A brawny miner stepped up to the side of a sheep herder who had been edging in all evening to get free drinks––and squirted a mouthful of tobacco juice in his ear.
“If anybody else had done that but you, Bill, I’d be tempted to strike him.”
“Don’t let your friendship for me spoil your notions,” the miner said with a contemptuous look.
The sheep herder made no reply, as he wiped his ear. The fire that burned in his 240 stomach demanded whiskey, and he would brook any insult to get it. He had reached the level of the sodden, and others passed him by. It was yet early in the night, and crowds were gathering in the rear of the large room, about the roulette wheel, the crap tables and faro layout, back of which the lookout was seated on a raised platform. Stacks of coin in gold and silver were on the tables to tempt the players. At other tables men were seated playing cards and smoking. In an adjoining room, cut with archways, was the dance hall. An orchestra on a platform played rag-time music, while painted women in short dresses to give them a youthful appearance, sat on benches against the wall, or danced with swaggering men to the calls of a brawny bullet-headed floor manager. His bleared eyes and heavy swollen jaw showed the effects of a recent debauch ending in a fist fight.
The women urged their partners to drink at the end of every dance. While the men drank whiskey, they gave the bar-keepers a 241 knowing look, and a bottle like the others was set out containing ginger ale which the women drank as whiskey, and were given a check, which they afterwards cashed as their percentage.
While the sign on the windows read The Lone Tree Saloon and Dance Hall, the place had earned the sobriquet of the Bucket of Blood, from the many tragedies enacted therein. And this place was run by a woman, Calamity Jane, famous in several mining camps. One fellow analyzed her when he said: “She is a powerful good woman, except she hain’t got no moral character.”
Coyote Jim, faro dealer, sauntered in and took his place at the table. His eyes were a steel blue, the kind that men inured to the mining camps of the early west had learned were dangerous. His face was thin and white, hair of a black blue, like a raven’s wing, hung half way to his shoulders. His thin hands handled the pasteboards in the box with a dexterity that marked him an expert. Supple in form, 242 with quick, cat-like motions, he made one think of a tiger.
A dark faced woman wearing a Spanish mantilla was winning at the roulette wheel. The onlookers crowded about. She was winning almost every bet. The interest grew intense, men crowded forward to catch a glimpse of her whose marvelous luck surpassed anything in the history of the Lone Tree. Her stack of chips of white, red and blue, grew taller at every turn of the wheel. The face of the gambler at the wheel grew vexed and then flushed with anger. The devil appeared to have been turned loose and he was losing his stakes. The chips vanished from his box in twenties, fifties and hundreds, and the group of onlookers stared in astonishment. As he counted out his last hundred he said: “If you win this you have broke the game.”
The woman lost and the gambler began to have hope, when she won again, and so the pendulum of chance swung to and fro over those last hundred chips for an hour, when the gambler slammed the lid of his 243 box with the exclamation: “You have busted the game!”
The woman cashed in her checks. Over five thousand dollars was paid to her. She walked up to the bar and threw down five hundred dollars on the counter and said to a bar-tender: