CHAPTER XVIII
WAYS THAT ARE DARK
The people of Snake's Fall were in the throes of that artificial excitement which ever accompanies the prospect of immediate and flowing wealth in a community which has been feverishly striving with a negative result.
Nor was this excitement a healthy or agreeable wave of emotion. It was aggressive and vulgar. It was hectoring and full of a blatant self-advertisement. Men who had never done better for themselves than a third-rate hotel, or who had never used anything more luxurious than a street car for locomotion in their ordinary daily life, now talked largely of Plaza hotels and automobiles, of real estate corners and bank balances. They sought by every subterfuge to exercise the dominance of their own personalities in the affairs of the place, only that they might the further enhance their individual advantage. Schemes for building and trading were in everybody's minds, and money, so long held tight under the pressure of doubt, now began to flow in one incessant stream towards the coffers of the already established traders.
Every boom city is more or less alike, and Snake's Fall was no variation to the rule. Gambling commenced in deadly earnest, and the sharpers, with the eye of the vulture for carrion, descended upon the place. How word had reached them would have been impossible to tell. Then came the accompaniment of loose houses, and every other evil which seems to settle upon such places like a pestilential cloud.
To Gordon, looking on and waiting, it was all a matter of the keenest interest, not untinged with a certain wholesome-minded disgust, and when he sometimes spoke of it in the little family circle at the ranch, or to the worldly-wise Mike Callahan in his barn, his talk was never without a hint of real regret.
"It makes a feller feel kind of squeamish watching these folks," he observed to Mike, as they sat smoking in the latter's harness-room one afternoon. "You see, if I didn't know the whole game was lying in the palm of my hand I'd just simply sicken at the sordidness of it. We can't feel that way, though. We're worse than them. They're just dead in earnest to beat the game by the accepted rules of it, which don't debar general crookedness. We're out to win by sheer piracy. Makes you laugh, doesn't it? Makes it a good play."
Mike was older, and had been brought up in a hard school.
"Feelin's don't count one way or the other, I guess," he replied contemptuously. "When it comes to takin' the dollars out of the other feller's pocket I'm allus ready and willin'. You can allus help him out after you beat him. Private charity after the deal is a sort of liqueur after a good dinner."