“Maybe not; just the same, it goes as it lies. You ought to know me by this time. Keep your hands where I can see them--it’s safer, because I can always beat you to the draw. Now listen: if you had the brain of a louse, Sheeny--which you haven’t--you’d know that I am worth more to the house in a month than a little one-horse railroad clerk would be in a year.” And to show his good will, he turned to the nearest roulette wheel and took his place in the circle of players. It was something like an hour later, and after he had consistently and painstakingly lost considerably more than the sum he had given young Middleton, that he drifted aimlessly out of the game room and across the stair-head landing into the open space serving as the back gallery of the varieties theater. A dancing girl in chalk-white tights had just finished her turn, and men in the crowded lower part of the theater were pitching silver dollars onto the stage in lieu of bouquets, stamping their applause with booted feet. Philip, looking down upon the scene in a saddened reverie from the gallery height, saw the beginning of a drunken fight in the pit. Two shirt-sleeved men from the third row of seats in the orchestra struggled up, went into a fierce clinch and stumbled into the aisle in a pummelling wrestle. Before any of the aproned bar-servers could drop their trays and intervene, the wrestlers fell apart and there was the sharp report of a pistol to dominate the clamor of stamping feet--the crack of a pistol and a woman’s scream. The gurgling scream came from one of the gallery boxes on the left, and Philip whipped out of his sober reverie with a bound and ran. Half-way down the passageway behind the row of cell-like boxes he collided with a red-faced man racing to escape. “They’ve shot the woman!” he gasped, struggling to free himself from Philip’s detaining grasp. “Lemme get out of here--I ain’t in it!” Philip let the craven go and hurried on. In the box of tragedy the curtain had been drawn and two women were kneeling over a third who was lying on the floor. One of the women sprang to her feet as he entered and her eyes were blazing. “That pie-eyed ---- ---- ---- down there shot at nothin’ and got Lola!” she raged. “Don’t let her die in this hell-hole! Get help to carry her over to her room! It’s just across the street.” In a trice Philip had captured two of the gallery drink servers, and the victim of the wild shot was quickly carried out and down the stairs and across to the darkened building opposite, the two women following. At the foot of the unlighted stairway where Jean Dabney had more than once turned him back, Philip found himself in the clutch of the woman with the blazing eyes. “Wait,” she panted. “There’s enough of ’em to carry her up and to run for a doctor and her man. What she’s needin’ is a priest, but she ain’t a Catholic, and none o’ the others’d dirty their hands with the likes of us.”