The gambling lid is fast on now—if they gamble they gamble under it. And no more do ribby horses and surprising-mixed crowds disport them at the deserted race-track.
But the setting Butte sun suggests the same wealth and wildness as if always its celestial chemistry were shot with essence of mining-camp: rich, generous, feverish and virile.
Brophy’s grocery-window and the Marcus Daly monument and the Parrot smelter and the Clark house and the Idaho Street hill—all of it—owns the gray-purple which is not St. Paul and not Wichita and not Pittsburg and not Spokane: not anything except intensely Butte-Montana.
I have felt it since I first lived here in little young short-frocked days, and I felt it when I lived away from Butte: I feel it all these now-days to the roots of myself.
I have no reason: but the contrary: to love Butte as a townful of human beings.
I have no friends in it, no feel-of-friendship, no human friendliness.
And the sculpturesque poetry of the outlying deserts and buttes pushes and presses hurtingly upon the lonely and introspective gazer in Body and Soul: I knew it as child and girl and woman.
There is nothing benign, nothing enlightening—no gentleness, no pity—in its barren beauty. But its hard chaste influence on the sensitive spirit is beyond any analytic power to gauge.
Its wonderful Aridness starves human nerve-soil till the sad wide eyes of the Soul grow bright—fever-bright, light-bright, star-bright—from denial and unconscious prayer: involuntary worship: homage of the unsuppliant unhoping dévotee.