The sun set, the twilight fell, the wind went down, the dust settled, and night mantled Benton.  The roar of the day became subdued.  It resembled the purr of a gorging hyena.  The yellow and glaring torches, the bright lamps, the dim, pale lights behind tent walls, all accentuated the blackness of the night and filled space with shadows, like specters.  Benton’s streets were full of drunken men, staggering back along the road upon which they had marched in.  No woman now showed herself.  The darkness seemed a cloak, cruel yet pitiful.  It hid the flight of a man running from fear; it softened the sounds of brawling and deadened the pistol-shot.  Under its cover soldiers slunk away sobered and ashamed, and murderous bandits waited in ambush, and brawny porters dragged men by the heels, and young gamblers in the flush of success hurried to new games, and broken wanderers sought some place to rest, and a long line of the vicious, of mixed dialect, and of different colors, filed down in the dark to the tents of lust.

Life indoors that night in Benton was monstrous, wonderful, and hideous.

Every saloon was packed, and every dive and room filled with a hoarse, violent mob of furious men:  furious with mirth, furious with drink, furious with wildness—­insane and lecherous, spilling gold and blood.

The gold that did not flow over the bars went into the greedy hands of the cold, swift gamblers or into the clutching fingers of wild-eyed women.  The big gambling-hell had extra lights, extra attendants, extra tables; and there round the great glittering mirror-blazing bar struggled and laughed and shouted a drink-sodden mass of humanity.  And all through the rest of the big room groups and knots of men stood and sat around the tables, intent, absorbed, obsessed, listening with strained ears, watching with wild eyes, reaching with shaking hands—­only to gasp and throw down their cards and push rolls of gold toward cold-faced gamblers, with a muttered curse.  This was the night of golden harvest for the black-garbed, steel-nerved, cold-eyed card-sharps.  They knew the brevity of time, and of hour, and of life.

In the dancing-halls there was a maddening whirl, an immense and incredible hilarity, a wild fling of unleashed, burly men, an honest drunken spree.  But there was also the hideous, red-eyed drunkenness that did not spring from drink; the unveiled passion, the brazen lure, the raw, corrupt, and terrible presence of bad women in absolute license at a wild and baneful hour.

That was the last pay-day Beauty Stanton’s dancing-hall ever saw.  Likewise it was to be the last she would ever see.  In the madness of that night there was written finality—­the end.  Benton had reached its greatest, wildest, blackest, vilest.  But not its deadliest!  That must come—­later—­as an aftermath.  But the height or the depth was reached.

The scene at midnight was unreal, livid, medieval.  Dance of cannibals, dance of sun-worshipers, dance of Apaches on the war-path, dance of cliff-dwellers wild over the massacre of a dreaded foe—­only these orgies might have been comparable to that whirl of gold and lust in Beauty Stanton’s parlors.