Benton seemed breathing hard, laboring under its load of evil, dancing toward its close.

Night wore on and the hour of dawn approached.  The lamps were dead; the tents were dark; the music was stilled; and the low, soft roar was but a hollow mockery of its earlier strength.

Like specters men staggered slowly and wanderingly through the gray streets.  Gray ghosts!  All was gray.  A vacant laugh pealed out and a strident curse, and then again the low murmur prevailed.  Benton was going to rest.  Weary, drunken, spent nature sought oblivion—­on disordered beds, on hard floors, and in dusty corners.  An immense and hovering shadow held the tents and halls and streets.  Through this opaque gloom the silent and the mumbling revelers reeled along.  Louder voices broke the spell only for an instant.  Death lay in the middle of the main street, in the dust—­and no passing man halted.  It lay as well down the side streets in sandy ditches, and on tent floors, and behind the bar of the gambling-hell, and in a corner of Beauty Stanton’s parlor.  Likewise death had his counterpart in hundreds of prostrate men, who lay in drunken stupor, asleep, insensible to the dust in their faces.  No one answered the low moans of the man who, stabbed and robbed, had crawled so far and could crawl no farther.

But the dawn would not stay back in order to hide Benton’s hideousness.  The gray lifted out of the streets, the shadows lightened, the east kindled, and the sweet, soft freshness of a desert dawn came in on the gentle breeze.

And when the sun arose, splendid and golden, with its promise and beauty, it shone upon a ghastly, silent, motionless sleeping Benton.

22

To Allie Lee, again a prisoner in the clutches of Durade, the days in Benton had been mysterious, the nights dreadful.  In fear and trembling she listened with throbbing ears to footsteps and low voices, ceaseless, as of a passing army, and a strange, muffled roar, rising and swelling and dying.

Durade’s caravan had entered Benton in the dark.  Allie had gotten an impression of wind and dust, lights and many noisy hurried men, and a crowded jumble of tents.  She had lived in the back room of a canvas house.  A door opened out into a little yard, fenced high with many planks, over or through which she could not see.  Here she had been allowed to walk.  She had seen Durade once, the morning after Fresno and his gang had brought her to Benton, when he had said that meals would be sent her, and that she must stay there until he had secured better quarters.  He threatened to kill her if he caught her in another attempt to escape.  Allie might have scaled the high fence, but she was more afraid of the unknown peril outside than she was of him.