served the nightly throngs. Faro and keno were to be met there, and poker without end.
This bar, with the gambling furniture, occupied one end of the ground floor, the dining-room the other. Between them the entrance hall extended, the front door at one end of it, the staircase at the other. Near this chute of a staircase there was a stubby little counter where the clerk shared duty with Mrs. Kane in receiving and dispatching guests. Capacious folding doors opened from bar to hallway, from hallway to dining-room. At night these were thrown open, tables were removed to the edges of the dining-room floor, and the place became a dance-hall, where a gent might sit down with a lady when he felt leg weary, and sop up as many drinks as his money could pay for and his skin would hold.
This was a spacious room, a row of stocky posts down its center upholding the overhead structure in security against the vibrations set moving by hard-pounding range heels. There were splintered corners on some of them, where the bullets of old rows renewed, and fresh ones springing out of rivalries and jealousies had struck. Human gore is not difficult to remove from the planks of a floor; its dye is not fast and everlasting, in spite of traditions which fix it as unfading. If that had been true, Eddie Kane's floor would have shown its blots from end to end.
Kane held his customers down to a decorum far greater than appeared possible, taking into account the character of these border herdsmen. He was on the watch always, his cocked head over on his shoulder as if he tried to listen to his own heart in the suspicion that it was plotting
