These afternoons grew to be hideous for Allie.  She had been subjected to every possible attention, annoyance, indignity, and insult, outside of direct violence.  She could only shut her eyes and ears and lips.  Fresno found many opportunities to approach her, sometimes in Durade’s presence, the gambler being blind to all but the cards and gold.  At such times Allie wished she was sightless and deaf and feelingless.  But after she was safely in her room again she told herself nothing had happened.  She was still the same as she had always been.  And sleep obliterated quickly what she had suffered.  Every day was one nearer to that fateful and approaching moment.  And when that moment did come what would all this horror amount to?  It would fade—­be as nothing.  She would not let words and eyes harm her.  They were not tangible—­they had no substance for her.  They made her sick with rage and revolt at the moment, but they had no power, no taint, no endurance.  They were evil passing winds.

As she saw Durade’s retrogression, so she saw the changes in all about him.  His winnings were large and his strange passion for play increased with them.  The free gold that enriched Fresno and Mull and Andy only augmented their native ferocity.  There were also Durade’s other helpers—­Black, his swarthy doorkeeper, a pallid fellow called Dayss, who always glanced behind him, and Grist, a short, lame, bullet-headed, silent man—­all of them under the spell of the green cloth.

With Durade’s success had come the craze for bigger stakes, and these could only be played for with other gamblers.  So the black-frocked, cold-faced sharps became frequent visitors at Durade’s.  Jones, the professional, won on that second visit—­a fatal winning for him.  Allie saw the giant Fresno suddenly fling himself upon Jones and bear him to the floor.  Then Allie fled to her room.  But she heard curses—­a shot—­a groan—­Durade’s loud voice proclaiming that the gambler had cheated—­and then the scraping of a heavy body being dragged out.

This murder horrified Allie, yet sharpened her senses.  Providence had protected her.  Durade had grown rich—­wild—­vain—­mad to pit himself against the coolest and most skilful gamblers in Benton—­and therefore his end was imminent.  Allie lay in the dark, listening to Benton’s strange wailing roar, sad, yet hideous, and out of what she had seen and heard, and from the mournful message on the night wind, she realized how closely associated were gold and evil and men, and how inevitably they must lead to lawlessness and to bloodshed and to death.

23

Neale conceived an idea that he was in line for the long-looked-for promotion.  Neither the chief nor Baxter gave any suggestion of a hint of such possibility, but more and more, as the work rapidly progressed, Neale had been intrusted with important inspections.

Long since he had discovered his talent for difficult engineering problems, and with experience had come confidence in his powers.  He had been sent from place to place, in each case with favorable results.  General Lodge consulted him, Baxter relied upon him, the young engineers learned from him.  And when Baxter and his assistants were sent on ahead into the hills Neale had an enormous amount of work on his hands.  Still he usually managed to get back to Benton at night.