passed him, smiling again, nodding, sweeping a hand and arm effectively through her handsome curls as she flung a shapely limb over the broad back of the bear.  In a garish sort of way the woman was beautiful, and this night, as on all others, her beauty had nearly filled the silken coin-bag suspended from her neck.  As she rode down the street Aldous recalled Blackton’s words:  She was a friend of Culver Rann’s.  He wondered if this fact accounted for the strangeness of the look she had given him.

He passed on to the dance-hall.  It was crowded, mostly with men.  But here and there, like so many faces peering forth from living graves, he saw the Little Sisters of Tete Jaune Cache.  Outnumbered ten to one, their voices rang out in shrill banter and delirious laughter above the rumble of men.  At the far end, a fiddle, a piano, and a clarinet were squealing forth music.  The place smelled strongly of whisky.  It always smelled of that, for most of the men who sought amusement here got their whisky in spite of the law.  There were rock-hogs from up the line, and rock-hogs from down the line, men of all nationalities and of almost all ages; teamsters, trail-cutters, packers, and rough-shod navvies; men whose daily task was to play with dynamite and giant powder; steel-men, tie-men, and men who drilled into the hearts of mountains.  More than once John Aldous had looked upon this same scene, and had listened to the trample and roar and wild revelry of it, marvelling that to-morrow the men of this saturnalia would again be the builders of an empire.  The thin, hollow-cheeked faces that passed and repassed him, rouged and smiling, could not destroy in his mind the strength of the picture.  They were but moths, fluttering about in their own doom, contending with each other to see which should quickest achieve destruction.

For several minutes Aldous scanned the faces in the big tent-hall, and nowhere did he see DeBar.  He dropped out, and continued leisurely along the lighted way until he came to Lovak’s huge black-and-white striped soup-tent.  At ten o’clock, and until twelve, this was as crowded as the dance-hall.  Aldous knew Lovak, the Hungarian.

Through Lovak he had found the key that had unlocked for him many curious and interesting things associated with that powerful Left Arm of the Empire Builders—­the Slav.  Except for a sprinkling of Germans, a few Italians, and now and then a Greek or Swiss, only the Slavs filled Lovak’s place!—­Slavs from all the Russias and the nations south:  the quick and chattering Polak; the thick-set, heavy-jowled Croatian; the silent and dangerous-eyed Lithuanian.  All came in for Lovak’s wonderful soup, which he sold in big yellow bowls at ten cents a bowl—­soup of barley, rice, and cabbage, of beef and mutton, of everything procurable out of which soup could be made, and, whether of meat or vegetable, smelling to heaven of garlic.