ieval. Dance of cannibals,
dance of sun-worshipers, dance of Apaches on the war-path, dance of
cliff-dwellers wild over the massacre of a dreaded foe--only these
orgies might have been comparable to that whirl of gold and lust in
Beauty Stanton's parlors.

Benton seemed breathing hard, laboring under its load of evil, dancing
toward its close.

Night wore on and the hour of dawn approached. The lamps were dead; the
tents were dark; the music was stilled; and the low, soft roar was but a
hollow mockery of its earlier strength.

Like specters men staggered slowly and wanderingly through the gray
streets. Gray ghosts! All was gray. A vacant laugh pealed out and a
strident curse, and then again the low murmur prevailed. Benton
was going to rest. Weary, drunken, spent nature sought oblivion--on
disordered beds, on hard floors, and in dusty corners. An immense and
hovering shadow held the tents and halls and streets. Through this
opaque gloom the silent and the mumbling revelers reeled along. Louder
voices broke the spell only for an instant. Death lay in the middle of
the main street, in the dust--and no passing man halted. It lay as well
down the side streets in sandy ditches, and on tent floors, and behind
the bar of the gambling-hell, and in a corner of Beauty Stanton's
parlor. Likewise death had his counterpart in hundreds of prostrate
men, who lay in drunken stupor, asleep, insensible to the dust in their
faces. No one answered the low moans of the man who, stabbed and robbed,
had crawled so far and could crawl no farther.

But the dawn would not stay back in order to hide Benton's hideousness.
The gray lifted out of the streets, the shadows lightened, the east
kindled, and the sweet, soft freshness of a desert dawn came in on the
gentle breeze.

And when the sun arose, splendid and golden, with its promise and
beauty, it shone upon a ghastly, silent, motionless sleeping Benton.

22

To Allie Lee, again a prisoner in the clutches of Durade, the days in
Benton had been mysterious, the nights dreadful. In fear and trembling
she listened with throbbing ears to footsteps and low voices, ceaseless,
as of a passing army, and a strange, muffled roar, rising and swelling
and dying.

Durade's caravan had entered Benton in the dark. Allie had gotten an
impression of wind and dust, lights and many noisy hurried men, and
a crowded jumble of tents. She had lived in the back room of a canvas
house. A door opened out