Dick Beckworth, who was Tolley’s chief dealer at the tables of chance, was a privileged character. He was supposed to be a “killer” with the ladies. He dressed his long curls and heavy black mustache as carefully as he did his sleek and slender person. Cream-colored flannel shirt, a flowing tie, velvet jacket and broadcloth trousers tucked into patent-leather boots, and a Mexican sombrero heavy with silver cord to top this ensemble, he made a picture to rival the squalid painting over the bar.
The night had been strenuous at the tables, but the gambling fever had now abated. Dick lolled gracefully in the armchair at his empty table with half-closed eyes, smoking a cigarette. Around a table near the archway between the barroom and the hall was a noisy group of miners, but they were no longer playing. Their glasses had just been refilled at the bar.
The rasping chords of a hard-working male quartette beyond the archway repeated a syncopated rhythm for the entertainment of the patrons of the tables.
From beneath the arch into the barroom stepped suddenly an astonishingly brilliant figure—a figure engraved as sharply as a cameo against the blue mist of tobacco smoke that now drifted in a thin haze throughout the barnlike place. The group of miners about the first table roared a greeting.
“Nell! Nell Blossom! The blossom of Canyon Pass!”
“Give us a song of your own, Nellie!” added one burly miner, swaying from his seat toward her, a maudlin smile on his face.
The girl’s smiling expression changed swiftly to one of flaring fury. She swept past the miners and headed straight for Dick Beckworth, who had watched the incident with a little smile flickering about his lips. The girl’s face was still ablaze. She needed no rouge or lipstick in any case to lend it color.
“Dick,” she said tensely, “I hate this place!”
“I’ve already told you I hate to see you in it,” he rejoined with apparent frankness. “Singing and dancing for these roughnecks is far beneath you.”
The flame of her anger gradually waned as she gazed down into his face. His usual calmness was somewhat ruffled by her near presence. Nell Blossom held a certain influence over him that “Dick the Devil”—his boasted cognomen among his admirers—was loath to acknowledge.