at dealer--he
wasn't worth hell room!"

"Gimme a fiver to eat on!" demanded Rimrock as Bray banked the money,
but he flipped him fifty cents. It was the customary stake, the sop
thrown by the gambler to the man who has lost his last cent, and Bray
sloughed it without losing his count.

"Go on, now," he said, still keeping to the formula, "go back and
polish a drill!"

It was the form of dismissal for the hardrock miners whose earnings he
was wont to take, but Rimrock was not particular.

"All right, Ike," he said and as he drifted out the door his prosperity
friends disappeared. Only L. W. remained, a scornful twist to his
lips, and the sight of him left Rimrock sick. "Yes, rub it in!" he
said defiantly and L. W., too, walked away.

In his sober moments--when he was out on the desert or slugging away
underground--Rimrock Jones was neither childish nor a fool. He was a
serious man, with great hopes before him; and a past, not ignoble,
behind. But after months of solitude, of hard, yegging work and hopes
deferred, the town set his nerves all a-tingle--even Gunsight, a mere
dot on the map--and he was drunk before he took his first drink. Drunk
with mischief and spontaneous laughter, drunk with good stories untold,
new ideas, great thoughts, high ambitions. But now he had had his
fling.

With fifty cents to eat on, and one more faro game behind him, Rimrock
stood thoughtfully on the corner and asked the old question: What next?
He had won, and he had lost. He had made the stake that would have
taken him far towards his destiny; and then he had dropped it,
foolishly, by playing another man's game. He could see it now; but
then, we all can--the question was, what next?

"Well, I'll eat," he said at last and went across the street to Woo
Chong's. "The American Restaurant" was the way the sign read, but
Americans don't run restaurants in Arizona. They don't know how. Woo
Chong had fed forty miners when he ran the cookhouse for Rimrock, for
half what a white man could; and when Rimrock had lost his mine, at the
end of a long lawsuit, Woo Chong had followed him to town. There was a
long tally on the wall, the longest of all, which told how many meals
Rimrock owed him for; but Rimrock knew he was welcome. Adversity had
its uses and he had learned, among other things, that his best friends
were now Chinamen and Mexicans. To them, at least, he was still El
Patron--the Boss!

"Hello there, Woo!" he shouted a