The passion for gambling was raging, and to pander
thereto were collected as choice a lot of desperadoes as ever "stocked"
cards or loaded dice. It came to be noticed that they were on excellent
terms with a man called "Jeff" Johnson, who was lessee of the hotel; and
to be suspected that said Johnson, in local parlance, "stood in with"
them. With this man had come to Barker's his daughter Sarah, commonly
known as "Sally," a handsome girl with a straight, lithe figure, fine
features, reddish auburn hair, and dark blue eyes. It is but fair to say
that even the "toughs" of a place like Barker's show some respect for
the other sex, and Miss Sally's case was no exception to the rule. The
male population admired her; they said she "put on heaps of style"; but
none of them had seemed to make any progress in her good graces.
On a pleasant afternoon, just after the track had been laid some miles
west of Barker's, and construction trains were running with some
regularity to and from the end thereof, Sinclair sat on the rude veranda
of the engineers' quarters, smoking his well-colored meerschaum and
looking at the sunset. The atmosphere had been so clear during the day
that glimpses were had of Long's and Pike's peaks, and as the young
engineer gazed at the gorgeous cloud-display he was thinking of the
miners' quaint and pathetic idea that the dead "go over the Range.
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