Here was a bond of sympathy between the big, law-defying saloon-keeper and the frail toper from the East. Busted Blake drained his glass and presently coughed again. P. Gibbs again set forth the bottle, and this time he drank with Blake. Before long, by dint of repeated fits of coughing on the part of Blake, the sympathy of P. Gibbs was so worked upon that he invited the three miners in the saloon to join him and the stranger. Blake slept in a corner of the saloon that night. He left the next morning, a curious expression of resolution on his face. During the next three weeks he was now and then alluded to in P. Gibbs's saloon as the “coughing stranger.” In the middle of the third week, at nine o'clock in the evening, when the lamps in P. Gibbs's saloon were exerting their smallest degree of dimness and the bar was doing a good business, the door opened and in staggered Busted Blake. His staggering on this occasion was manifestly not due to drink. His face had the hideous concavities of a starved man and the uncertainty of his gait was the token of a mortal feebleness. His emaciation was painful to behold. His eyes glowed like huge gems. The crowd of miners looked at him with surprise as he entered. “The coughing stranger!” cried one. “The coffin stranger, you mean,” said another. Busted Blake lurched over to the bar. His eyes met those of P. Gibbs on the other side, and the latter reached for a whiskey-bottle. Blake fumbled in his pocket and brought forth a piece of soiled paper, which he laid on the bar under the glance of P. Gibbs. “Keep that!” said Blake, in a husky voice, whose service he compelled with much effort. “And keep your word, too! That's where you'll find her.” P. Gibbs picked up the paper. “What do you mean?” he asked. “That woman's name there. It's the name of my widow; the address, too, of a photograph man who will tell you where she is. Get the money to her quick, before the governor and the troops comes down on you to close you up. And don't let her know how it comes about. Pick a man to take it to her,--let him pay his expenses out of it,--a man you can trust, and make him tell her I made it somehow, mining or something, so she'll take it. You know.” P. Gibbs, who had listened with increasing amazement, opened wide his eyes and drew his revolver. He spoke in a strangely low, repressed voice: “Stranger, do you mean to say--” “Yes, that's it,” shrieked Busted Blake, turning toward the crowd of intensely interested onlookers. “And I call on all you here to witness and to hold him to his word. That's no mere bluff he says in his notice there, and I'm the sneaking hound that informed. My widow is entitled to $5,000. I did it in Topeka, and for proof, see this newspaper.” P. Gibbs fired a shot from his revolver through the newspaper that Blake pulled from his shirt. Then the saloon-keeper brought his weapon on a level with Blake's face. “It's good your boots is on!” said P. Gibbs, ironically.