he rejoined. "But if you'll use the one
you'll keep the other."

Gazing neither right nor left I strode resolutely for the exit. Now I had
an anchor to windward. Sometimes just one word will face a man about when
for lack of that mere word he was drifting. Of the games and the people I
wished only to be rid forever; but at the exit I was halted by a hand laid
upon my arm, and a quick utterance.

"Not going? You will at least say good-night."

I barely paused, replying to her.

"Good-night."

Still she would have detained me.

"Oh, no, no! Not this way. It was a mistake. I swear to you I am not to be
blamed. Please let me help you. I don't know what you've heard--I don't
know what has been said about me--you are angry----"

I twitched free, for she should not work upon me again. With such as she,
a vampire and yet a woman, a man's safety lay not in words but in
unequivocal action.

"Good-night," I bade thickly, half choked by that same nausea, now hot.
Bearing with me a satisfying but somehow annoyingly persistent imprint of
moist blue eyes under shimmering hair, and startled white face plashed on
one cheek with vivid crimson, and small hand left extended empty, I
roughly stalked on and out, free of her, free of the Big Tent, her lair.

All the way to the hotel, through the garish street, I nursed my wrath
while it gnawed at me like the fox in the Spartan boy's bosom; and once in
my room, which fortuitously had no other tenants at this hour, I had to
lean out of the narrow window for sheer relief in the coolness. Surely
pride had had a fall this night.

There "roared" Benton--the Benton to which, as to prosperity, I had
hopefully purchased my ticket ages ago. And here cowered I, holed
up--pillaged, dishonored, worthless in even this community: a young fellow
in jaunty frontier costume, new and brave, but really reduced to sackcloth
and ashes; a young fellow only a husk, as false in appearance as the Big
Tent itself and many another of those canvas shells.

The street noises--shouts, shots, music, songs, laughter, rattle of dice,
whirr of wheel and clink of glasses--assailed me discordant. The scores of
tents and shacks stretching on irregularly had become pocked with dark
spots, where lights had been extinguished, but the street remained ablaze
and the desert without winked at the stars. There were moving gleams at
the railroad yards where switch engines puffed back and forth; up the
grade and the new track,