"Then I heard rumors of Gillette. The town became a city in a night. The rush of men here at that time was heavy. Being one of the first on the ground, I started a saloon in a shack and a boarding house in a tent. Then I leased the upstairs of a building and owned the first dance hall here. For several months Gillette was fast becoming the center of the Cripple Creek region. Then the gold gave out. It was shallow. People left here in a single night. Many did not take even the precaution of shutting their doors. Gillette started like a whirlwind, and in a like manner it became deserted. "Only a few of us remained, firm in the belief that the country was plentiful in gold. My saloon business was ruined, yet I kept it up, and still have it to-day. Gradually my friends left Gillette, but I remained, and have lived in solitary grandeur since nineteen hundred and eight, when the last of my family moved away. "Why don’t I leave, you ask? Why should I? I have nothing especially to live for. I have formed an attachment to Gillette. I will die here. I am emperor of the place. My word is law, having no one to dispute it." The visitors soon after this resumed their journey to Cripple Creek, seven miles away. An air of depression filled each and every one of them. They began to realize what Carthage looked like after the carnage of the Romans. As they turned off the main "drag" into a side street and thence to the main road, the newspaper man looked back. Sam Bolger, a pathetic figure to say the least, was still sitting where he had been left. The Strange Rites of the "Voodoo Queen." While voodooism--into the realm of which hideous and grotesque cult one cannot go far without encountering the snake dancer, medicine faker, charm vender, witchcraft queen, and the like--is becoming a matter of "ancient history" in the South, still, one is bound to stumble onto signs of it occasionally, and if one only follows the right trail, he may come upon a scene that will readily convince him that the old-time practices of some superstitious blacks are not dead or soundly slumbering. The annual outbreaks--and then some--of aged Marie Lavoe, known in Louisiana as the "Voodoo Queen," who was born in the Kongo and was brought to that State in the slavery days, only go to prove that her followers--and these are not all confined to the blacks--are just as eager to take part in her mysterious séances and wilder orgies as they were when she, as a young girl and stately specimen of the African queen, first introduced her startling exhibitions of conjuring and sorcery.