I didn’t have any difficulty finding the Cactus Patch. It preserved a fiction of having the bar and the casino in two different establishments; but both opened on the street through wide doorways, and there was a glass partition between the two. The casino had a big wheel of fortune right up in front, then a couple of roulette wheels, a crap table, and some stud poker games. There was a bingo parlor in back of that. Over on the right was a whole bank of slot machines, a double row standing side by side and containing possibly a hundred machines in all.
There were a few scattering customers here and there. It was too early as yet for the bulk of the tourist trade to come in, but the crowd was the mixture that can be found only in a Nevada town.
Here were professional gamblers, panhandlers, touts, and some of the higher-class girls from the red-light district. A couple of the men at the bar were probably miners. Three chaps who were at the wheel of fortune might be engineers from the Boulder Dam. A small sprinkling of auto tourists wandered aimlessly around the place.
Some of these tourists were from the west and more or less familiar with Nevada. Some of them were seeing it for the first time, and their reaction to the wide-open gambling, the shirt-sleeved camaraderie of the crowd was one of gawking wonderment.
I got a dollar changed into nickels, went over to the slot machine, and started playing. It seemed as though every time the wheels clicked to a stop a lemon would be staring me in the face.
A woman was playing a two-bit machine halfway down the bank of machines. She was in the thirties, and her face was touched up like a desert sunset. She didn’t register as Helen Framley. I was down to my last nickel, when two cherries clicked coins into the metal pay-off cup. Just then, a girl came in.
I said to the machine in a voice loud enough to be distinctly audible to the girl, “Don’t get generous now.”
She turned, looked me over, walked past without saying anything, and dropped a dime in the ten-cent machine. She got three oranges, and dimes cascaded into the cup in a jingling tune.
I could have made her Helen Framley; but she stood looking at the machine with a dazed expression of “What-do-I-do-next?” so I decided at once she was no old hand at the game. She played another dime.
A jaunty chap with quick, restless eyes and head that, seemed perfectly poised on a muscular neck paused in front of the quarter machine. I watched his hands as he dropped the coin and slammed down the lever. Not a wasted motion. Everything was as smoothly graceful as hough his arms had been pistons working in an oil bath.