thought. Furthermore Dr. Bill's estimate of the blatant gold city was
by no means a self-righteous belief. He had known the place from its
birth. He had treated its every ailment at the height of its burning
youth. Now, in its maturity, it fell to him to learn much of the inner
secrets of its accruing mental disease. He hated it and loved it,
almost one and the same emotion. He cried aloud its shame to listening
ears. In secret he wept over its iniquities, with all the pity of a
warm-hearted man gazing upon a wanton.

But Leaping Horse was indifferent. It spread its shabby tendrils over
hundreds of acres of territory, feeding its wanton heart upon the
squalor which gathered about its fringe as well as upon the substance
of those upon whom it had showered its fortune.

At night its one main street radiated a light and life such as could be
found in no city in the world. The wide, unpaved thoroughfare, with
its shabby sidewalks buried to a depth of many feet of snow in winter,
and mud in the early open season, gave no indication of the tide of
wealth which flowed in this main artery. Only at night, when a
merciful dark strove to conceal, did the glittering tide light up.
Then indeed the hideous blatancy of the city's life flared out in all
its painful vulgarity.

In the heart of the Main Street the Elysian Fields Hotel, and theatre,
and dance hall stood out a glittering star of the first magnitude,
dimming the lesser constellations with which it was surrounded. A
hundred arc lamps flung out their challenge to all roysterers and
vice-seeking souls. Thousands of small globular lights, like ropes of
luminous pearls, outlined its angles, its windows, its cornices, its
copings. All its white and gold shoddy was rendered almost magnificent
in the night. Only in the light of day was its true worth made
apparent. But who, in Leaping Horse, wanted the day? No one. Leaping
Horse was the northern Mecca of the night pleasure seeker.

The buildings adjacent basked in its radiance. Their own eyes were
almost blinded. Their mixed forms were painfully revealed. Frame
hutches, split log cabins rubbed shoulders with buildings of steel
frame and stone fronts. Thousand dollar apartments gazed disdainfully
down upon hovels scarcely fit to shelter swine. Their noses were
proudly lifted high above the fetid atmosphere which rose from the
offal-laden causeway below. They had no heed for that breeding ground
of the germ