Just a girl

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
The Table of Contents has been created by the Transcriber.
The original text deliberately leaves a space after a dash (a spaced mdash) in some dialog, and capitalizes the following word, when it describes a disjointed thought. For example ‘isn’t it— Is this all’, in contrast to ‘Is—is the place’. This spaced mdash is retained in the etext.

By CHARLES GARVICE
GROSSET & DUNLAP PUBLISHERS . . . NEW YORK
Copyright 1895, by George Munro’s Sons.

JUST A GIRL.
There was really a lovely row on at Dan MacGrath’s Eldorado Saloon in Three Star Camp.
The saloon, a long and narrow room, built of rough, feather-edged boards and decorated with scraps of turkey-red cotton and cheap calico lining, with occasional portraits of local celebrities rudely drawn in charcoal, was well filled with the crew of miners and camp followers which made up the population of Three Star Camp—Three Star, it is needless to explain, after the well-known legend on the brandy bottles.
At one end of the saloon was a drinking-bar, at the other a card-table; in the center a billiard-table, spotted with candle grease and stained with the rims and bottoms of wet glasses. Men were lounging at the bar or playing a noisy game at pool, or gathered round the faro-table, over which presided Mr. Varley Howard, the professional gambler of Three Star and other camps.