onts decorated by amateur wielders of
the paint brush, and the garish dens of vice tucked in everywhere. The
pendulum of life never ceased swinging. Society was mixed; no man cared
who his neighbor was, or dared to question. Of women worthy the name
there were few, yet there were flitting female forms in plenty, the
saloon lights revealing powdered cheeks and painted eyebrows. It was
a strange, restless populace, the majority here to-day, disappearing
to-morrow--cowboys, half-breeds, trackmen, graders, desperadoes,
gamblers, saloon-keepers, merchants, generally Jewish, petty officials,
and a riff-raff no one could account for, mere floating debris. The town
was an eddy catching odd bits of driftwood such as only the frontier
ever knew. Queer characters were everywhere, wrecks of dissipation,
derelicts of the East, seeking nothing save oblivion.

Everything was primitive--passion and pleasure ruled. To spend easily
made money noisily, brazenly, was the ideal. From dawn to dawn the
search after joy continued. The bagnios and dance halls were ablaze; the
bar-rooms crowded with hilarious or quarrelsome humanity, the gambling
tables alive with excitement. Men swaggered along the streets looking
for trouble, and generally finding it; cowboys rode into open saloon
doors and drank in the saddle; troops of congenial spirits, frenzied
with liquor, spurred recklessly through the street firing into the air,
or the crowd, as their whim led; bands played popular airs on balconies,
and innumerable "barkers" added their honeyed invitations to the
perpetual din. From end to end it was a saturnalia of vice, a babel of
sound, a glimpse of the inferno. Money flowed like water; every man was
his own law, and the gun the arbiter of destiny. The town marshal,
with a few cool-headed deputies, moved here and there amid the chaos,
patient, tireless, undaunted, seeking merely to exercise some slight
restraint. This was Sheridan.

Into the one long street just at dusk rode Keith and Neb, the third
horse trailing behind. Already lights were beginning to gleam in the
crowded saloons, and they were obliged to proceed slowly. Leaving the
negro at the corral to find some purchaser for the animals, and such
accommodations for himself as he could achieve, Keith shouldered his
way on foot through the heterogeneous mass toward the only hotel, a long
two-storied wooden structure, unpainted, fronting the glitter of the
Pioneer Dance Hall opposite. A noisy b