The city had grown up in the wide valley of the Hekor River at the point where the first alluvial strike had been made. It was at a point where the river widened out before dispersing its northern waters into a great lake surrounded by the lofty range of hills which had created it. It followed the usual lines of all these improvised northern places of habitation. It was designed in a rectangular fashion based on one interminable main thoroughfare, which was the centre of haphazard development. The road had sidewalks, but for the rest it remained unconstructed. Vehicular traffic wallowed in mire during the spring, jolted and bumped over a broken, dusty surface in summer, and, in winter, enjoyed a foundation of snow on which to travel that frequently stood five and six feet in depth.
The whole place was hopelessly straggling and unkempt. Lofty seven- and eight-storied buildings looked down on the log shanties and frame hutments grovelling at their feet in that incongruous fashion which never seems to disturb the human sense of fitness. There were even men amongst its cosmopolitan people who found joy in the disparity. But these were mainly the folk who owned or had designed the greater structures.
Throughout the long winter night the place was ablaze with electric light, a never-ending source of joy to the crude pioneering mind. Arc lamps lit the main thoroughfare, while a multitude of winking signs served to guide the unwary to those accommodating dens waiting to unloose inflated bank rolls. During the six months of summer daylight this service was unnecessary. And only the cold light standards, and the hideous framing of the signs, and the tawdry decorations of the places of entertainment were left to replace the winter splendour.
Bill Wilder knew it all by heart, from the elaborate Elysee, down to the meanest cabaret from which a drunken miner would be fortunate to escape with nothing worse than a vanished store of “dust.” He hated it. The knowledge of the life that went on every hour of the twenty-four sickened and bored him. He longed for the free, wholesome, hard-living life of the outworld beyond the sordid prison bars which his fortune had set up about him.
It was always the same now. Month in, month out, there was nothing but the solitude of his home and the work of the office in the great commercial block he had built, or the pastimes of the dance hall and gambling hell.
He wanted none of it. His great body was rusting with disuse, while the mental effort of the administration of his affairs was fast robbing his sober senses of all joy of life. He yearned for the open with all its privations. He wanted the canoe nosing into the secret places of the far world. The burden of the battle against Nature in her fiercest mood was something to be desired. And so, too, with the howl of the deadly blizzard beyond the flap door of a flimsy tent. At this moment Placer City and all its alleged attractions were anathema to the man on the sidewalk.
He came to an abrupt halt. His grey eyes were turned on the elaborate entrance doors of the Elysee on the opposite side of the road. It was disgorging its freight into the smiling spring sunlight, a throng of men and painted women who had spent the daylit night drinking, and dancing, and gambling. He watched them out of sheer disgust. Here at something like ten in the morning, when the sidewalks were thronged with business traffic, they were just about to seek their homes for that brief sufficiency of rest which would enable them to return to another night of loose pleasure. For all he was on the youthful side of thirty, for all he was inured to the life of the city, for all his blood was no less warm, and rich, and swift flowing, the sight mingled pity with disgust and left him depressed and even saddened. The terrible falseness of it; the price that must be ultimately paid. The bill of interest that would be presented by an outraged Nature later on would mean overwhelming bankruptcy for the majority. He turned away and collided with an officer of the police.
Superintendent Raymes stepped clear and laughed.
“Bill Wilder gawking at the Elysee’s throw-outs? Guess you aren’t yearning to join that bunch?”
“No.”