Grant did not realize that when he passed through the rabbit-proof fence he left behind him everything for which he paid income tax and other doles--protection, due processes of law, all the checks and balances on society and the individual painstakingly built up under the Anglo-Saxon scheme of things. He did not conceive himself in the light of an alien--of a not-too-popular nation--gratuitously placing himself under the protection of laws quite the opposite in terms of interpretation. Nor did he appreciate that, save for his suitcase and a signature on a hotel register, he had left behind him nothing to bear testimony to the fact that a man named Grant Hickman had come to Arizora and had left the United States to enter Mexico. All these inattentions he recalled later when opportunity for correction had passed. Grant was circling the plaza, where the municipal band was giving a concert, when amid the strollers he thought he saw a familiar face. He looked again and was sure. Little Colonel Urgo, in a snappy uniform of dark blue with back-turned cape, was walking with a woman whose beauty was that of the blown peony. Chance brought Urgo’s eyes Grant’s way. They lighted with sudden surprise, then the colonel brought up his hand in a salute. A flash of teeth was cut by the travelling hand; it was like a too quick shutter on the villain’s smile in Way Down East. Grant doffed his hat and passed on. Half an hour later a particularly glittering sheaf of lights he had noted in earlier saunterings pricked his curiosity and he turned into a low building just off the plaza. A bare front room easily visible from the street was a too obvious blind for complacent police inspection; through an open arch in its rear wall a crowded gambling room was given false length by wall mirrors in dingy frames. Fifty or more men and women were clustered about roulette, faro and crap tables. A fat Chinaman with a face expressionless as a bowl of jelly sat on a dais behind a little desk stacked high with silver and with deft movement of his fingers achieved nice problems in international exchange. Pursuit of the goddess Luck was being engaged in with a frankness and business-like absorption quite different from furtive evasions of hidden attic and camouflaged club across the Line. Grant exchanged a ten-dollar note for a heavy stack of Mexican silver and moved over to a table where two ivory cubes were dancing to the droning incantations of a big negro game keeper. He was curious to see whether Big Dick and Lady Natural were as temperamental a couple in Mexico as he had discovered them to be in many a front-line dugout in France. “Come to papa!” A raw-boned Arizonan across the table was singing to the dice held in his cupped palms, huge as waffle irons; a humorous imp of strong liquor danced in his eyes. “Cap’n come down the gangplank and says, ‘Good mawnin’, Seven!’”