Page:Jackson Gregory--joyous trouble maker.djvu/222

206 low, rough-board shack with a sturdy roof bespeaking its owner's intention to return to his mart after the passing of the coming winter: necessary articles and provisions went over a fresh pine counter demanding and getting those prices which men do not question in a mining camp. Bradshaw was the storekeeper's name; no one knew him or of him. He, like all other necessities for communal existence, seemed to have materialized at Boom Town's need.

Through the trees was a crooked, brush-cleared track which was called a street, and facing the store another squat building went up wherein, long before roof or walls were completed, much whiskey was dispensed by Flash Truitt and his aide. The floor was the main thing here, it appeared, and true enough, while the Boom Town Saloon was still noisy with hammer and saw a fiddler and an accordeon player had arrived and the new settlement had its dance hall, a place destined to win much ill fame as days went by and more men and women came.

The men of the mountains in the Thunder River country have been always hard men, will always be hard men until the earth has given up its final fleck of yellow metal and the last of the big timber has gone down under a vigorous attack, men who worked hard and played hard, who were violent in wrath, scarcely less than violent in their amusements. And, always and always, those who come first to the shout of gold are the restless spirits, the adventurers of these later days, those many types which are one in their disregard of convention and their contempt for the orderly exist-