Naturally, rows were of pretty frequent occurrence between the company’s men and the leeches who bleed them with crooked games and stacked decks over the roulette, faro and stud-poker tables. But of them all in the delectable pursuit of separating the men and their pay-checks, Pete McGonigle’s “Golden Luck” saloon was in the van, both as to size and crookedness. And that high station of eminence it maintained until the night a stranger wrecked it by no more delicate a method than that of kicking over the roulette table, sending it and the attendant, who was presiding over the little whirling ball in Pete’s interest, crashing to the floor. That stranger was Munford. And that was how Munford came to join the army of the Rockies. A number of the company men were present and they sided in with Munford. Before this amalgamation, Pete and his hangers-on went down to ignominious defeat, and the “Golden Luck,” to utter demolishment and ruin. News of the fracas spread rapidly to the other “joints.” The dive-keepers joined forces, the company men did likewise, and that night became the wildest in the history of Big Cloud. Munford took command of his new-found friends from the start. In the street fight that followed he did wondrous things--and did them with zest, delight and effectiveness. With his great bulk he towered above his companions, and the sweep of his long arms as they rose and fell, the play of his massive shoulders as he lunged forward to give impetus to his blows, was a marvelous sight to see. But the details of that fight have no place here. Its result, however, was that Munford, previously unknown and unheard of, became thereafter, a marked man in Big Cloud. When the fight was over the company men, elated with victory though somewhat the worse for wear, retired to the yard to wait for the construction trains to take them up to their work. And while they waited they spent the time gazing in admiration at Munford who sat on the edge of a flat-car, his legs dangling over, blowing softly on his knuckles, a smile of divine contentment on his face. What was Munford going to do? demanded McGuire and the cronies of his particular gang who had had the honor of being present at Pete’s when the evening’s proceedings were instituted, and who therefore felt they had a prior claim to the hero’s consideration over and above that of the men from other sections of the work who had taken part in the fight. Munford did not know. Would he go up the line with them and take a job with their gang if they promised to get him one? Munford would. So he kept his seat when the construction train pulled out just as the dawn was breaking, and twenty miles up the road at Twin Bear Creek they tumbled him off and introduced him to Alan Burton, foreman of Bridge Gang No. 3.