The Law-Breakers

by Ridgwell Cullum

It was late at night. The yellow lamplight left hard faces almost repulsive under the fantastic shadows it so fitfully impressed upon them. The low-ceiled room, too, gained in its sordid aspect. An atmosphere of moral degradation looked out from every shadowy corner, claiming the features of everybody who came within the dull radiance of the two cheap oil lamps swinging from the rafters.

Dirty O’Brien’s saloon was a fitting setting for a proprietor with such a name. Crime of every sort was suggested in its atmosphere at all time; but at night, when the two oil lamps, with their smoky chimneys, were burning, when drink was flowing, when the room was full of rough bechapped men belonging to the valley, with their long hair, their unwashed skins, their frowsy garments, and the firearms adorning their persons, when strident voices kept up an almost continual babel of coarse oaths, interlarded with rough laughter, or deadly quarrelings, when the permeation of alcohol had done its work and left its victims in a condition when self-control, at all times weak enough in these untamed citizens, was at its lowest ebb, then indeed the stranger, unaccustomed to such sights and sounds, might well feel that at last a cesspool of civilization had been reached.

The room was large in floor space, but the bark-covered rafters, frowsy with cobwebs, were scarcely more than two feet above the head of a six-foot man. The roof was on a gradual, flat slope from the bar to the front door, which was flanked by windows on either side of it. So low were the latter set, and so small were they, that a well-grown man must have stooped low to peer through the befouled glass panes. The walls of the building were of heavy lateral logs bare as the day they were set up, except for a coating of whitewash which must have stood the wear of at least ten years.

The evening had been a long and noisy one; longer and noisier than usual. For a note of alarm had swept through the town—an alarm which, in natures as savage and unscrupulous as those of the citizens of the valley, promptly aroused the desperate fighting spirit always pretty near the surface.

The gathering was pretty well representative of the place. The bar had been crowded all night. Some of the men were plain townsmen belonging to the purely commercial side of the place, and these were clad as became citizens of any little western township. But they were the very small minority, and had no particularly elevating effect upon the aspect of the gathering. Far and away the majority were of the prairie, men from outlying farms and ranches, whose hard, bronzed features and toil-stained kits, marked them out as legitimate workers who found their recreation in the foul purlieus of this drinking booth merely from lack of anything more enticing. Then, too, a few dusky-visaged, lank-haired creatures wearing the semi-barbaric costume of the prairie half-breed found a place in the gathering.

But none of these were the loud-voiced, hard-swearing complainants. That was left to a section of the citizens of the town who had everything in the world to lose by the coming of the police. As the evening wore on these gradually drew everybody’s interest in the matter, until the stirring of passions raised the babel of tongues to an almost intolerable clamor.

Dirty O’Brien, sinister and cynical, stood behind his bar serving every customer with a rapidity and nonchalance which the presence of the police in the place could never disturb. But the situation was well within his grasp. On this particular night his mandate had gone forth, and, in his own bar, he was an absolute autocrat. Each drink served must be devoured at once, and the empty glass promptly passed back across the counter. These were hastily borne off by an assistant to an adjoining room, where, in secret cupboards let into the sod partition wall, the kegs of smuggled spirit were secreted. All drinks were poured out in this room, and, on the first alarm, the secret cupboards could be hidden up, and all sign of the traffic concealed. Then there was nothing left to be seen but the musty display of temperance drinks on the shelves behind the bar, and a barrel of four per cent. beer, for the dispensing of which the existence of these prohibition saloons was tolerated and licensed by the Government.

Dirty O’Brien knew the law to the last word. He only came up against it when caught in the act of selling spirits. This was scarcely likely to happen. He was far too astute. His only danger was a trap customer, and the difficulties and dangers of attempting such a course, even the most foolhardy would scarcely dare to risk in a place as untamed as Rocky Springs.

Even the wildest spirits, however, were bound to reach their limit of protest against this new move of the authorities, and by midnight the majority of the customers had taken their departure from Dirty O’Brien’s booth. Thus, when the small hours crept on, only a trifling gathering of his regular patrons still remained behind.

The air of the place was utterly foul. The stench of tobacco smoke blending with the fumes of liquor left it nauseating. In the farthest corner of the room, just beside one of the windows, a group of four men were playing draw poker, and with these were Kate’s two hired men, Nick Devereux, with his vulture head and long lean neck, and Pete Clancy, the half-breed, whose cadaverous cheeks and furtive eye marked him out as a man of desperate purpose.