Dutch spat thoughtfully. "I thought I'd seen some honky-tonks, but this beats all. There's maybe four or five blocks of business with a few joints on the side streets, but mostly it's on the main drag, Fremont, a couple of blocks down from the railroad station."
"What do the clubs look like?"
"Well, three or four of them are pretty fancy. I went in and asked a few questions. Seems like a bunch from Los Angeles came in not long back and kind of prettied things up. But the play isn't much and the people on the streets, I swear to God, Doc, it looks like a mob scene out of a Western picture. I even saw Indians."
Doc was opening the rear door of the old car and beginning to lift out the supplies. "What about tourists?"
Dutch shrugged. "How the hell do I know which are tourists? I'll tell you one thing though. There are plenty of whores. They even got a crib district. I didn't know there was one left in the country. This place is backward as hell."
Doc laughed and picked up a box, then he stopped as Judy ran across through the weeds toward them. Her face was flushed, her eyes shining. "I was next door. They got chickens and some pigs, and even horses. Doc, can I have a horse to
ride? There's room to keep him in the bam and everything.**
Dutch had all the carnival grifter's natural suspicion of natives. "You keep away from them people, mind."
"Ah," said Doc, "lay off the kid. We have to live in this country, and unless I'm wrong we'll probably be here for a long time. Come on now, let's get this junk in the house."
They sat at dinner under the stark Hght of the bare electric bulb dangling at the end of its black insulated drop cord. The food was good. That was one thing about Joe. He was a natural cook. But he was cursing the stove and telling Doc how they had to have a refrigerator the first thing. They needed other things, too; the stove was lousy, and the dishes weren't fit to eat on, and a hot-water heater would help and. . . .
Doc's mind ceased to follow Joe's rambfing words. Joe never stopped to think that things cost money, and Doc couldn't remember a time in his life when he had been so nearly broke.
He got up vithout speaking and went out to the porch. Behind him he heard Joe and Judy rise and begin the dishes. He sat down on the steps. There was a softness in the dry air that was very pleasant and very restful. Doc knew nothing about the desert, or the fact that sundown is the most pleasant period of the desert land. But strangely he found that he was enjoying himself as he looked around.
The place could be made attractive with work. Paint would help. The old bam should be torn down and a garage put in its place and the plank fences mended and painted.
Yes, it would be kind of fun to fix it up. He had never had a place of his own, or for that matter much responsibility of any kind. But here, it was up to him. If he didn't do something they would starve.
He went back in. Tomorrow they would have to get other beds. They could clean out the woodshed for Joe and fix Chance a place on the screen porch where he'd get plenty of air. Doc had always heard that T.B. needed a lot of air. Judy could have Chance's room.
He undressed slowly, stretching on the lumpy mattress, not really expecting to sleep. He did, eight solid hours, more sleep than he had had at one time in a dozen years. When he
awoke, it was as if to a new world. He was raring to go. After breakfast, he put Joe to clearing the woodshed, and sent Dutch to town for canvas to nail around one end of the screen porch, and two beds. Then he walked back to look at the old barn.
Judy went with him. Judy was bubbhng over this morning, more filled with life than he had ever seen her. "You like it here?"
"Gee," she said, "sure. It's great. Can we get some chickens and a pig?"
"Talk to Joe. I don't know a damn thing about livestock." "Joe does. They had everything at the training farm." They went into the barn. It was empty and the wind which had come up during the night sighed through the cracks with a kind of eerie steadiness.
"Looks like it will take some fixing before we could keep anything in here."
Judy said, "We going to live here, always?" Doc thought about it. The thought was sobering. "We'll be here awhile anyway." He heard the rattle of the old Ford as Dutch turned in from the highway, and they moved back to the house.
Chance was awake. He lay in the little dark bedroom, not moving, not turning his head when Doc entered.
Doc said, "We're fixing up a comer of the porch for you. You have to have fresh air and rest and eggs and milk and . . ."
