a fervent prayer that he would go away of his own volition and leave her free.  Far more clearly than he, the woman recognized the utter impossibility of any serious purpose between them, and she fought his advances with every weapon in her armory, her very soul trembling behind the happy smiling of her lips.  It was bravely attempted, and yet those dull weapons of defence served merely to increase his interest, to awaken his passion, and thus bind him more strongly to her.  Safe once again from general observation, he returned to the obscurity of the wings and to the routine handling of trunks and scenery, feeling totally unable to permit her to pass entirely out of his life.  Within her own room she dampened her pillow with tears of regret and remorse, yet finally she sank to sleep strangely happy because he lingered.  It was the way of a woman; it was no less the way of a man.

It was thus that the “Heart of the World” players came to fulfil their engagement at San Juan upon a Saturday night.  This was the liveliest camp in all that mountain region, a frantic, feverish, mushroom city of tents and shacks, sprawling frame business blocks, and a few ugly brick abominations, perched above the golden rocks of the Vila Valley, bounded on one side by the towering cliffs, on the other by the pitiless desert.  In those days San Juan recognized no material distinction between midnight and noon-day.  All was glitter, glow, life, excitement along the streets; the gloomy overhanging mountains were pouring untold wealth into her lap, while vice and crime, ostentation and lawlessness, held high carnival along the crowded, straggling byways.  The exultant residents existed to-day in utter carelessness of the morrow, their one dominant thought gold, their sole acknowledged purpose those carnal pleasures to be purchased with it.  Everything was primitive, the animal yet in full control, the drinking, laughing, fighting animal, filled with passion and blood-lust, worshipping bodily strength, and governed by the ideals of a frontier society wherein the real law hung dangling at the hip.  Saloons, gambling halls, dance halls, and brothels flaunted themselves shamelessly upon every hand; the streets exhibited one continual riot, while all higher life was seemingly rendered inactive by inordinate grasping after wealth, and reckless squandering of it on appetite and vice; over all, as if blazoned across the blue sky, appeared the ever-recurring motto of careless humanity, “Eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow ye die.”  Hardly a week before a short railroad spur had been constructed up the narrow, rock-guarded valley from Bolton Junction, eighteen miles to the northward, and over those uneven rails the “Heart of the World” troupe of adventurous strollers arrived at San Juan, to find lodgment in that ramshackle pile of boards known locally as the “Occidental Hotel.”