ere different, you know."

Reedy smoked and nodded in appreciative silence. The dusk came fast.
Mrs. Barnett rustled her starched skirts and sighed.

"You know, Mr. Jenkins," she began on a totally different subject, "it
has been such a pleasure to me to meet someone out here in this
God-forsaken country with fine feelings--one who loves the higher
things of life."

"Thank you, Mrs. Barnett." Reedy bowed in all seriousness.

A moment later when he took his leave he held her hand a thought longer
than necessary, and pressed it as though in a sympathetic impulse for
her loneliness--or his--or maybe just because.

It was dark as Reedy threw the clutch into high and put his foot on the
accelerator. He was out of town too quick to be in danger of arrest
for speeding. He was late. The three others who were to seek
recreation for the evening with him would be waiting.

And biting the end of his cigar he said fervently:

"Thank God for Jim Crill--and his niece."

Reedy's three friends were waiting--but dinner was ready. They had
ordered a special dinner at the Pepper Tree Hotel, served out in a
little pergola in the back yard.

They were all hearty eaters, but not epicures; and anyway they did not
take time to taste much. From where they sat they could look out
between the latticed sides of the pergola across the Mexican line, and
see above and beyond the squat darker buildings a high arch of winking
electric lights.

That was the Red Owl.

And while they talked jerkily and broadly of cotton and real
estate--and women, their thoughts were over there with those winking
lights.

Just across the line there was the old West again--the West of the
early Cripple Creek days, of Carson City and Globe. Still wide open,
still raw, still unashamed.

Over there underneath these lights, in that great barnlike structure,
were scores of tables across which fortunes flowed every night. There
men met in the primitive hunt for money--quick money, and won--and
lost, and lost, and lost.

There, too, the tinkle of a piano out of tune, the blare of a
five-piece orchestra, and the raucous singing of girls who had lost
their voices as significantly as other things. And beyond that, along
shadowy corridors, were other girls standing or sitting in
doorways--lightly dressed.

"Well, are you fellows through?" Reedy had pushed back his chair.
"Let's go."

CHAPTER X

It was perhaps an hour later that Bob Rogeen went