Hunting for news, he went naturally to the news emporium which took the place of the daily paper--namely, he went to the saloons. But on the way he ran through a liberal cross-section of The Corner's populace. First of all, the tents and the ruder shacks. He saw little sheet-iron stoves with the tin dishes piled, unwashed, upon the tops of them when the miners rushed back to their work; broken handles of picks and shovels; worn-out shirts and overalls lay where they had been tossed; here was a flat strip of canvas supported by four four-foot poles and without shelter at the sides, and the belongings of one careless miner tumbled beneath this miserable shelter; another man had striven for some semblance of a home and he had framed a five-foot walk leading up to the closed flap of his tent with stones of a regular size. But nowhere was there a sign of life, and would not be until semidarkness brought the unwilling workers back to the tents. Out of this district he passed quickly onto the main street, and here there was a different atmosphere. The first thing he saw was a man dressed as a cowpuncher from belt to spurs--spurs on a miner--but above the waist he blossomed in a frock coat and a silk hat. Around the coat he had fastened his belt, and the shirt beneath the coat was common flannel, open at the throat. He walked, or rather staggered, on the arm of an equally strange companion who was arrayed in a white silk shirt, white flannel trousers, white dancing pumps, and a vast sombrero! But as if this was not sufficient protection for his head, he carried a parasol of the most brilliant green silk and twirled it above his head. The two held a wavering course and went blindly past Donnegan. It was sufficiently clear that the storekeeper had followed the gold. He noted a cowboy sitting in his saddle while he rolled a cigarette. Obviously he had come in to look things over rather than to share in the mining, and he made the one sane, critical note in the carnival of noise and color. Donnegan began to pass stores. There was the jeweler's; the gent's furnishing; a real estate office--what could real estate be doing on the Young Muddy's desert? Here was the pawnshop, the windows of which were already packed. The blacksmith had a great establishment, and the roar of the anvils never died away; feed and grain and a dozen lunch-counter restaurants. All this had come to The Corner within six weeks. Liquor seemed to be plentiful, too. In the entire length of the street he hardly saw a sober man, except the cowboy. Half a dozen in one group pitched silver dollars at a mark. But he was in the saloon district now, and dominant among the rest was the big, unpainted front of a building before which hung an enormous sign: LEBRUN'S JOY EMPORIUM Donnegan turned in under the sign.