Assured, aggressive, his customary good humor heightened by the comforting sense of his luck being with him, he finally emerged into the open air to discover that the stars were out and that it might be later than he thought.  The air, infinitely pure, infinitely fresh, exhaled from the vast, breathing desert, and the delicious aromatic desert odors touched him like a caress.  He drew them in in great draughts.  The air seemed to him a wonderful, potent ichor infusing him with a new and vigorous life.  Hanson was sure of himself always, but now, in this awakened sense of such power and dominance as he had never known, he threw back his head and laughed aloud.

“Gosh!” he muttered, “I feel like all I got to do was to reach up and pull down a few of those stars and use them for poker chips.”  He exulted like a sleek and lordly animal in this thrilling vitality, this imperious and insistent demand for conquest.

Chickasaw Pete’s place, as he soon discovered, was no more pretentious in appearance than the San Gorgonio.  It also was a long, low frame building with some great cottonwood trees before it and a few palms with their infinite and haunting suggestions of the tropics.

It was with a sense of mounting excitement which still held that strong element of exultation that Hanson crossed the porch, opened the door and walked in.  He saw before him a long room well lighted with electricity and with a shining polished floor.  The bar ran along one side, and behind it lounged a short, stout, round-faced man with very black hair and eyes and a perpetual smile.  This was the bar-keeper, known familiarly as Jimmy.  At the rear of the room, covering about half of the floor, were rows and rows of chairs, occupied by both men and women, strong, sun-burned looking people in the main, but with the invariable and unmistakable sprinkling of “lungers” in various stages of recovery.

Hanson saw his friend, the station agent, leaning across the bar talking to Jimmy, and knew from the interested glances cast in his direction that he was the topic of conversation.

At the opposite end of the room was a piano.  A young man sat before it facing the wall, while beside him there stood a woman intently tuning a violin which she held tucked under her chin.  Approaching middle age, she was rather stout, with a sallow, discontented face, which yet held some traces of its former evanescent prettiness.  Both lashes and brows of her faded light eyes were heavily blackened, and the rouge which lay thickly on her cheeks only served to accentuate their haggard lines.  The hair, dark at the roots, was blondined to a canary color where it rolled back under her hat, large and black, of a dashing Gainsborough style and covered with faded red roses.  For the rest, her costume consisted of a white shirt waist, a wine-colored skirt and shoes with very high heels which were conspicuously, and no doubt uncomfortably, run over.