Rhyolite Rose kept always her curiously unfeminine sense of humour. Standing in the doorway of the Bodega where nightly she accompanied herself on a battered piano, and sang indecorous songs with the voice of a seraph, she listened, vastly diverted, to the crap dealer’s flights of fancy.
“Get your money down, boys; six, eight, field or come—play a favourite. Here comes the lucky man! He throwed nine, Long Liz, the ham and egg gal.”
Rhyolite was booming, and Rhyolite was fortune-mad. It was Saturday night. Outside on Golden Street crowds surged up and down. There were miners, promoters, engineers, cooks, crooks, tin horns and wildcatters; good women, bad women, and boarding-house keepers. Adventurers all; each confident that to-morrow would bring him fortune.
The Bodega overflowed with a good-humoured crowd that stood four deep at the bar. Around the crap table was a restless throng, drawn by the dealer’s recitative, a curious chant detailing the fortunes of Big Dick from Boston, Little Joe, Miss Phoebe, and many more of the fanciful folk that indicate the fall of the dice.
Mining booms a-plenty Rose had seen. For five years she had followed them since she had first appeared in the Klondike a young girl with a lovely face, a gentle voice, and a consuming passion for Scotch whiskey. Each year since then had taken some of the innocence from her face, and set deeper shadows in her eyes; each year found her growing sadder till evening came, and then very gay, indeed; for by night Rose’s sorrow, whatever it was, had been drowned in a square bottle.
The pasty-faced crap dealer droned on: “Now and then I earn a small one,” he was saying. “Miss Ada, yore maw wants you——”
He faltered, and came to a pause. A shot had sounded on the street outside, and almost instantly the saloon was emptied.
Following the crowd, and still smiling, went Rhyolite Rose. She gathered from snatches of agitated conversation that “Sidewinder,” the camp’s bad man, in shooting at an unbearable acquaintance, had killed a stranger.
Not dead, but desperately wounded, the man lay on the boardwalk. Rose pushed her way to his side. As she looked down upon him her face blanched, the red of her cheeks standing out in odd relief.
“He’s a friend of mine,” she said to the men around her. “Take him to my cabin, and send for the doctor.”