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 countenance as crafty as mischance and inborn disposition ever set upon a man.

All the time the baby board was bringing him in dimes, a jug under his counter was bringing Kane dollars. The laws of the state prohibited the sale of intoxicants, but the law blended out weakly, and fell away to little force, before it reached the Cherokee border. By the time the first herd was driven into the new pens for loading, Kane had a regular bar in the little plank building from which his hotel presently grew.

Kane had married a railroad woman, daughter of a tent-boarding-house keeper, a work-worn gaunt woman who also had prospered on the jug. This boarding-tent daughter was no finer in any particular than her mother, and no better than she should have been, without a doubt. But she was no worse than Kane in her frailest particular, a big-eyed woman, roughly handsome, much loud, raucous laughter in her big Irish mouth. Josie Meehan her name had been. The old hen that brooded her had given up her railroading way and taken root in Drumwell, where she ran a short-order house to catch as many as she might who missed her son-in-law's more thorough mill.

At this historic period of Drumwell's day, the Windsor Hotel was the casino of the town. All of its amusements were centered there, for Eddie Kane was a man who would not countenance competition as long as there was any way of cutting it off, and he was singularly proficient in his ways. There was in his place a long bar of dark polished wood, brass-fitted, mirror-backed, equal to anything to be found between Kansas City and Fort Worth, at which two deft men, aided by Kane himself in a rush,