"The boys call him ’The Failure,’" Laughlin explained. "You find a man like that in the corner of most every ho-tel-bar you go into in this here Western country—always a-playing that there lonesome game, I ’m always scared to ask ’em what the rudiments o’ that game is for they ’re always kind o’ rat-house,—of unsound mind, them men is. I heerd a gentleman explain one day that it’s a great game for steadyin’ the head. He gets a remittance from England, they say. Anyhow, he stands up to the bar once every two months and blows himself in for about three-four days. Then he goes back to his table there and sets down to his lonesome card game again and frowns away over it for another couple o’ months. I guess that gentleman was right in what he explained. I guess he holds his brains together on that there game." We found seats in a corner of the room and Laughlin again cleared his throat. He had a name for taking a real delight in imparting information and spinning yarns, true, fictitious, and otherwise, to his guests, and this time we were not interrupted. He told me the story of the Lost Cabin Mine, or as much of that story as was known by that time, ere his smiling Chinese cook came to inform him "dinnah vely good. Number A1 dinnah to-day, Misholaughlin, ledy in half-oh." *CHAPTER II* _*Mr. Laughlin Tells the Story up to Date*_ Mr. Laughlin’s suggestion that I should go out and look for this Lost Cabin and, finding it, "live happy ever after," made me but the more anxious to hear all that was to be told regarding it. "Well, about this here Lost Cabin Mine," he said. "There’s a little, short, stubby fellow that you maybe have noticed around here, with a pock-marked face,—Mike Canlan, they call him. He was up to Tremont putting in assessment on a claim he has in the mountains there away, and he was comin’ along back by the trail on the mountains that runs kind o’ parallel with the stage road, but away up on the hills, and there he picks up a feller nigh dead,—starved to death, pretty nigh. Mike gets him up on his pack-horse and comes along slow down through the mountain till he hits the waggon road from the Poorman. There a team from the Poorman Mine makes up on him. That there fellow, Apache Kid, was drivin’ the team, and along with him was Larry Donoghue, a partner o’ his, with another team. They had been haulin’ up supplies for one of the stores, and was comin’ down light. They offer to help Canlan down with the dying man, seein’ as how the hoss was gettin’ pretty jaded with all Canlan’s outfit on its back, and this here man, too, tied on, and wabbling about mighty weak."