ns of exhaustion, and the gulch and ore
mining afforded but a precarious alternative to the thousands who had
gone in on the crest of the bonanza wave. Almost as tumultuously as it
had swept into the hill country, the tide of population swept out. For
the gulch hamlets between the Timanyonis there was still an industrial
reason for being; but the railroad languished, and Angels became the
weir to catch and retain many of the leavings, the driftwood stranded in
the slack water of the outgoing tide. With the railroad, the Copperette
Mine, and the "X-bar-Z" pay-days to bring regularly recurring moments of
flushness, and with every alternate door in Mesa Avenue the entrance to
a bar, a dance-hall, a gambling den, or the three in combination, the
elemental appetites grew avid, and the hot breath of the desert fanned
slow fires of brutality that ate the deeper when they penetrated to the
punk heart of the driftwood.

It was during this period of deflagration and dry rot that the Eastern
owners of the railroad lost heart. Since the year of the Red Butte
inrush there had been no dividends; and Chandler, summoned from another
battle with the canyons in the far Northwest, was sent in to make an
expert report on the property. "Sell it for what it will bring," was the
substance of Chandler's advice; but there were no bidders, and from this
time on a masterless railroad was added to the spoils of war--the
inexpiable war of the Red Desert upon its invaders.

At the moment of the moribund railroad's purchase by the Pacific
Southwestern, the desert was encroaching more and more upon the town
planted in its western border. In the height of Angels's prosperity
there had been electric lights and a one-car street tramway, a bank,
and a Building and Loan Association attesting its presence in rows of
ornate cottages on the second mesa--alluring bait thrown out to catch
the potential savings of the railroad colonists.

But now only the railroad plant was electric-lighted; the single
ramshackle street-car had been turned into a _chile-con-carne_ stand;
the bank, unable to compete with the faro games and the roulette wheels,
had gone into liquidation; the Building and Loan directors had long
since looted the treasury and sought fresh fields, and the cottages were
chiefly empty shells.

Of the charter members of the Building and Loan Association, shrewdest
of the many boom-time schemes for the separation of the pay-roll man
from his money, o