Chance closed his eyes. "For Christ sake, stop making like a nurse. So, I'm going to die. So what?" He sounded listless, as if there was nothing in the world to interest him.
Doc talked for a couple of minutes, then went outside where Dutch and Joe were setting up one of the new beds at the corner of the porch.
"When you get it all set, move him out here. I'm going into town. You got the car keys, Dutch?"
Dutch spat over the steps to the weeds outside. "In the lock. You don't think anyone would steal that, do you?"
Doc walked to the battered car and stepped in. The car started tiredly. He backed around on the grass and headed
out to the highway. He turned into the black-topped road and pressed the accelerator to the floor.
The car was doing thirty miles an hour. It was almost all he could do to hold it on the road. The wind and a bent radius rod made steering a problem, but he reached the underpass, drove through it, turned right and then left into Fremont. He di'ove slowly down Fremont until he reached Fifth Street. There he parked the old car and retraced the route on foot.
He took his time. It was nearly noon and he went into a small sandwich bar on the northeast side of the street and talked to the counterman while he ate a bowl of chili.
The counterman was young with a shock of yellow hair, pale blue eyes and an almost chinless face. He was disgusted. Doc watched him, deciding that he would have been disgusted in New York or Chicago or Cleveland.
"A man's a fool to stay here." The counterman was wiping the oilcloth top of the bar. "Hell, wages are cheap, and food and rent are high, and unless you're a dealer you ain't got a chance."
Doc finished his chih. "Know a good doctor?"
"I know one. I don't know how good he is. Schultz. Go up the stairs to the right of the door. You can't miss."
Doc climbed the stairs. They were dirty. He pushed open the door on the right of the upper hall and came into a boxlike waiting room. The place smelled faintly of antiseptic. Doc stopped just inside the door, letting his eyes assess the room, the three worn, straight chairs, the lumpy couch, the table with its stack of dog-eared magazines.
He started to turn away. Then, suddenly, he thought of his father, and the fancy oflBces high above the Loop. His father was a charlatan, a successful, high-paid charlatan. Doc had known it for years.
He had no way of judging how good a doctor his father might have been in other circumstances, in other surroundings. He knew enough however not to judge a medical man's ability by his front.
The inner door opened. The doctor stood beyond it. He
had round, gold-rimmed spectacles and a round south German head. His face was a little beefy, a little coarse looking. "Yes?"
Doc said, "We're new in town and I'm looking for a doctor. I've got a partner who is sick. T.B., I guess." He went ahead to explain about the beating and the punctured lung.
The doctor's face did not change. It was as if he failed to hear anything Doc said. Doc was getting a little angry. A man who set himself up as a doctor should show a little interest in the sick.
He said finally, "I judge you don't want the case, don't want to be bothered."
Schultz merely stared at him.
"All right. I'll find out from John Kern who a decent doctor is." Doc didn't know why he used Kern's name. He was not by habit a name-dropper.
There was a flicker in the round eyes. "You know John Kern?"
"Sure," said Doc. "We're living at his place out on the Tonopah road."
&
nbsp; "I see, come on in."
Schultz liked to talk. The knowledge came to Doc as a surprise. The man had shown no sign of it at first. Listening to him advise bed-rest, outlining a diet, promising that he would be out to see Chance in a day or two, and that they could then decide about X-rays, Doc made a discovery about Vegas, something which had not occurred to him.
Vegas was a small town, a clannish town, which resented the influx of outsiders that had descended upon it in a kind of tidal wave. Leaving the doctor's ofiice, Doc stored the knowledge away in his mind for future use. John Kern's name seemed to have a kind of magic quality. He wondered what would have happened to them if he had not chanced to meet John Kern on the train.
He stood at the bottom of the steps leading from Dr. Schultz's office and looked up and down the street.
