It was the Chinaman!
* * * * *
Early the next morning, a cortége composed of every citizen who was able to walk, climbed slowly and sorrowfully up the road leading to the little cemetery, just back of town. At the head of the solemn procession were six stout miners, hat in hand, bearing upon a rude stretcher the body of Poker Jim. Just behind the body, another party was carrying a rough coffin, composed of pieces of wreckage, hastily thrown together.
By no means the least sorrowful feature of the funeral was the fact that we had no means of communication with the dead man’s wife, nor did we indeed, even know whether or not she had witnessed his death.
The cemetery reached, and the body having been laid in the clumsy coffin beside the grave which the kind-hearted miners had already dug, there was an embarrassing pause—
I had been asked to say a few words, in lieu of a clergyman, and had agreed to do so, on condition that some one else was selected to say something in behalf of the mining population proper. Dixie was selected to coöperate with me, but was evidently waiting for me to give him his cue, so I was obliged to open the services as well as I could.
I was so overcome with emotion that I could hardly find voice to say a word. I finally managed, however, to give a brief eulogy of the dead man, revolving chiefly around the incident that happened in the San Francisco gambling-house on the occasion when I met Jim for the first time. My remarks were received with a running fire of muttered eulogies of the deceased hero, which were as sincere as they were inelegant.
Dixie now mustered up the necessary courage, mounted a stump and began:
“Feller citizens, we air hyar ter do a solemn dooty. One uv our most prom’nent an’ respected citizens is a lyin’ hyar dead, an’ we, ez his fren’s, air hyar ter give him a good send off. Poker Jim hez passed in his checks; he hez cashed in fer the las’ time, an’ thar aint nobody hyar whut’ll say that his last deal wasn’t a squar one. Sum mout say ez how Jim was a d—d fool, ter play agin sich a dead open-an’-shut game, with a d—d Chinaman fer stakes, but, my feller citizens, Jim cut the cards on the squar’, an’ he died ez squar’ ez enny man that ever stepped in shoe leather.
“An’ Jim died game, an’ with his boots on. He wasn’t no white-livered coyote, Jim wasn’t. Ef thar was enny yaller streaks in him, w’y nobody ever knowed it. He wuz a sandy man frum way up the creek, y’u bet! He wuz a dead-game cock fer fair.