The barred window was still barred; I had not gone through the door; how had I managed my disappearance? It was witchery!--or like the flitting of a ghost! Even in my refuge I could feel the awe and the chill that began to creep about my visitors as they looked uneasily and repeated, as folk who touch some graveyard mystery: “Where’s Jack?” There was no help; fate held me in a corner and never a crack of escape! Shame-faced, dust-sprinkled and perspiring like a harvest hand--for my hiding place was not Nova Zembla--I threw back the top of the lounge and stood there--the image of confusion--the “man with a pull”--the ally of the powers--the “protected” proprietor of The Shotgun! There was a moment of silence; and next fell a whirlwind of mirth. There is no argument for saying more. I was laughed out of Providence and into New York. The Shotgun was laughed out of existence. And with it all, I too, laughed; for was it not good, even though inadvertent comedy? Also, was it not valuable comedy to leave me better by half a hundred thousand dollars--that comedy of The Shotgun? And thereupon, while I closed my game, I opened my mouth widely and laughed with the others. In green-cloth circles the story is still told; and whenever I encounter a friend of former days, I’m inevitably recalled to my lounge-holdout and that midnight stampede of The Shotgun. ***** “That’s where the west,” observed the Old Cattleman, who had given delighted ear to the Red Nosed Gentleman’s story, “that’s where the west has the best of the east. In Arizona a passel of folks engaged in testin’ the demerits of farobank ain’t runnin’ no more resks of the constables than they be of chills an’ fever.” “There are laws against gambling in the west?” This from the Jolly Doctor. “Shore, thar’s laws.” “Why, then, aren’t they enforced?” “This yere’s the reason,” responded the Old Cattleman. “Thar’s so much more law than force, that what force exists is wholly deevoted to a round-up of rustlers an’ stage hold-ups an’ sech. Besides, it’s the western notion to let every gent skin his own eel, an’ the last thing thought of is to protect you from yourse’f. No kyard sharp can put a crimp in you onless you freely offers him a chance, an’ if you-all is willin’, why should the public paint for war? In the east every gent is tryin’ to play some other gent’s hand; not so in that tolerant region styled the west. Which it ain’t too much to say that folks get killed--an’ properly--in the west for possessin’ what the east calls virchoos.” And here the Old Cattleman shook his head sagely over a western superiority. “The east mixes itse’f too much in a gent’s private affairs. Now if Deef Smith an’ Colonel Morton” he concluded, “had ondertook to pull off their dooel in the east that Texas time, the east would have come down on ’em like a failin’ star an’ squelched it.” “And what was this duel you speak of?” asked the Sour Gentleman. “I, for one, would be most ready to hear the story.1’