nd
smoking. In an adjoining room, cut with archways, was the dance hall.
An orchestra on a platform played rag-time music, while painted women
in short dresses to give them a youthful appearance, sat on benches
against the wall, or danced with swaggering men to the calls of a
brawny bullet-headed floor manager. His bleared eyes and heavy swollen
jaw showed the effects of a recent debauch ending in a fist fight.

The women urged their partners to drink at the end of every dance.
While the men drank whiskey, they gave the bar-keepers a knowing
look, and a bottle like the others was set out containing ginger ale
which the women drank as whiskey, and were given a check, which they
afterwards cashed as their percentage.

While the sign on the windows read The Lone Tree Saloon and Dance
Hall, the place had earned the sobriquet of the Bucket of Blood, from
the many tragedies enacted therein. And this place was run by a woman,
Calamity Jane, famous in several mining camps. One fellow analyzed her
when he said: "She is a powerful good woman, except she hain't got no
moral character."

Coyote Jim, faro dealer, sauntered in and took his place at the table.
His eyes were a steel blue, the kind that men inured to the mining
camps of the early west had learned were dangerous. His face was thin
and white, hair of a black blue, like a raven's wing, hung half way to
his shoulders. His thin hands handled the pasteboards in the box with
a dexterity that marked him an expert. Supple in form, with quick,
cat-like motions, he made one think of a tiger.

A dark faced woman wearing a Spanish mantilla was winning at the
roulette wheel. The onlookers crowded about. She was winning almost
every bet. The interest grew intense, men crowded forward to catch a
glimpse of her whose marvelous luck surpassed anything in the history
of the Lone Tree. Her stack of chips of white, red and blue, grew
taller at every turn of the wheel. The face of the gambler at the
wheel grew vexed and then flushed with anger. The devil appeared to
have been turned loose and he was losing his stakes. The chips
vanished from his box in twenties, fifties and hundreds, and the group
of onlookers stared in astonishment. As he counted out his last
hundred he said: "If you win this you have broke the game."

The woman lost and the gambler began to have hope, when she won again,
and so the pendulum of chance swung to and fro over those last hundred
chips for an hour, when th