As was his custom, he walked to the extreme end of Front Street and turning started back for the station, when he encountered Baxter, the chief despatcher. Baxter saw Bucks first and spoke.
“I thought you were taking your sleep at this time,” returned Bucks, greeting him.
“So I should be,” he replied, “but we are in trouble. Dan Baggs is to take out the passenger train to-night, and no one can find him. He is somewhere up here in one of these dives and has forgotten all about his engine. It is enough to set a man crazy to have to run trains with such cattle. Bucks, suppose you take one side of the street while I take the other, and help me hunt him up.”
“What shall we do?”
“Look in every door all the way down-street till we find him. If we don’t get the fellow on his engine, there will be no train out till midnight. Say nothing to anybody and answer no questions; just find him.”
Baxter started down the right-hand side of the long street and Bucks took the left-hand side. It 187 was queer business for Bucks, and the sights that met him at every turn were enough to startle one stouter than he. He controlled his disgust and ignored the questions sometimes hurled at him by drunken men and women, intent only on getting his eye on the irresponsible Baggs.
Half-way down toward the square he reached a dance hall. The doors were spread wide open and from within came a din of bad music, singing, and noise of every kind.
Bucks entered the place with some trepidation. In the rear of the large room was a raised platform extending the entire width of it. At one end of the platform stood a piano which a man pounded incessantly and fiercely. Other performers were singing and dancing to entertain a motley and disorderly audience seated in a still more disorderly array before them.
At the right of the room a long bar stretched from the street back as far as the stage, and standing in front of this, boisterous groups of men were smoking and drinking, or wrangling in tipsy fashion. The opposite side of the big room was given 188 over to gambling devices of every sort, and this space was filled with men sitting about small tables and others sitting and standing along one side of long tables, at each of which one man was dealing cards, singly, out of a metal case held in his hand. Other men clustered about revolving wheels where, oblivious of everything going on around them, they watched with feverish anxiety a ball thrown periodically into the disc by the man operating the wheel.
Bucks walked slowly down the room the full length of the bar, scanning each group of men as he passed. He crossed the room behind the chairs where the audience of the singers and dancers sat. He noticed, when he reached this, the difference in the faces he was scrutinizing. At the gambling tables the men saw and heard nothing of what went on about them. He walked patiently on his quest from group to group, unobserved by those about him, but without catching a sight of the elusive engineman. As he reached the end of the gambling-room, he hesitated for a moment and had finished his quest when, drawn by curiosity, 189 he stopped for an instant to watch the scene about the roulette wheels.