It was nearing midnight when we entered the town. Price directed the way to a corral where he was known, and where we left the animals feasting on fresh alfalfa, while we fared forth to see his friends. It was precisely as though Price had invited me around to his club. He led the way to a saloon, and as we entered it, I saw at once its typical character. At the left of the entrance was a bar, gorgeous with mirrors and cut glass, while down the deep recesses of the room were faro and roulette tables and tables for poker. The groups about them were formed of “cow-punchers,” and prospectors and “Greasers” and Chinamen, and even Indians, all mingling and intermingling with a freedom that suggested that in gambling there is a touch of nature that makes the whole world kin. But more immediately interesting to us was a group which stood beside the bar. It was made up, as I found, of politicians, high in territorial office, all of whom knew Price and hailed him cordially while asking after his luck. For some time we stood talking with them, then one of their number, himself not a politician but a business man, proposed our joining him at supper. We accepted, I the more delightedly because he, of all the group, had most attracted me. Tall and very handsome, he had the bearing of a gentleman, and what he told me of himself confirmed my own impression of a richly varied past. Far into the night we talked, and I could well believe him when he said that the fascination of the life which he had led on the frontier had so far grown upon him that, while he was glad to go back at times to his former home in New York, he could no longer remain contented there, hearing as he always did after a few months, at most, the call back to the wild freedom of the plains. It was under the spell of what he said, enforced by my little experience as a “burro-puncher,” that I went to sleep that night on a bed of alfalfa in the corral; and when I wakened in the morning and found letters urging my return to the East, I was conscious of an indifference to the idea which was wholly new to my experience. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ INCIDENTS OF THE SLUMS ------------------------------------------------------------------------ INCIDENTS OF THE SLUMS