culation, and provoked strenuous
profanity and exceeding bitterness in the Europeans, Particularly in
those whose luck was not good. There was already talk of a white rising
to drive the heathen from the field, and Done found his mates entirely in
sympathy with the common sentiment; to him; also the Celestials became
exceedingly repellent as he grew more familiar with their habits and
manners, although he was opposed to making differences of race an excuse
for wholesale robbery.

The Chinese camp was strictly apart from that of the whites, and there
was no intercourse between the two parties, Levi Long being the only man
who seemed attracted to the squalid huts into which the Mongolians packed
themselves by some process mysterious to the Caucasian understanding. Men
in whom gambling was an absorbing passion could never be wholly
objectionable to a man of his peculiar principles; but he came back from
his third visit to their camp with his hands sunk to the bottoms of his
pockets and a troubled look on his smooth countenance.

'They've sprung a new game on me down there,' he said to a crowd in the
shanty, nodding his head back. 'I thought I'd picked up something about
it, an' it's cost me every bit o' glitter I had on me to demonstrate to
my entire satisfaction that I was quite wrong. I haven't got a scale
left. I'm feelin' like a little boy who's been tryin' to teach his gran'
mother all about eggs.'

'Fantan?' said Burton.

'Somethin' o' that character an' complexion. Boys, I begin to think that
p'r'aps after all we're doin' wrong in submittin' to the encroachments o'
the alien.'

Hear, hear!' shouted half a dozen voices.

'It strikes me that the inferior race that can skin Levi Long to his pelt
in a gamble is providin' no fit associates for guileless an' confidin'
children o' the Occident, like yourselves, f'r instance.'

Long's professional pride was hurt; the idea of being beaten at his own
business by a pack of unlettered Asiatics made him sad. 'It kinder
destroys a man's faith in himself he said. As a result of his eloquence
the miners knotted windlass-ropes together, and stole down upon the
Chinese camp in the small and early hours of morning. There were twenty
men on each cable, and one lot kept to the right of the camp, the other
to the left, and, going noiselessly, they dragged the ropes through the
frail huts and kennels in which the Mongols were sleeping, mowing them
down as if they had been houses o