"You must be drunk," said Place, gravely, "and yet what you say hits

me hard. I'm a gambler. But sometimes--there are moments when I

might be less or more. There's mystery in the air. This Benton is a

chaos. Those hairy toilers of the rails! I've watched them hammer

and lift and dig and fight. By day they sweat and they bleed, they

sing and joke and quarrel--and go on with the work. By night they

are seized by the furies. They fight among themselves while being

plundered and murdered by Benton's wolves. Heroic by day--hellish by

night.... And so, spirit or what--they set the pace."

Next afternoon, when parasitic Benton awoke, it found the girl Ruby

dead in her bed.

Her door had to be forced. She had not been murdered. She had

destroyed much of the contents of a trunk. She had dressed herself

in simple garments that no one in Benton had ever seen. It did not

appear what means she had employed to take her life. She was only

one of many. More than one girl of Benton's throng had sought the

same short road and cheated life of further pain.

When Neale heard about it, upon his return to Benton, late that

afternoon, Ruby was in her grave. It suited him to walk out in the

twilight and stand awhile in the silence beside the bare sandy

mound. No stone--no mark. Another nameless grave! She had been a

child once, with dancing eyes and smiles, loved by some one, surely,

and perhaps mourned by some one living. The low hum of Benton's

awakening night life was borne faintly on the wind. The sand seeped;

the coyotes wailed; and yet there was silence. Twilight lingered.

Out on the desert the shadows deepened.

By some chance the grave of the scarlet woman adjoined that of a

laborer who had been killed by a blast. Neale remembered the spot.

He had walked out there before. A morbid fascination often drew him

to view that ever-increasing row of nameless graves. As the workman

had given his life to the road, so had the woman. Neale saw a

significance in the parallel.

Neale returned to the town troubled in mind. He remembered the last

look Ruby had given him. Had he awakened conscience in her? Upon

questioning Hough, he learned that Ruby had absented herself from

the dancing-hall and had denied herself to all on that last night of

her life.

There was to be one more incident relating to this poor girl before

Benton in its mad rush should forget her.

Neale divined the tragedy before it came to pass, but he was as

powerless to prevent it as any other spectator in Beauty Stanton's

hall.