down the main street
of the Mexican town, also headed for the Owl. Off this main street
only a few lights served to reveal rather than dissipate the night.
But under the dimness Mexicali was alive--a moving, seething,
passionate sort of aliveness. The sidewalks were full, the saloons
were busy. In and out of the meat shops or the small groceries
occasionally a woman came and went. But the crowd was nearly all
men--Mexicans, Chinamen, American ranchers and tourists, Germans,
Negroes from Jamaica, Filipinos, Hindus with turbans. All were
gathered in this valley of intense heat--this ancient bed of the sea
now lower than the sea--not because of gold mines or oil gushers, but
for the wealth that grew from the soil: the fortunes in lettuce, in
melons, in alfalfa, and in cotton.

"Odd," thought Bob, "that the slowest and most conservative of all
industries should find a spot of the earth so rich that it started a
stampede almost like the rush to the Klondike, of men who sought sudden
riches in tilling the soil."

Across the way from a corner saloon came the twang of a mandolin; and
half a dozen Mexican labourers began singing a Spanish folk song. In a
shop at his right a Jap girl sold soda water; in another open door an
old Chinaman mended shoes; and from another came the click of billiard
balls. But most of the crowd was moving toward the Owl.

As Bob stepped inside the wide doors of the gambling hall the scene
amazed him. There were forty tables running--roulette, blackjack,
craps, stud poker--and round them men crowded three to five deep. Down
the full length of one side of the room ran a bar nearly a hundred and
fifty feet long, and in the rear end of the great barnlike structure
thirty or forty girls, most of them American, sang and danced and
smoked and drank with whosoever would buy.

Bob stood to one side of the surging crowd that milled round the gaming
tables, and watched. There was no soft-fingered, velvet-footed glamour
about this place. No thick carpets, rich hangings, or exotic perfumes.
Most of the men were direct from the fields with the soil of the day's
work upon their rough overalls--and often on their faces and grimy
hands. The men who ran the games were in their shirt sleeves, alert,
sweatingly busy; some of them grim, a few predatory, but more of them
easily good-natured. The whole thing was swift, direct, businesslike.
Men were trying to win money from the house; and the house was winni