But Long Mike raged as was his fashion, and called for red liquor many times, breathing out threats of what he would do on the morrow, till the others saw that it was necessary to encourage him in his effort to get a sufficiency of liquor. And when they had finally accomplished this, and had put him safely in his own bed, Stumpy said again: “Sure there’ll be no such thing as livin’ quiet an’ peaceable in Brownsville till we have a firsht-class killin’. But Oi do be thinkin’ it’ll not be Gallagher. He do get away too often.” XII A STRANGER AND FOND OF POKER The Mississippi River packet _City of Natchez_ had been tied up at the levee in Arkansas City for possibly half an hour. The passengers who wanted to go ashore had gone, all but one, and the roustabouts were struggling with the freight under the inspiring influence of the mate’s energetic comments. Possibly because of their terrified condition, resulting from the mate’s flow of language, but more probably because of their total indifference to consequences, they paid no attention whatever to a short, red-headed gentleman who might perhaps have been born in Ireland, and who came strolling from the direction of the boat’s barroom toward the single gangplank, now in use by the freight department. Even as they paid no attention to him, he paid none to them, but approached the gangplank somewhat unsteadily, with the evident intention of going ashore. The mate’s attention for the moment was fixed on some point at the other side of the deck, or it is a moral certainty that he would have interposed language of sufficient strength to arrest the belated passenger’s progress. As it happened, however, there was none to warn him of his danger, and he stepped in debonair fashion on the sloping gangplank, serenely unconscious of the fact that four huge darkies were coming behind him, bearing a case of goods on their shoulders that must have weighed something like a thousand pounds. It is an open question whether they saw that he was in their way, but it is absolutely certain that they recognized no obligation on their part to shout a warning. On they came, jog-trotting along till they were only a single pace behind him, when he either tripped or slipped, and, staggering, seemed about to fall. Had he fallen and so tripped the rousters, the matter would have been serious indeed. Just as he lost his balance, a sinewy hand was stretched forth from somewhere in the darkness, for it was late at night, and catching the tottering gentleman by the lapel of his coat, gave him such a mighty and overmastering yank that he darted forward on the double-quick for thirty or forty feet, and fell all in a heap on the levee. As he lay there, he was hopelessly undignified in appearance, but he was out of the path of the roustabouts. Quite as if nothing whatever had happened, he looked up at his unknown preserver, who could now be seen indistinctly, and said in a conversational tone: