There be men on earth who are ever ready for trouble that, specifically, isn’t trouble of their own. They delight in dancing when others pay the fiddler. Numbers of such gathered with the radical Bear Creek; and being gathered, he and they pooled their wicked wits in devising fardels for those expected enemies. When, next day, our executives of prohibition came into Dodge, they were amazed, while scarcely gratified, to find every rum shop locked up fast and tight. The Dance Hall, the Alhambra, the Long Branch and the Alamo, acting on the hint of Mr. Masterson, had closed their doors, and not a drink of whiskey, not even for rattlesnake-bite, could have been bought from one end of the street to the other. Not that this paucity of rum-selling seemed to bear heavily upon the community. There were never so many gentlemen of Dodge whom one might describe as wholly and successfully drunk. The boardwalks were thronged with their staggering ranks, as the visitors made a tour of the place. The visitors were pompous, well-fed men of middle age; and while they said they had come to perform a duty, one skilled in man-reading might have told at a glance that their great purpose was rather to tickle vanity, and demonstrate how unsparing would be their spirit when the question became one of moral duty. When the duo first appeared their faces wore a ruddy, arrogant hue. As they went about upon that tour of inspection they began to pale. There was something in the lowering eye of what fragment of the public looked to the leadership of Bear Creek Johnson, to whiten them. Pale as linen three times bleached, following fifteen minutes spent about the streets, the visitors—their strutting pomposity visibly reduced—made a shortest wake to Gallon’s, being the hostelry they designed to honour with their custom. Gallon’s was a boarding-house distinguished as “Prohibition,” and the visitors proposed to illustrate it and give it fashion in the estimation of sober men, by bestowing upon it their patronage. Two hours later, the proprietor would have paid money to dispense with the advertisement. Once the invaders were housed, by twos and fives and tens, the disengaged inhabitants of Dodge began to assemble in front of Gallon’s. Some came in a temper of curiosity. The band with Bear Creek Johnson, however, entertained a different feeling. Their taste was for the strenuous. They set forth this fact with imitations of the yelp of the coyote. Withal, they were constantly closing up about the refuge of the visitors, until they stood, a packed and howling mob, with which it was no more than a question of minutes before ugly action would begin.