ash would get run out by the Faculty. You ought to see
our president put up his pile and draw to a pair of deuces. What!--a
Reverend! I beg your pardon, friend. 'S all right. Jest name the game
you're strong at and we'll try to accommodate you later on. Here, you
fellows, watch my chips while I show the Reverend around our diggin's.
You nip one like you did last time, Turk Bowman, and there'll be the
all-firedest row that this shack has ever seed. Come right along,
Reverend."

[Illustration: "Har's das spy'" he yelled "Kill him, fallers, he ban a
spy!"
_Page 132_]

That tour was a great triumph for Bangs. We always did admire his
acting, but he outdid himself that night. The rest of us just kept quiet
and let him handle the conversation, and I must say it sounded desperate
enough to be convincing. Of course he slipped up occasionally and stuck
in words that would have choked an ordinary cow-gentleman, but Diggsey
was that dazed he wouldn't have suspected if they had been Latin. I
thought it would be more or less of a job to explain how we were living
in a fifteen-thousand-dollar house instead of dugouts, but Bangs never
hesitated a minute. He explained that the house belonged to a
millionaire cattle-owner who had built it from reading a society novel,
and that he let us live in it because he preferred to live in the barn
with the horses. The boys had filled their rooms full of junk and one of
them had even tied a pig to his bed--while the way Bangs cleared
rubbish out of the bathtub and promised to have some water heated in the
morning was convincingly artless. He had just finished explaining that,
owing to the boiler-plate in the walls, the house was practically Indian
proof, when an awful fusillade of shots broke out from the kitchen.
Bangs disappeared for a moment, gun in hand, and I watched our guest
trying to make himself six inches narrower and three feet shorter. I
don't know when I ever saw a chap so anxious to melt right down into a
corner and be mistaken for a carpet tack.

"'S all right," said Bangs, clumping in cheerfully. "Jest the cook
having another fit. We've got a cook," he explained, "who gets loaded up
'bout oncet a month so full that he cries pure alcohol, and when he gits
that way he insists on trying to shoot cockroaches with his gun. He
ain't never killed one, but he's gotten two Chinamen and a mule, and
we've got to put a stop to it. He's tied up in the cellar a-swearin'
t