them. The low-ceiled room, too, gained in its sordid aspect. An
atmosphere of moral degradation looked out from every shadowy corner,
claiming the features of everybody who came within the dull radiance
of the two cheap oil lamps swinging from the rafters.

Dirty O'Brien's saloon was a fitting setting for a proprietor with
such a name. Crime of every sort was suggested in its atmosphere at
all time; but at night, when the two oil lamps, with their smoky
chimneys, were burning, when drink was flowing, when the room was full
of rough bechapped men belonging to the valley, with their long hair,
their unwashed skins, their frowsy garments, and the firearms adorning
their persons, when strident voices kept up an almost continual
babel of coarse oaths, interlarded with rough laughter, or deadly
quarrelings, when the permeation of alcohol had done its work and left
its victims in a condition when self-control, at all times weak enough
in these untamed citizens, was at its lowest ebb, then indeed the
stranger, unaccustomed to such sights and sounds, might well feel that
at last a cesspool of civilization had been reached.

The room was large in floor space, but the bark-covered rafters,
frowsy with cobwebs, were scarcely more than two feet above the head
of a six-foot man. The roof was on a gradual, flat slope from the bar
to the front door, which was flanked by windows on either side of it.
So low were the latter set, and so small were they, that a well-grown
man must have stooped low to peer through the befouled glass panes.
The walls of the building were of heavy lateral logs bare as the day
they were set up, except for a coating of whitewash which must have
stood the wear of at least ten years.

The evening had been a long and noisy one; longer and noisier than
usual. For a note of alarm had swept through the town--an alarm
which, in natures as savage and unscrupulous as those of the citizens
of the valley, promptly aroused the desperate fighting spirit always
pretty near the surface.

The gathering was pretty well representative of the place. The bar had
been crowded all night. Some of the men were plain townsmen belonging
to the purely commercial side of the place, and these were clad as
became citizens of any little western township. But they were the very
small minority, and had no particularly elevating effect upon the
aspect of the gathering. Far and away the majority were of the
prairie, men from outlying farms a