ch they had marched in. No woman now showed
herself. The darkness seemed a cloak, cruel yet pitiful. It hid the
flight of a man running from fear; it softened the sounds of brawling
and deadened the pistol-shot. Under its cover soldiers slunk away
sobered and ashamed, and murderous bandits waited in ambush, and brawny
porters dragged men by the heels, and young gamblers in the flush of
success hurried to new games, and broken wanderers sought some place to
rest, and a long line of the vicious, of mixed dialect, and of different
colors, filed down in the dark to the tents of lust.

Life indoors that night in Benton was monstrous, wonderful, and hideous.

Every saloon was packed, and every dive and room filled with a hoarse,
violent mob of furious men: furious with mirth, furious with drink,
furious with wildness--insane and lecherous, spilling gold and blood.

The gold that did not flow over the bars went into the greedy hands
of the cold, swift gamblers or into the clutching fingers of wild-eyed
women. The big gambling-hell had extra lights, extra attendants,
extra tables; and there round the great glittering mirror-blazing bar
struggled and laughed and shouted a drink-sodden mass of humanity. And
all through the rest of the big room groups and knots of men stood
and sat around the tables, intent, absorbed, obsessed, listening
with strained ears, watching with wild eyes, reaching with shaking
hands--only to gasp and throw down their cards and push rolls of gold
toward cold-faced gamblers, with a muttered curse. This was the night
of golden harvest for the black-garbed, steel-nerved, cold-eyed
card-sharps. They knew the brevity of time, and of hour, and of life.

In the dancing-halls there was a maddening whirl, an immense and
incredible hilarity, a wild fling of unleashed, burly men, an honest
drunken spree. But there was also the hideous, red-eyed drunkenness that
did not spring from drink; the unveiled passion, the brazen lure, the
raw, corrupt, and terrible presence of bad women in absolute license at
a wild and baneful hour.

That was the last pay-day Beauty Stanton's dancing-hall ever saw.
Likewise it was to be the last she would ever see. In the madness of
that night there was written finality--the end. Benton had reached its
greatest, wildest, blackest, vilest. But not its deadliest! That must
come--later--as an aftermath. But the height or the depth was reached.

The scene at midnight was unreal, livid, med