fire, precisely
as had Doc's Springfield a few weeks before.

Hearing the snap of the rifle hammer, with a curse Doc jerked his gun
and whirled his horse toward the brush just as Billy sprang out into
the open and threw a pistol shot into Doc that broke his thigh.
Swaying in saddle, Doc cursed Hassard for leading him into a trap, and
shot him twice before himself pitching to the ground. Hassard stood
idly, stunned apparently by a sort of white-hot work he was not used
to, and received his death wound without any effort even to draw.
Meantime, the firm of Lykins and Llewellyn accounted for two more
before Doc's mates got out of range. Thus, like the brook, Doc had
drifted down the turbid current of crime till he found himself
impounded in the Lincoln penitentiary with the off-scourings of the
state.

While it is true that back into such impounding most who once have been
there soon return, Doc turned out to be one of the rare exceptions
proving the rule; for the last I heard of him, he was the lame but
light-hearted and wholly honest proprietor of a respectable Rushville
saloon.

When in the early eighties the front camps of the Atchison, Topeka, and
Santa Fe and the Texas Pacific met at El Paso, then a village called
Franklin, within a few weeks the population jumped from a few hundred
to nearly three thousand. Speculators, prospectors for business
opportunities, mechanics, miners, and tourists poured in--a
chance-taking, high-living, free-spending lot that offered such rich
pickings for the predatory that it was not long before nearly every fat
pigeon had a hungry, merciless vulture hovering near, watching for a
chance to fasten its claws and gorge itself.

The low one-story adobes, fronted by broad, arched portals, that then
lined the west side of El Paso Street for several blocks, was a long
solid row of variety theatres, dance halls, saloons, and
gambling-houses, never closed by day or by night. They were packed
with a roistering mob that drifted from one joint to another, dancing,
gambling, carousing, fighting. Naturally, at first the predatory
confined their attentions to the roisterers.

Of course every lay-out was a brace game, from which no player arose
with any notable winning except occasionally when the "house" felt it a
good bit of advertising to graduate a handsome winner--and then it was
usually a "capper," whose gains were in a few minutes passed back into
the till.

The faro boxes were