IT was the day of celebration at the Speedway. It was the anniversary of its first opening and Max Lepende had ordained that once a year high revel should hold sway in commemoration of the foundation of his fortunes. The Speedway was to Beacon Glory what the Casino is to Monte Carlo. It was perhaps a good deal more. But then, Monte Carlo is in the eyes of society and Beacon Glory had somehow contrived a position on the map more or less unrecorded. On the whole the “Glory” citizens, as they loved to call themselves, were well enough satisfied with their position. It was convenient for many reasons, not the least of which was the feeling of security it gave to most of them, and the general immunity they enjoyed from the legitimate consequences of offences committed against society in earlier life.
Max, being of Italian extraction and flamboyant in temperament, had built and designed it in the manner that most appealed to him. The place was literally a Bacchanalian temple, lavish with white and gold and brilliant lights. It was gaudy with red furnishings and glittering glass, and, generally speaking, was as good an example of a whited sepulchre as the riot of debased human passions, and the lavish brush of the decorator could make of otherwise perfectly innocent woodwork.
The place stared out on the city’s main thoroughfare two blocks below the Plaza Hotel, a wide-fronted, be-pillared edifice of two stories. In the brilliant summer sunlight its whitened walls looked dispiritedly grey and shabby, but in the dark months of winter its blaze of electric light transformed it into a lure which the people of Beacon Glory found impossible to resist.
Max had named it “The Palace of Pleasure.” But then Max wore a pointed beard which concealed a pair of full, red, something sensuous lips. Furthermore, he wore the rest of his hair long, and a large, flowing black cravat adorned the evening clothes he always appeared in when presiding over the nightly orgy obtaining in his establishment. Beacon Glory, being frank, apt and unashamed in its downrightness of phraseology, had promptly dubbed it “The Speedway,” and, in the end, the ultra-artistic mind of its founder had to yield, and as the “Speedway” it was known throughout the length and breadth of southern Alaska.
Max’s annual celebration was not lightly to be missed, and, generally speaking, Beacon Glory was not given to missing anything at other people’s expense. Besides, Max would be offended if his available customers absented themselves on this his especial night. Then, too, why should it be missed? There would be a dinner of exceptional quality in the grand dining-hall—free to invited guests. There would be a flood of wine of the best quality. The company, for once, would smoke the best cigars and lap up expensive, sticky cordials. And it would all be free. Oh, no. There was no missing it by those men favoured with an invitation.
There would be no women at the dinner; that was where Max displayed his fineness of discrimination. He knew his men. And perhaps his women—some of them. The women would be there for the dance afterwards—they would be given a good time, but Max sternly demanded that this, his evening of evenings, should start—fair. Whatever the later developments, the night should at least start with such dignity and decorum as an assorted line in evening clothes could impress upon the manhood of a more or less disreputable out-world city.
The Plaza was unusually full in the late afternoon on this day of celebration. The weather was hot and windless, and the spring mosquitoes were merciless. But the open verandah, overlooking the main avenue, was liberally patronised. Mosquitoes were part of the daily life of Beacon Glory, and their worst torture was insufficient to disturb its citizens out of their routine.
Jubilee Hurst and his partner, Burt Riddell, were amongst those foregathered. They were nominally gold men of the type which is drawn from the big cities of civilisation. They come at the call of adventure and easy money, and in the end, generally seek the latter by means of an active application of wit rather than of muscle. Then there was the well-liked, amiable and indifferent Doctor Finch, Beacon’s leading man of medicine. He was reposing his rotund figure in a chair of doubtful stability, tilted at a perilous angle, while his heavily-booted feet decorated the rail of the verandah. Abe Cranfield, the Plaza’s esteemed proprietor, short, stout, and with a thrusting chin whisker, was squatting on a low stool many sizes too small for him. And, reposing comfortably in a prolonged cane deck chair, with a Rye highball on an adjacent table easily within reach, reclined Victor Burns of the Occidental Bank.
None of them had as yet disguised themselves under the uniform required for the evening’s entertainment to which they were all invited. That was an evil they preferred to postpone till the last minute. They one and all preferred to remain the plain examples of Beacon’s citizenship they really were as long as possible.