The Mountain DivideSpearman, Frank H. (Frank Hamilton)
General
The Mountain Divide
Spearman, Frank H. (Frank Hamilton)
Western stories
Baxter started down the right-hand side of the long street and Bucks
took the left-hand side. It was queer business for Bucks, and the
sights that met him at every turn were enough to startle one stouter
than he. He controlled his disgust and ignored the questions sometimes
hurled at him by drunken men and women, intent only on getting his eye
on the irresponsible Baggs.
Half-way down toward the square he reached a dance hall. The doors
were spread wide open and from within came a din of bad music,
singing, and noise of every kind.
Bucks entered the place with some trepidation. In the rear of the
large room was a raised platform extending the entire width of it. At
one end of the platform stood a piano which a man pounded incessantly
and fiercely. Other performers were singing and dancing to entertain a
motley and disorderly audience seated in a still more disorderly array
before them.
At the right of the room a long bar stretched from the street back as
far as the stage, and standing in front of this, boisterous groups of
men were smoking and drinking, or wrangling in tipsy fashion. The
opposite side of the big room was given over to gambling devices of
every sort, and this space was filled with men sitting about small
tables and others sitting and standing along one side of long tables,
at each of which one man was dealing cards, singly, out of a metal
case held in his hand. Other men clustered about revolving wheels
where, oblivious of everything going on around them, they watched with
feverish anxiety a ball thrown periodically into the disc by the man
operating the wheel.
Bucks walked slowly down the room the full length of the bar, scanning
each group of men as he passed. He crossed the room behind the chairs
where the audience of the singers and dancers sat. He noticed, when he
reached this, the difference in the faces he was scrutinizing. At the
gambling tables the men saw and heard nothing of what went on about
them. He walked patiently on his quest from group to group, unobserved
by those about him, but without catching a sight of the elusive
engineman. As he reached the end of the gambling-room, he hesitated
for a moment and had finished his quest when, drawn by curiosity, he
stopped for an instant to watch the scene about the roulette wheels.
Almost instantly he heard a sharp voice behind him. "What are you
doing here?"
Bucks, surprised, turned to find himself confronted by the black-bearded
passenger conductor, David Hawk. Baxter's admonition to say nothing
of what he was doing confused Bucks for an instant, and he stammered
some evasive answer.
Hawk, blunt and stern in word and manner, followed the evasion up
sharply: "Don't you know this is no place for you?" and before Bucks
could answer, Hawk had fixed him with his piercing eyes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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