"Right-o!" replied the Sergeant, grown strangely husky. "Keep your hair on, carrots! We'll let that sentiment stand for the whole Force, if you please."
And stand for the Force it did.
V
Miss Nita Oswald, when she first came to the North, had ignored Prospect as a field for 'copy.' Discovery City lured her. But closer acquaintance had shown her that Black Elk Territory was almost too law-abiding to be picturesque. Her Editors were clamouring for 'thrills' and 'ginger.' Her friends advised her to seek them in Prospect. Mr. Northcote thought that Prospect was no place for a lady. But Miss Oswald's thirst for sensation ruled her and she insisted on seeing the place for herself.
"Very well," said the Human Parson, "if you will go, I'll go with you."
"Chaperone?" Miss Oswald had queried, with a touch of assumed anger. "Think I need one?"
"Chaperone? No! Protector? Yes! Though you mightn't think it, I'm an artist with a six-shooter; and not a bad fist at boxing."
"Come on, then! There's no need to ask you to leave your odour of sanctity behind—you've never had it!"
So they went down into Prospect; and, in due course, sallied out on knowledge bent.
The streets were a blaze of light. Crowds gathered thickly, like blundering, deluded moths, round the glaring entrances of the bigger dance-halls, cafés, saloons, gambling houses, dope dens and theatres. On platforms outside the theatres bands blared murderously and leathern-throated men, standing before posters of scarlet-cheeked women in all stages of dress and undress, bellowed lurid descriptions of the delights they had to offer. From the dance-halls came crashes of music, shouts and shrieks; shouts, jingling of glasses and pistol shots from the saloons. No-one minded them. No-one minded anything—except their own business. When drunken men were flung out of the saloons, when obstreperous plungers, their last dollar gone, were pitched bodily from the gambling houses, no-one raised them from the ground where they lay. Greasy Jones' gang worked openly through the crowd. The men in the ticket-offices sat with revolvers ready to hand. Broken men, shuddering from the effects of cocaine or opium, wandered aimlessly about the dope dens. Innumerable painted ladies cried their wares. There was no peace, no truth, no beauty in Prospect. It was a ghastly hunting-ground of Vice and Death.