It was only April, but despite the wind most of the men on the street were in shirt sleeves. They stood in small groups, or
loitered in the doors of the saloons and gambling clubs as if they had nothing in the world to do.
He could pick out the tourists on the street. They wore coats, for one thing, and the expectant air that he associated with sight-seers the world over. There were few of them, and fewer men whose clothes advertised that they were part of the construction crews still putting the finishing touches on the powerhouses and the dam.
He crossed the street and went into the Golden Nugget. Someone had spent a lot of money here, furnishing the big gambling room. But there wasn't much of a crowd. Only three crap tables were running and Doc's appraising eye noted that at each the shills outnumbered the real players.
A shill was hired by the house. He stood at a gambling table, making his bets, the theory being that real players did not like to risk their money at an empty table.
A shill, by house rule, racked his silver dollars in the groove along the table's edge in a distinctive way, five dollars standing as they should, the next five turned sidewise in the rack.
There was purpose in this. The slotman at the table could tell at a glance exactly how many dollars of the house money the shill had. It was merely another of the careful checks and balances by which the houseowners protected their games from dishonest employees.
Doc had chosen the Nugget because it seemed to him the biggest spot along Fremont. He had already passed the Club Grandee. It was on the other side of the street, down two blocks toward Fifth.
He had glanced at its dirty windows, at the tired electric sign from which the paint was peeling and three light bulbs were missing.
The Grandee had not impressed him, even though John Kern had said that he could get a job there. He preferred to work in one of the bigger, newer, flashier places.
He walked to the dealer at a crap table. "Who do I see about a job?"
The dealer looked at him, sizing him up in one quick glance. "New?"
"Got in yesterday."
The man laughed, a httle shortly. "You won't like it. You've seen nothing like this place in all your life, beheve me. I thought Caliente was bad. It's heaven compared to this hellhole. I'm getting out as soon as I have travel money."
"I can't. What about a job?"
"You can ask." He jerked his head toward a stout man who stood at the end of the ornate bar. "But it won't do you no good. They gotta list. All the boys from the Coast have drifted m.
Doc said, "Thanks."
He walked around the square of tables. At the rear of the big room were blackboards and half a hundred people were scattered in the four rows of chairs facing the boards. He thought of the crowds Cellini's book had drawn at the club in Cleveland. Even bookmaking did not seem to pay off well in this town.
Doc stopped beside the bar and the man looked him over silently as he made his pitch, telling where he was from, where he had worked. The man shook his head. "Sorry."
Doc said, "For Christ sake. All I'm asking is a chance to show you what I can do."
"Sorry, we gotta list."
Doc turned away. The man called him back. There was still no softness in his fleshy face, but his voice was friendlier. "You're real new here."
"Since yesterday,"
"And you worked in Miami?"
"That's right."
"Just a tip, the next time you ask for a job don't mention Miami. This town is spht two ways now, the old-timers who don't like us, the boys we brought with us from the Coast. All of us are afraid the gangs from the East are getting ready to move in."
Doc said, "If you mean did I work for the racket boys the answer is No."
"You worked in Miami," the man said. "Don't mention it." He turned and walked away as if he had lost interest in the whole subject.
Doc went slowly back into the glare of the afternoon sun-
light. The sun seemed to be brighter out here. It hurt his eyes.
He stood thinking it over. The town was divided into two camps, the johnny-come-latelys from the Coast and the native saloon men and gamblers. And both were afraid of an invasion from the East.
He went into the Pioneer Club, which despite its name was run by newcomers. He went to the Vegas Club and three smaller spots in the block between First and Second. The words were difiFerent, but the tmndown was as final.
He was whipped. His self-confidence, which usually carried him through any situation, was nearly gone. Christ what a town, a counterman who wanted to leave, a doctor who wouldn't take a case until he mentioned Kern's name, and half a dozen spots that would not hire him—spots where the minimum bet at the crap tables was only a quarter. And this was the place where he had told Chance they would get rich.
