Now, if there are several together, a few drinks about makes happiness full; and the ball then opens. The boys all draw good wages, their expenses are light, and most of them aim to spend in saloons every dollar that is not needed for actual necessaries. They often draw from fifty to one hundred dollars at once, and spend every dollar of it before leaving a saloon. There are men making fortunes off the cow-boys to-day. There are professional gamblers lurking around most of these frontier saloons, and they watch to _intoxicate_ the boys and then play them out of their money. Though the game be begun in the best of humor, it is usual for each man to lay his six-shooter at his side; and the _maxim_ is, _mind your eye_. As long as everything is done squarely there is no trouble; but the first man that is caught tricking is in hot quarters; and I have seen some deadly battles without one word spoken. Sometimes the gamblers entirely strip the boys, and with an understanding, when there is a large pot, they point the six-shooters at the gamblers’ heads and pull in the pile. Some years ago Dodge City, Kansas, was given up to be the roughest and most wicked place in the United States. It is situated right where the Texas trail crosses the railroad, and was a regular stock-center. Numbers of cow-boys were constantly going in and out, and whole dens of gamblers and prostitutes were quartered here for lucre. The population being composed of _such beings_, and the clash of the six-shooter being the voice of the law, the vilest consequences are but natural. Ah! many a man played his last game here, and mingled his dying-breath with the lurid smoke of the six-shooters. Men were shot down like dogs, and buried as they fell, red with gore and horribly mangled. There is at this place a yard called the _Boot Grave-yard_, a place well known to all western men, and called thus from the fact that thirty-eight men have been buried here with their boots on. There was scarcely a day that there was not a riot in town among the cow-boys, or between the cow-boys and gamblers; and of course _shooting_ and _cutting_ was the consequence. Emigrants passing through with wagons, and not knowing the place, were decoyed into dark places and robbed. Passengers from the trains, on going in for refreshments and showing any amount of money, were trapped and robbed, and were killed upon resistance. You are a stranger in the country, and they are all cliqued together; and what are you to do? If you go to making much trouble, or get to shooting off your mouth, the consequences can be imagined. Even when there are _officers_, they are not able to command order; for the first day they try it a ball from some unknown villain will strike him. Hence the officers are usually cliqued with the desperadoes. The easier a person can get out of these places the better; for the officers themselves will put you into a dungeon for the gamblers to rob you.