cheek seventy and seven times I doctored the dice so that he didn't
last forever. And I'm almighty glad I had the sand to do it.

Jo.'s gladness, which somehow did not impress me, was duly and
ostentatiously celebrated at the bottle.

"About five years ago I started in to stick up a shack. That was
before this one was built, and I put it in another place. I set Ah
Wee and a little cuss named Gopher to cutting the timber. Of course
I didn't expect Ah Wee to help much, for he had a face like a day in
June and big black eyes--I guess maybe they were the damn'dest eyes
in this neck o' woods."

While delivering this trenchant thrust at common sense Mr. Dunfer
absently regarded a knot-hole in the thin board partition separating
the bar from the living-room, as if that were one of the eyes whose
size and color had incapacitated his servant for good service.

"Now you Eastern galoots won't believe anything against the yellow
devils," he suddenly flamed out with an appearance of earnestness not
altogether convincing, "but I tell you that Chink was the perversest
scoundrel outside San Francisco. The miserable pigtail Mongolian
went to hewing away at the saplings all round the stems, like a worm
o' the dust gnawing a radish. I pointed out his error as patiently
as I knew how, and showed him how to cut them on two sides, so as to
make them fall right; but no sooner would I turn my back on him, like
this"--and he turned it on me, amplifying the illustration by taking
some more liquor--"than he was at it again. It was just this way:
while I looked at him, SO"--regarding me rather unsteadily and with
evident complexity of vision--"he was all right; but when I looked