At the half-breed camp was considerable bustle and excitement.  The activity of the Breed is not proverbial; they are at best a lazy lot, but now men and women came and went bristling with energy to their finger tips.  Preparations were nearing completion.  The chief item of importance was the whisky supply, and this the treasurer, Baptiste, had made his personal care.  A barrel of the vilest “rot-gut” that was ever smuggled into prohibition territory had been procured and carefully secreted.  This formed the chief refreshment, and, doubtless, the “bluestone” with which its fiery contents were strengthened, would work the passionate natures, on which it was to play, up to the proper crime-committing pitch.

The orgie was to be held in a barn of considerable dimensions.  It was a ramshackle affair, reeking of old age and horses.  The roof was decidedly porous in places, being so lame and disjointed that the starry resplendence of the summer sky was plainly visible from beneath it.

This, however, was a trifling matter, and of much less consequence than the question of space.  What few horse stalls had once occupied the building had been removed, and the mangers alone remained, with the odor of horse, to remind the guests of the original purpose of their ballroom.  A careful manipulation of dingy Turkey red, and material which had once been white, struggled vainly to hide these mangers from view, while coarse, rough boards which had at one time floored some of the stalls, served to cover in the tops and convert them into seats.  The result was a triumph of characteristic ingenuity.  The barn was converted into a place of the necessary requirements, but rendered hideous in the process.

Next came the disguising of the rafters and “collar-ties” of the building.  This was a process which lent itself to the curiously warped artistic sense of the benighted people.  Print—­I mean cotton rags—­was the chief idea of decoration.  They understood these stuffs.  They were cheap—­or, at least, as cheap as anything sold at Lablache’s store.  Besides, print decorated the persons of the buxom Breed women, therefore what more appropriate than such stuff to cover the nakedness of the building.  Festoons of print, flags of print, rosettes of print:  these did duty for the occasion.  The staring patterns gleamed on every beam, or hung in bald draping almost down to the height of an ordinary man’s head.  The effect was strangely reminiscent of a second-hand clothes shop, and helped to foster the nauseating scent of the place.

A row of reeking oil lamps, swinging in crazy wire swings, were suspended down the center from the moldering beams, and in the diamond window spaces were set a number of black bottles, the neck of each being stuffed with a tallow candle.

One corner of the room was set apart for the fiddler, and here a dais of rough boarding, also draped in print stuff, was erected to meet the requirements of that honored personage.  Such was the uncouth place where the Breeds proposed to hold their orgie.  And of its class it was an excellent example.