Neale did not tell Larry what he had heard.  The cowboy changed subtly, but not in his attitude toward Neale.  Benton and its wildness might have been his proper setting.  So many rough and bad men, inspired by the time and place, essayed to be equal to Benton.  But they lasted a day and were forgotten.  The great compliment paid to Larry King was the change in the attitude of this wild camp.  He had been one among many—­a stranger.  In time when the dance-halls grew quiet as he entered and the gambling-hells suspended their games.  His fame increased as from lip to lip his story passed, always gaining something.  Jealousy, hatred, and fear grew with his fame.  It was hinted that he was always seeking some man or men from California.  He had been known to question new arrivals:  “Might you-all happen to be from California?  Have you ever heard of an outfit that made off with a girl out heah in the hills?”

Neale, not altogether in the interest of his search for Allie, became a friend and companion of Place Hough.  Ancliffe sought him, also, and he was often in the haunts of these men.  They did not take so readily to Larry King.  The cowboy had become a sort of nervous factor in any community; his presence was not conducive to a comfortable hour.  For Larry, though he still drawled his talk and sauntered around, looked the name the Texan visitors had left him.  His flashing blue eyes, cold and intent and hard in his naming red face, his blazing red hair, his stalking form, and his gun swinging low—­these characteristics were so striking as to make his presence always felt.  Beauty Stanton insisted the cowboy had ruined her business and that she had a terror of him.  But Neale doubted the former statement.  All business, good and bad, grew in Benton.  It was strange that as this attractive and notorious woman conceived a terror of Larry, she formed an infatuation for Neale.  He would have been blind to it but for the dry humor of Place Hough, and the amiable indifference of Ancliffe, who had anticipated a rival in Neale.  Their talk, like most talk, drifted through Neale’s ears.  What did he care?  Both Hough and Ancliffe began to loom large to Neale.  They wasted every day, every hour; and yet, underneath the one’s cold, passionless pursuit of gold, and the other’s serene and gentle quest for effacement there was something finer left of other years.  Benton was full of gamblers and broken men who had once been gentlemen.  Neale met them often—­gambled with them, watched them.  He measured them all.  They had given life up, but within him there was a continual struggle.  He swore to himself, as he had to Larry, that life was hopeless without Allie Lee—­yet there was never a sleeping or a waking hour that he gave up hope.  The excitement and allurement of the dance-halls, though he admitted their power, were impossible for him; and he frequented them, as he went everywhere else, only in search of a possible clue.

Gambling, then, seemed the only excuse open to him for his presence in Benton’s sordid halls.  And he had to bear as best he could the baseness of his associates; of course, women had free run of all the places in Benton.