The place was known as the Savoy, and the hotel part of it was rather better than is generally found in the northern lumber regions.
It was on a summer night, when it was comfortable to sit out of doors, that a vaudeville entertainment was in progress on the lawn stage of the Savoy.
A monologue had just been delivered by a middle-aged comedian, in evening clothes, who had been a singer in bygone times, but, finding his voice gone, had been wise enough to “frame up” a “talking turn.”
The audience liked him, calling him “good old Joe Stokes,” many of the men inviting him to join them in a glass of beer at their tables, when he came out from the sacred precincts “back stage.”
This is a custom in many of the free-and-easy places of amusement in the West and Northwest, in small communities, and Joe Stokes accepted the invitations in the good-natured spirit in which they were tendered.
There was a large gathering, including men from the mines, from the lumber woods, and from the other industries existing for twenty miles around, including a sprinkling of workers on the railroad, with some tourists, who were there because they wanted to be.
It was this latter class that offered a round of encouraging handclaps to a delicate-looking young girl, dressed simply in white, with a white ribbon in her long, dark hair, who came slowly into view and faced the footlights.
“What’s comin’ off?” growled a rough-looking man near the stage. “Where did this kid blow in from?”
“Guess she belongs to a Sunday school, and got in here by mistake,” guffawed another of the same type. “Why didn’t old Joe Stokes give us an extra encore? This girl turn is goin’ to be punk, an’ I know it.”