rris had erected a two-story structure on the
eastern bank and moved his store from Little Missouri to be an active
rival of the Marquis's company store. A school was built (by whom and
with what funds remains mysterious) and Bill Dantz was made
Superintendent of Education; and next to Joe's store, opposite the
office of the _Bad Lands Cowboy_, Fisher laid the beginnings of
Medora's Great White Way with a roller-skating pavilion, where the
cowboys who drifted into town, drunk or sober, exhibited their skill
to the hilarious delight of their friends.

But the architectural monuments in which Medora's opulence most
vigorously expressed itself were the saloons. The number of these
varied, according to the season. Sometimes there were a dozen,
sometimes there were more, for no one bothered about a license and any
one with ten dollars and a jug of rum could start his own "liquor
parlor."

Among the saloons Bill Williams's stood in a class by itself. He, too,
had followed civilization to Medora, establishing himself first in a
small building near Joe's store, and, when that burnt down, in an
imposing two-story frame structure which the Marquis de Mores built
for him. The bar-room was on the first floor and above it was a huge
hall which was used for public meetings and occasionally for dances.
The relation of the dance-hall to the bar-room had its disadvantages,
especially when the shooting began. The bar-room itself was a
sumptuous affair, for Williams had the shrewdness to know that it was
not only rum that the lonely cowpuncher sought when he pushed in the
swinging doors. The place was never closed, night or day, and the faro
wheel was seldom silent.

The other saloons could not compete with the gorgeousness with which
Bill Williams edged the cloud of robbery and ruin that hung about his
iniquitous saloon; when they seemed for a night to compete, drawing to
their own hospitable bars the cowpunchers whom Williams looked upon as
his own legitimate prey, he had a way of standing at his door and
shooting indiscriminately into the night. Out of a dozen rum-shops
would pour excited cowboys eager to know "what the shooting was
about," and as they crowded inquisitively about his bar, trade would
once more become brisk in Bill Williams's saloon.

[Illustration: Hell-Roaring Bill Jones.]

[Illustration: Bill Williams's saloon (1919).]

Bill Williams was a _bona-fide_ "bad man." So also was Maunders. But
they were of Medora's