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 Crowds which seemed to have sprung from the ground like grasshoppers were out, the din of the musicians in the two rival dance halls was shrieking into the night. All was animation, with the flush of the night's first potations on the cheeks of men who would grow ugly and quarrelsome as the accumulated poison struck deeper and the polluted night wore on.

Texas wondered how many men among them walked with their trailing shadows like him on the streets of Cottonwood that night. Many were there who had taken human life, against whom accounts remained to be balanced by law or kindred or friend. And there was growing at that hour trouble which probably would result in more shooting and slaying before many days.

Jud Springer had defied the mayor and opened his place, with an imported band which, in volume of sound at least, was ahead of anything that Cottonwood had ever heard. Business was going to his doors, for the lights were bright, and the shoulders of women gleamed under them like insidious flowers.

Hartwell wondered what had become of Fannie Goodnight, the glimpse of those half-naked women having brought her sharply into his mind. There must have been a good deal of that kind of life in Fannie Goodnight's experience, he believed, for the