ou--can't
you find out--Oh, hell, you know what I want!"

"Sure I do. You're afraid of a mob, with a scoundrel back of it.
Excuse me for wasting words. You're afraid of a mob. I'm your man.
Free whisky is where I live. Me for the gilded haunts of sin. Any
particular haunt you have in mind?"

"Sure I have. No need to go to The Bank. Joe is a pretty decent old
scout. You skip Joe's place and drop in at The Mermaid. Where they
love money most is where trouble starts."

"Where will I report to you?"

"You know Perrault's house?"

"With trees all round, and a little vineyard? Just below the jail?
Yes."

"You'll find me there, and a couple more old residenters. Hop along,
now."

The Mermaid saloon squatted in a low, dark corner of Hillsboro--even
if the words were used in the most literal sense.

Waywardly careless, Hillsboro checkered with alternate homes and
mines the undulations of a dozen low hills; an amphitheater girdled
by high mountain walls, with a central arena for commercial gladiators.
Stamp mills hung along the scarred hillsides, stamp mills exhibiting
every known variety of size and battery. In quite the Athenian manner,
courthouse, church and school crowned each a hill of its own,
and doubtless proved what has been so often and so well said of
our civilization. At any rate the courthouse cost more than the
school--about as much more as it was used less; and the church steeple
was such as to attract comment from any god. The school was less
imposing.

This was a high, rainy country. The frontier of the pines lay just
behind and just above the town, on the first upward slopes. The desert
levels were far below. Shade trees, then, can grow in Hillsboro; do
grow there by Nature and by artifice, making a joyous riot of visible
song--in the residential section. Industrial Hillsboro, however,
held--or was held?--to the flintier hills, bleak and bare and brown,
where the big smelter overhung and dominated the north. The steep
narrow valley of the Percha divided Hillsboro rather equally between
the good and the goats.

There was also the inevitable Mexican quarter--here, as ever,
Chihuahua. But if Hillsboro could claim no originality of naming, she
could boast of something unique in map making. The Mexican suburb ran
directly through the heart of the town. Then the Mexican town was the
old town? A good guess, but not the right one. The effective cause
was that the lordly white man scorned to garden--cowmen