m him.
Her glossy black curls were a bit dishevelled, and the excitement of the
night had added to the vivid colouring of her rouged lips and cheeks. Her
body was sleek and sinuous in its silken vesture; arms and shoulders were
startlingly white; and when she turned, facing Aldous, her black eyes
flashed fires of deviltry and allurement.

For a moment he stared into her face. If he had not been looking closely he
would not have caught the swift change that shot into the siren-like play
of her orbs. It was almost instantaneous. Her slow-travelling glance
stopped as she saw him. He saw the quick intake of her breath, a sudden
compression of her lips, the startled, searching scrutiny of a pair of eyes
from which, for a moment, all the languor and coquetry of her trade were
gone. Then she passed him, smiling again, nodding, sweeping a hand and arm
effectively through her handsome curls as she flung a shapely limb over the
broad back of the bear. In a garish sort of way the woman was beautiful,
and this night, as on all others, her beauty had nearly filled the silken
coin-bag suspended from her neck. As she rode down the street Aldous
recalled Blackton's words: She was a friend of Culver Rann's. He wondered
if this fact accounted for the strangeness of the look she had given him.

He passed on to the dance-hall. It was crowded, mostly with men. But here
and there, like so many faces peering forth from living graves, he saw the
Little Sisters of Tete Jaune Cache. Outnumbered ten to one, their voices
rang out in shrill banter and delirious laughter above the rumble of men.
At the far end, a fiddle, a piano, and a clarinet were squealing forth
music. The place smelled strongly of whisky. It always smelled of that, for
most of the men who sought amusement here got their whisky in spite of the
law. There were rock-hogs from up the line, and rock-hogs from down the
line, men of all nationalities and of almost all ages; teamsters,
trail-cutters, packers, and rough-shod navvies; men whose daily task was to
play with dynamite and giant powder; steel-men, tie-men, and men who
drilled into the hearts of mountains. More than once John Aldous had looked
upon this same scene, and had listened to the trample and roar and wild
revelry of it, marvelling that to-morrow the men of this saturnalia would
again be the builders of an empire. The thin, hollow-cheeked faces that
passed and repassed him, rouged and smiling, could not destroy in his mi