Chapter 13

Rouletta Kirby could not manage to get warm. The longer she sat beside the stove the colder she became. This was not strange, for the room was draughty, people were constantly coming in and going out, and when the door was opened the wind caused the canvas walls of the saloon to bulge and its roof to slap upon the rafters. The patrons were warmly clad in mackinaw, flannel, and fur. To them the place was comfortable enough, but to the girl who sat swathed in sodden undergarments it was like a refrigerator. More than once she regretted her heedless refusal of the Countess Courteau's offer of a change; several times, in fact, she was upon the point of returning to claim it, but she shrank from facing that wintry wind, so low had her vitality fallen. Then, too, she reasoned that it would be no easy task to find the Countess at this hour of the night, for the beach was lined with a mile of tents, all more or less alike. She pictured the search, herself groping her way from one to another, and mumbling excuses to surprised occupants. No, it was better to stay here beside the fire until her clothes dried out.

She would have reminded her father of her discomfort and claimed his assistance only for the certainty that he would send her off to bed, which was precisely what she sought to prevent. Her presence irritated him; nevertheless, she knew that his safety lay in her remaining. Sam Kirby sober was in many ways the best of fathers; he was generous, he was gentle, he was considerate. Sam Kirby drunk was another man entirely--a thoughtless, wilful, cruel man, subject to vagaries of temper that were as mysterious to the girl who knew him so well as they were dangerous to friend and foe alike. He was drunk now, or in that peculiar condition that passed with him for drunkenness. Intoxication in his case was less a condition of body than a frame of mind, and it required no considerable amount of liquor to work the change. Whisky, even in small quantities, served to suspend certain of his mental functions; it paralyzed one lobe of his brain, as it were, while it aroused other faculties to a preternatural activity and awoke sleeping devils in him. The more he drank the more violent became his destructive mood, the more firmly rooted became his tendencies and proclivities for evil. The girl well knew that this was an hour when he needed careful watching and when to leave him unguarded, even temporarily, meant disaster. Rouletta clenched her chattering teeth and tried to ignore the chills that raced up and down her body.

White Horse, at this time, was purely a make-shift camp, hence it had no facilities for gambling. The saloons themselves were little more than liquor caches which had been opened overnight for the purpose of reaping quick profits; therefore such games of chance as went on were for the most part between professional gamblers who happened to be passing through and who chose to amuse themselves in that way.

After