track,
at a point where a few weeks before they had fastened those very rails
with lusty blows.

"Well, boys, I think I see the smoke of our pay-dirt, way down the
line," said one.

"Bandy, your eyes are pore," replied another.

"Yep, she's comin'," said another. "'Bout time, for I haven't two-bits
to my name."

"Boys, no buckin' the tiger for me to-day," declared Bandy.

He was laughed at by all except one quiet comrade who gazed thoughtfully
eastward, back over the vast and rolling country. This man was thinking
of home, of wife and little girl, of what pay-day meant for them.

Bandy gave him a friendly slap on the shoulder.

"Frank, you got drunk an' laid out all night, last payday."

Frank remembered, but he did not say what he had forgotten that last
pay-day.

A long and gradual slope led from Benton down across the barren desert
toward Medicine Bow. The railroad track split it and narrowed to a mere
thread upon the horizon. The crowd of watching, waiting men saw smoke
rise over that horizon line, and a dark, flat, creeping object. Through
the big throng ran a restless murmur. The train was in sight. It might
have been a harbinger of evil, for a subtle change, nervous, impatient,
brooding, visited that multitude. A slow movement closed up the
disintegrated crowd and a current of men worked forward to encounter
resistance and opposing currents. They had begun to crowd for
advantageous positions closer to the pay-car so as to be the first in
line.

A fight started somewhere, full of loud curses and dull blows; and then
a jostling mass tried the temper of the slow-marching men. Some boss
yelled an order from a box-car, and he was hooted. There was no order.
When the train whistled for Benton a hoarse and sustained shout ran
through the mob, not from all lips, nor from any massed group, but taken
up from man to man--a strange sound, the first note of calling Benton.

The train arrived. Troops alighting preserved order near the pay-car;
and out of the dense mob a slow stream of men flowed into the car at one
end and out again at the other.

Bates, a giant digger and a bully, was the first man in the line, the
first to get his little share of the fortunes in gold passing out of the
car that day.

Long before half of that mob had received its pay Bates lay dead upon a
sanded floor, killed in a drunken brawl.

And the Irishman Mike had received his thirty dollars.

And the big Negro had broken the head