The hotel lamps were being lighted by the gnome porter. When I stepped outside twilight had deepened into dusk, the air was almost frosty, and this main street had been made garish by its nightly illumination.
It was a strange sight, as I paused for a moment upon the plank veranda. The near vicinity resembled a fair. As if inspired by the freshness and coolness of the new air the people were trooping to and fro more restlessly than ever, and in greater numbers. All up and down the street coal-oil torches or flambeaus, ruddily embossing the heads of the players and onlookers, flared like votive braziers above the open-air gambling games; there were even smoked-chimney lamps, and candles, set on pedestals, signalizing other centers. The walls of the tent store-buildings glowed spectral from the lights to be glimpsed through doorways and windows, and grotesque, gigantic figures flitted in silhouette. While through the interstices between the buildings I might see other structures, ranging from those of tolerable size to simple wall tents and makeshift shacks, eerily shadowed. 103
The noise had, if anything, redoubled. To the exclamations, the riotous shouts and whoops, the general gay vociferations and the footsteps of a busy people, the harangues of the barkers, the more distant puffing and shrieking of the locomotives at the railroad yards, the hammering where men and boys worked by torchlight, and now and then a revolver shot, there had been added the inciting music of stringed instruments, cymbals, and such—some in dance measures, some solo, while immediately at hand sounded the shuffling stamp of waltz, hoe-down and cotillion.
Night at Benton plainly had begun with a gusto. It stirred one’s blood. It called—it summoned with such a promise of variety, of adventure, of flotsam and jetsam and shuttlecock of chances, that I, a youth with twenty-one dollars and a half at disposal, all his clothes on his back, a man’s weapon at his belt, and an appointment with a lady as his future, forgetful of past and courageous in present, strode confidently, even recklessly down, as eager as one to the manners of the country born.
The mysterious allusions to the Big Tent now piqued me. It was a rendezvous, popular, I deemed, and respectable, as assured. An amusement place, judging by the talk; superior, undoubtedly, to other resorts that I may have noted. I was well equipped to test it out, for I had little to lose, even time was of no moment, and I possessed a friend at court, there, 104 whom I had interested and who very agreeably interested me. This single factor would have glorified with a halo any tent, big or little, in Benton.
There was no need for me to inquire my way to the Big Tent. Upon pushing along down the street, beset upon my course by many sights and proffered allurements, and keenly alive to the romance of that hurly-burly of pleasure and business combined here two thousand miles west of New York, always expectant of my goal I was attracted by music again, just ahead, from an orchestra. I saw a large canvas sign—The Big Tent—suspended in the full shine of a locomotive reflector. Beneath it the people were streaming into the wide entrance to a great canvas hall.
Quickening my pace in accord with the increased pace of the throng, presently I likewise entered, unchallenged for any admission fee. Once across the threshold, I halted, taken all aback by the hubbub and the kaleidoscopic spectacle that beat upon my ears and eyes.
The interior, high ceilinged to the ridged roof, was unbroken by supports. It was lighted by two score of lamps and reflectors in brackets along the walls and hanging as chandeliers from the rafters. The floor, of planed boards, already teemed with men and women and children—along one side there was an ornate bar glittering with cut glass and silver and backed by a large plate mirror that repeated the lights, 105 the people, the glasses, decanters and pitchers, and the figures of the white-coated, busy bartenders.
At the farther end of the room a stringed orchestra was stationed upon a platform, while to the bidding of the music women, and men with hats upon their heads and cigars in mouths, and men together, whirled in couples, so that the floor trembled to the boot heels. Scattered thickly over the intervening space there were games of chance, every description, surrounded by groups looking on or playing. Through the atmosphere blue with the smoke women, many of them lavishly costumed as if for a ball, strolled risking or responding to gallantries. The garb of the men themselves ran the scale: from the comme il faut of slender shoes, fashionably cut coats and pantaloons, and modish cravats, through the campaign uniforms of army officers and enlisted men, to the frontier corduroy and buckskin of surveyors and adventurers, the flannel shirts, red, blue and gray, the jeans and cowhide boots of trainmen, teamsters, graders, miners, and all.
From nearly every waist dangled a revolver. I remarked that not a few of the women displayed little weapons as in bravado.