erious and insistent demand for conquest.

Chickasaw Pete's place, as he soon discovered, was no more pretentious
in appearance than the San Gorgonio. It also was a long, low frame
building with some great cottonwood trees before it and a few palms with
their infinite and haunting suggestions of the tropics.

It was with a sense of mounting excitement which still held that strong
element of exultation that Hanson crossed the porch, opened the door and
walked in. He saw before him a long room well lighted with electricity
and with a shining polished floor. The bar ran along one side, and
behind it lounged a short, stout, round-faced man with very black hair
and eyes and a perpetual smile. This was the bar-keeper, known
familiarly as Jimmy. At the rear of the room, covering about half of the
floor, were rows and rows of chairs, occupied by both men and women,
strong, sun-burned looking people in the main, but with the invariable
and unmistakable sprinkling of "lungers" in various stages of recovery.

Hanson saw his friend, the station agent, leaning across the bar talking
to Jimmy, and knew from the interested glances cast in his direction
that he was the topic of conversation.

At the opposite end of the room was a piano. A young man sat before it
facing the wall, while beside him there stood a woman intently tuning a
violin which she held tucked under her chin. Approaching middle age, she
was rather stout, with a sallow, discontented face, which yet held some
traces of its former evanescent prettiness. Both lashes and brows of her
faded light eyes were heavily blackened, and the rouge which lay thickly
on her cheeks only served to accentuate their haggard lines. The hair,
dark at the roots, was blondined to a canary color where it rolled back
under her hat, large and black, of a dashing Gainsborough style and
covered with faded red roses. For the rest, her costume consisted of a
white shirt waist, a wine-colored skirt and shoes with very high heels
which were conspicuously, and no doubt uncomfortably, run over.

Her violin finally tuned to her satisfaction, she bent her head to speak
to the young man at the piano. He turned to answer her, and for a moment
his delicate, sad face was outlined against the wall behind him. Then,
with an emphatic little nod, he began to play and the woman lifted her
violin and swung in with him.

The only virtue she possessed as a violinist was that she kept good
time, but although it w