Along with the gamblers came the prostitutes, the Three Card Monte men, from the deserts of Arizona, from the deserts of New Mexico, from Arkansas, and Texas. The prostitutes were not segregated nor isolated. They occupied the second story, front, of the business houses along the one Main Street. Among them were two Cherokee Indian girls, sisters; Violet and May. May was built like the Venus. She was her little sister in the flesh, as far as beauty went. She had thin, fine lined features, coal black hair that reached her ankles, and a complexion the color of a cape-jessamine. The only marks of the Indian were her silence and suppleness; and the grace of her body. Both had been convent bred. After these years of forced and disagreeable restraint in the convent, they turned to the easiest way, or else some law of atavism asserted itself, and swept upon them the insistent instincts of their Indian past. The streets looked like a scene from a comic opera. Red blanketed Indians mixed freely with the whites, and Mexicans, wearing a fortune in a silver hat band that glittered like a coiled snake around their pointed-crowned, broad-brimmed, white hats. Notwithstanding the fact that the Indian is a stoic and seldom gets excited himself, he gravitates toward a crowd like a fly toward a bowl of sugar, instinctively rebelling against the accumulated loneliness of the past. He does not take any part to be sure, nor does he join in the fun and the noise, but he has his own, ancient, silent, devious ways of pleasure. He did not know of course, the silent watchful Indian, that he was helping to celebrate his own funeral. All these tens of thousands of white men congregated here, were at a given signal, going to leap over the line of the Indian Territory and cut up, into the checker-board squares of little farms, the old, happy hunting ground of his ancestors. The line-up was on the southern Kansas line. For weeks, for months, they had been getting ready for this race; Texans on their long winded cow-ponies, Kentuckians on their thoroughbreds, Illinois farmers on their fat, overfed, pot-bellied horses, and Missouri farmers driving wagons with mules. It was just like getting ready for a world Marathon, which had fifty thousand entries, and no rules and no judges. They trained hundreds of horses here for weeks; for endurance, for speed, for that first great leap forward. Some had picked out the land they wanted in advance and had a definite objective. The rich paid fabulous sums for horses; tall, gaunt, clean limbed Kentucky racers, or Virginia thoroughbreds, thin and nimble bodied. There were fat mule teams that could not make twenty miles in a day. But everyone was eager for a little square of that rich land.