"Where's the man, Smiler?" asked Phil.

The boy grinned and nodded his head, as if to say:--"Come along,--I'll show you."

He led Phil through the back lanes to Chinatown, stopping in front of a cheap, Chinese restaurant. He pointed inside. Phil made to enter.

He encountered, of all people, Brenchfield coming out.

The suddenness of the Mayor's appearance caused him to catch his breath. In Phil's mind it solved the problem at once.

Brenchfield stopped and stared at Phil, then he glared at Smiler who turned tail and ran off as if for his very life.

The Mayor appeared to be in one of his most sullen moods. He turned again and looked angrily at Phil, his eyes travelling from the young smith's face to his boots, then back to his left hand in which he still held his recovered spurs.

Phil jingled them suggestively, and kept on into the restaurant.

Brenchfield remained on the sidewalk in front of the door.

Phil knew quite well that he was taking chances, but he risked that.

There was nothing of any moment taking place in the main dining-room.

Several diners were on stools at the counter. Others were at tables. A Chinese waiter was serving, while the cook was tossing hot cakes beside the cooking range. The door of the adjoining room was open.

Some Chinamen were at a table, deeply interested in a game of chuckaluck. In a room still farther back, some white men were playing poker.

Phil strolled in there. No one paid any heed to him.

His eyes travelled over the players. He did not know any of them. But it did not take him a second to settle in his mind which was the man he was after.

A little, stout, narrow-eyed fellow, who did not seem to have been shaved or washed for months, was seated at the far corner, chewing tobacco viciously. Evidently he had just resumed his game, for Phil heard one of the players exclaim:--

"Aw!--get a move on, Ginger! What'n the deuce do you want to keep us here all day for, waitin' for you and that blasted Mayor to quit chewin' the fat?"

None worried about the new arrival: they were all too engrossed in their game.

In the middle of it, Phil went up close.

"Men,--I hate to b.u.t.t in, but I want that dirty little fellow over there." He pointed suggestively at his man.

"Yes,--you Ginger!" he shouted, as the little man gaped.

"Aw,--get back on your base!" was all he got for answer, for the man had no idea who had challenged him, and drunks had a habit of interfering at cards, ultimately to find themselves thrown out into the street. He took Phil for one of those and left it to the man nearest to the intruder to settle the account.

With a quick movement Phil threw his body over the table, catching the little fellow smartly by the neck-cloth and shirt in a grip that there was no gainsaying. By the sheer power of his right hand and arm, he pulled the astonished Ginger--before his more astonished partners--right across the table, planting him on his feet in front of him.

The little man gasped for breath and struggled, but finding his struggling merely meant more strangling, he commenced to feel at his hip as if for a gun.

Phil struck him on the side of the head, sending him staggering against the wall. As Ginger recovered, Phil held his spurs under the man's nose and jingled them.

"I guess you know these?"

The fellow's narrow eyes opened wide. He let out a guttural sound and sprang for the door. Phil shot after him. But the little one's speed was accelerated by his fear. Phil's boot was all that reached him and it did its work uncommonly well. A nicely planted kick, just when he reached the door-step, sent Ginger in the air and seated him on the plank sidewalk. He jumped up almost before he touched the boards and tore down the road as if the devil himself were behind him.

Brenchfield, who had been a silent spectator of what had taken place, came into the main room of the restaurant, where a crowd of low whites and curious Chinese had gathered.

"Look here, young man!--you don't want to be doing much of that in this town or you'll find yourself locked up."

Phil shook his spurs in the Mayor's face.

"And _you_ don't want to be doing much of _this_, or you'll find yourself my next cell neighbour."

The Mayor had no idea how far his opponent was prepared to go, and evidently afraid to risk a scene, he turned his back on Phil with an oath.

"First time I catch that d.a.m.ned, sneaking little rat I saw you with I'll thrash him within an inch of his miserable little life."

"You just try it on,--and, G.o.d help you,--that's all," retorted Phil.

CHAPTER X

Jim's Grand Toot

As Phil knocked the dust from his clothes and wiped the perspiration from his face, it suddenly struck him that Jim Langford must have been waiting fully half an hour for him at the Kenora.

He hurried through Chinatown and down toward the hotel. When he got there, he found Jim in lazy conversation with some pa.s.sing acquaintance, whom he immediately left.

"Did you finish what you were after, Phil?"

"You bet!"

"Tell me about it. I wish to size the thing up."

With the exception of his encounter with the Mayor, Phil recounted all that had happened. He preferred keeping to himself that little bout he had had with Brenchfield, for he knew Jim already had suspicions that he and Brenchfield had some old secret antagonism toward each other.

Some day, he thought, he might feel constrained to unburden himself on the point to Jim, but the time for that did not appear to be ripe.

"Darned funny!" remarked Langford, when Phil concluded. "I can't recollect the man from your description and there doesn't seem to be any connection between him and the flour and feed steal. But--what the devil could that fellow be after, anyway?"

Suddenly, as was his habit, he dismissed the subject and broke in on another.

"Say, Phil,--know who's in the card-room?"

"No!"

"An old pal of yours!" He commenced to sing a line of an old Scot's song:--"Rob Roy McGregor O."

"Yes!"

"How's your liver?"