be found in the quieter part of a summer afternoon.

To-day there was a group of