“Ain’t blind, are you?” was Phil’s surly response, and Jim, with a slight shrug, twirled the ball. It hovered aimlessly for two or three turns as the wheel slowed down, and once it threatened to fall into a winning pocket; then, with the perversity of fortune, it slipped quietly into a partition and lay there. For a full quarter of a minute Jim did not touch it, nor the stakes that Phil had lost, and then he slowly reached over and swept the table clean, and, as he did so, again vented that slow laugh of his. “Told you I’d get you,” he said; but in the friendliest and most careless of tones. Phil, who had risen to his feet as the wheel spun, stood as if transfixed by adversity when Jim swept the last of the money into the drawer; but his lips were drawn back into a stiff, snarling grin, and his eyes were wild with disappointment and anger. At the sound of Jim’s laugh he suddenly broke loose into a storm of oaths, and, almost before any one could realize his intent, so swift was his action, he whipped a gun from his belt and “threw it down” on the wheelman. The quickness of Shakespeare George was, and still is, proverbial among those who knew him up and down the long Northwestern coast. Undoubtedly, on that evening, it was the means of saving the life of Laughing Jim; for even as George leaped forward from the side and caught Phil’s arm, the pistol exploded. But so sure and deft had been George’s attack, the heavy bullet merely buried itself in one of the poles of the cabin roof, and the pistol hand, clutched by the harsh, sinewy fingers of the miner, waved aloft helplessly as the two men struggled backward and forward. The roulette wheel with its table was overturned, and for a minute the room was filled with excited men who broke forward to witness or participate in any trouble. Quite steadily George forced Phil back against the wall, still clutching the upraised hand, and held him there. “Phil! Phil!” George expostulated. “What’s the matter with you--you fool! Cut it out, I tell you!” Other voices joined the protest, and another of the competents, Bill Davis, reached up and twisted the gun from Phil’s hand. George released his hold, and for a minute they stood there, angry, excited, and gathered as if for further combat; then, slowly, Phil relaxed. “You got a square deal, pardner, all right,” insisted Shakespeare George with his slow drawl. “I ain’t got no use at all for gamblers or them that plays; but we stood behind you when you commenced, and Jim told you he’d get your money. Then he tried to get you to stop when he saw luck was against you, and that you was gettin’ sore, and that didn’t do no good. I ain’t right sure that, if you’d ’a’ killed him, I wouldn’t have helped hang you. Now will you be good?”