He took a deep breath and walked the two blocks to the Club Grandee. All he needed was to be turned down here and they might as well pull up stakes and head out. The hell of it was that he did not have enough money to move them all, even to Los Angeles.
He stopped outside the double swinging doors. Their panels were glass, painted in an X-like pattern of red and blue. The paint had chipped away, the varnish of the doorframes was checked and weathered and looked dirty.
Doc was fastidious and he had a definite physical repugnance in pushing open those doors. He stepped inside, his dark eyes ranging along the deep, narrow room. The bar ran from the front along the north wall to a point two-thirds of the distance to the rear of the room. Behind it was a back-bar that looked as if it had seen service since the sixties, judging from the ornate carving surrounding the crystal of the plate-glass mirror.
To his right were three crap tables, a roulette wheel and two blackjack tables. These were not arranged in the traditional squares but stood against the south wall, leaving just enough room for the dealers to squeeze behind them.
At the rear of the narrow room were four round, cloth-covered tables that Doc judged were for poker, and in the rear corner was a counter on which stood a kind of revolving bird cage. Behind the counter against the wall was a rack, holding white tickets about four inches square. Doc had no idea what they were for.
There was only one crap table operating and there were less than a dozen players in the room. One dealer loafed at the roulette wheel. The other layouts were empty.
The bartender watched him approach. He was a tall man, without hips, so that his soiled apron seemed about to slip down around his ankles.
Doc ordered whisky. The man set a bottle and a shot glass on the bar. He did not add a water chaser until Doc asked for it, and then he seemed to feel nothing but contempt.
Doc was beginning to get mad all over again. The knowledge that he was forced to come into this dump of a place to ask for a job was bad enough, and to be high-hatted by a bartender who probably could not write his own name was worse.
He took the drink slowly. The whisky was cheap and raw, burning its way clear down into his stomach, but he did not flinch. "Boss around?"
The bartender was indifferent. He indicated the door beyond the end of the bar with a sweep of his hand.
"Okay if I tallc to him?"
"Better ask him."
<
br /> Doc had the impulse to pick up the bottle and heave it into the man's narrow face. This, he thought, was the God-damnedest most unfriendly town he'd ever been in. And it was supposed to cater to tourists, to go out of its way to please the general public.
He spun a silver dollar on the bar and without waiting for change walked back to the door and knocked. He had no idea what Comelately Hombone would look like, nor was he prepared when a soft voice called from within.
"It ain't locked."
He walked into a room as dirty as the main saloon. It was small and most of its cramped space was fiUed by a big old-
fashioned safe and a scarred roll-top desk. The safe door was partly open and Doc saw that aside from some httered papers it was empty. Chipped gold letters on the door were still legible and he read, JUNO MINING COMPANY: rhyolite.
Comelately Hornbone sat in a swivel chair before the desk, and looked as old as it was. He was spare and his skin sunbaked to the textm-e of well-tanned leather, and Doc reaUzed that he was none too clean. "What's your trouble?"
"No trouble," said Doc. "John Kern said you'd give me a job."
The old man did not seem surprised. Doc was watching him closely, trying to judge his reactions. Hornbone considered him as if he were a specimen from another world. "You look like a con man or a sharp off the boats."
"The boats," said Doc. With a man hke the one at the desk, you did not press too hard. You did not oversell.
Hornbone squinted at him thoughtfully before sending a brown stream of tobacco juice unerringly into the cuspidor at the corner of the safe.
"You belong across the street at one of them new-fangled joints."
Doc said, "I tried. There wasn't a spot open." Suddenly the old man chuckled. "At least you're part honest. I suppose maybe John did send you. Known him long?" "Met him on the train." Doc felt that the intei-view was not going well, but for the hfe of him he did not know what to do about it. There was no softness in Hornbone's face, in his small eyes. Hornbone, Doc decided, could be very tough when he chose.
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