de Neale
realize that Benton had arisen in a day and would die out in a night;
its life would be swift, vile, and deadly.

When the band ceased a sudden roar came from inside the big tent, a
commingling of the rough voices of men and the humming of wheels, the
clinking of glasses and gold, the rattling of dice, the hoarse call of
a dealer, the shuffling of feet--a roar pierced now and then by the
shrill, vacant, soundless laugh of a woman.

It was that last sound which almost turned Neale away from the door.
He shunned women. But this place fascinated him. He went in under the
flaming lamps.

The place was crowded--a huge tent stretched over a framework of wood,
and it was full of people, din, smoke, movement. The floor was good
planking covered with sand. Walking was possible only round the narrow
aisles between groups at tables.

Neale's sauntering brought him to the bar. It had to him a familiar
look, and afterward he learned that it had been brought complete
from St. Louis, where he had seen it in a saloon. It seemed a huge,
glittering, magnificent monstrosity in that coarse, bare setting. Wide
mirrors, glistening bottles, paintings of nude women, row after row of
polished glasses, a brawny, villainous barkeeper, with three attendants,
all working fast, a line of rough, hoarse men five deep before the
counter--all these things constituted a scene that had the aspects of
a city and yet was redolent with an atmosphere no city ever knew.
The drinkers were not all rough men. There were elegant black-hatted,
frock-coated men of leisure in that line--not directors and
commissioners and traveling guests of the U. P. R., but gentlemen of
chance. Gamblers!

The band now began a different strain of dance music. Neale slowly
worked his way around. At the end of the big tent a wide door opened
into another big room--a dance-hall, full of dancers.

Neale had seen nothing like this in the other construction camps.

A ball was in progress. Just now it was merry, excited, lively. Neale
got inside and behind the row of crowded benches; he stood up against
a post to watch. Probably two-hundred people were in the hall, most
of them sitting. How singular, it struck Neale, to see good-looking,
bare-armed and bare-necked young women dancing there, and dancing well!
There were other women--painted, hollow-eyed--sad wrecks of womanhood.
The male dancers were young men, as years counted, mostly unfamiliar
with the rhythmic motion o