Jo.’s gladness, which somehow did not impress me, was duly and ostentatiously celebrated at the bottle.

“About five years ago I started in to stick up a shack.  That was before this one was built, and I put it in another place.  I set Ah Wee and a little cuss named Gopher to cutting the timber.  Of course I didn’t expect Ah Wee to help much, for he had a face like a day in June and big black eyes—­I guess maybe they were the damn’dest eyes in this neck o’ woods.”

While delivering this trenchant thrust at common sense Mr. Dunfer absently regarded a knot-hole in the thin board partition separating the bar from the living-room, as if that were one of the eyes whose size and color had incapacitated his servant for good service.

“Now you Eastern galoots won’t believe anything against the yellow devils,” he suddenly flamed out with an appearance of earnestness not altogether convincing, “but I tell you that Chink was the perversest scoundrel outside San Francisco.  The miserable pigtail Mongolian went to hewing away at the saplings all round the stems, like a worm o’ the dust gnawing a radish.  I pointed out his error as patiently as I knew how, and showed him how to cut them on two sides, so as to make them fall right; but no sooner would I turn my back on him, like this”—­and he turned it on me, amplifying the illustration by taking some more liquor—­“than he was at it again.  It was just this way:  while I looked at him, so”—­regarding me rather unsteadily and with evident complexity of vision—­“he was all right; but when I looked away, so”—­taking a long pull at the bottle—­“he defied me.  Then I’d gaze at him reproachfully, so, and butter wouldn’t have melted in his mouth.”

Doubtless Mr. Dunfer honestly intended the look that he fixed upon me to be merely reproachful, but it was singularly fit to arouse the gravest apprehension in any unarmed person incurring it; and as I had lost all interest in his pointless and interminable narrative, I rose to go.  Before I had fairly risen, he had again turned to the counter, and with a barely audible “so,” had emptied the bottle at a gulp.

Heavens! what a yell!  It was like a Titan in his last, strong agony.  Jo. staggered back after emitting it, as a cannon recoils from its own thunder, and then dropped into his chair, as if he had been “knocked in the head” like a beef—­his eyes drawn sidewise toward the wall, with a stare of terror.  Looking in the same direction, I saw that the knot-hole in the wall had indeed become a human eye—­a full, black eye, that glared into my own with an entire lack of expression more awful than the most devilish glitter.  I think I must have covered my face with my hands to shut out the horrible illusion, if such it was, and Jo.’s little white man-of-all-work coming into the room broke the spell, and I walked out of the house with a sort of dazed fear that delirium tremens might be infectious.  My horse was hitched at the watering-trough, and untying him I mounted and gave him his head, too much troubled in mind to note whither he took me.