otten uniforms, wouldn't you? Come on over, fellows. The liquor's
fine."

Then, one day, a Chinaman he had insulted gave him an unexpected shove,
and he had managed to save himself by a foot from the clutch of a
quiet-faced man in plain clothes who spent a certain amount of time
lounging on the other side of the border.

That had sobered him. He kept away from the border itself after that,
although the temptation of it drew him. After a few weeks, when the
novelty had worn off, he began to hunger for the clean little American
town across the line. He wanted to talk to some one. He wanted to boast,
to be candid. These Mexicans only laughed when he bragged to them. But
he dared not cross.

There was a high-fenced enclosure behind the "Owl," the segregated
district of the town. There, in tiny one-roomed houses built in
rows like barracks were the girls and women who had drifted to this
jumping-off place of the world. In the daytime they slept or sat on
the narrow, ramshackle porches, untidy, noisy, unspeakably wretched.
At night, however, they blossomed forth in tawdry finery, in the
dancing-space behind the gambling-tables. Some of them were fixtures.
They had drifted there from New Orleans, perhaps, or southern
California, and they lacked the initiative or the money to get away.
But most of them came in, stayed a month or two, found the place a
nightmare, with its shootings and stabbings, and then disappeared.

At first Rudolph was popular in this hell of the underworld. He spent
money easily, he danced well, he had audacity and a sort of sardonic
humor. They asked no questions, those poor wretches who had themselves
slid over the edge of life. They took what came, grateful for little
pleasures, glad even to talk their own tongue.

And then, one broiling August day, late in the afternoon, when the
compound was usually seething with the first fetid life of the day,
Rudolph found it suddenly silent when he entered it, and hostile,
contemptuous eyes on him.

A girl with Anna Klein's eyes, a girl he had begun to fancy, suddenly
said,

"Draft-dodger!"

There was a ripple of laughter around the compound. They commenced to
bait him, those women he would not have wiped his feet on at home. They
literally laughed him out of the compound.

He went home to his stifling, windowless adobe room, with its sagging
narrow bed, its candle, its broken crockery, and he stood in the center
of the room and chewed his nails with fu