“It rattled the bull-whacker, having so much attention drawn to him, and he stepped on the rope and twisted himself up in it and was flying light generally.

“‘Say!’ says Ag, appealing to the crowd, ’won’t some kind friend who’s fond of puzzles go down and help that gentleman do himself?’

“That made the whacker mad.  He was as red in the face as a lobster.

“’You come down and show what you can do,” says he.  ’You’ve got gas enough for a balloon ascension, but that may be all there is to you.’

“‘Oh, I ain’t so much,’ says Aggy, ’although I’m as good a man to-day as ever I was in my life—­but I have a little friend here who can rope, down, and ride that critter from here to the brick-front in five minutes by the watch; and if you’ve got a twenty-five dollar bill in your pocket, or its equivalent in dust, you can observe the experiment.’

“‘I’ll go you, by gosh!’ says the bull-whacker, slapping his hat on the ground and digging for his pile.

“‘Say, if you’re referring to me, Ag,’ I says, ’it’s kind of a sudden spring—­I ain’t what you might call in training, and that steer is full of triple-extract of giant powder.’

“‘G’wan!’ says Ag.  ’You can do it—­and then we’re twenty-five ahead.’

“‘But suppose we lose?’

“‘Well . . .  It won’t be such an awful loss.’

“‘Now you look here, Agamemnon G. Jones,’ says I, ’I ain’t going to stand for putting up a summer breeze ag’in’ that feller’s good dough—­that’s a skin game, to speak it pleasantly.’

“Then Aggy argues the case with me, and when Aggy started to argue, you might just as well ‘moo’ and chase yourself into the corral, because he’d get you, sure.  Why, that man could sit in the cabin and make roses bloom right in the middle of the floor; whilst he was singing his little song you could see ’em and smell ’em; he could talk a snowbank off a high divide in the middle of February.  Never see anybody with such a medicine tongue, and in a big man it was all the stranger.  ‘Now,’ he winds up, ’as for cheating that feller, you ought to know me better, Red—­why, I’ll give him my note!’

“So, anyhow, I done it.  Up the street we went, steer bawling and buck-jumping, my hair a-flying, and me as busy as the little bee you read about keeping that steer underneath me, ’stead of on top of me, where he’d ruther be, and after us the whole town, whoopin’, yellin’, crackin’ off six-shooters, and carryin’ on wild.

“Then we had twenty-five dollars and was as good as anybody.  But it didn’t last long.  The tin-horns come out after pay-day, like hop-toads after a rain.  ’Twould puzzle the Government at Washington to know where they hang out in the meantime.  There was one lad had a face on him with about as much expression as a hotel punkin pie.  He run an arrow game, and he talked right straight along in a voice that had no more bends in it than a billiard cue.