The camp which was to be the scene of Lafond's operations and of the girl's anticipated triumphs, lay between Ragged Top and Tom Custer. It consisted of a double row of log cabins situated in the V of the deep ravine. The men generally ate in the long dining-room of the hotel, worked at prospecting in the hills, and spent their evenings in the centrally situated Little Nugget saloon, the property of Michaïl Lafond. The night of the half-breed's arrival the usual crowd was carrying on the usual discussions on the usual subjects. One fresh from the East entering the building would have been struck first with the strangeness of the room. It was long and low, and on three sides dark. Against the fourth wall was stretched tightly a white cotton sheet, imitating plaster, in front of which stood the bar. The bar was polished, narrow, with a foot rest in front and two towels hanging from metal clasps just under the projecting eaves of it. It had been brought in sections, by wagon, at considerable expense. Some three feet behind the bar, stretched a shelf of the same height, towel covered, on which stood four bottles in front of a little mirror. The shelf was piled symmetrically with glasses of all shapes--tumblers, ponies, fine-stemmed wineglasses--arranged in pyramids and squares. They glittered in the glare of the lamps, and the indirect light from the white sheet. A dim pink reflection was given back by the mirror--dim and pink because the glass was draped with pink mosquito bar. Overhead hung the sign which read, "To Trust is Bust." Beneath the reflector of the largest lamp lounged the barkeeper reading a paper. He had spread the paper on the bar, and, having crooked his elbows out at wide angles around its margin, was bending his head of straw-colored hair close over the print. He was dressed in white as to the upper part of his body. Occasionally he read aloud in a monotone from the paper. At other times his lips moved slowly, shaping the invisible words as they took form in his sluggish brain. "The latest creations in ties," he read, "are described by our buyer as being natty effects in the narrow plaids."