“How much,” inquired the man, “did you lend my partner? I’ll settle with you, and pay liberal interest.”
“That’s not the idee,” rejoined Bob. “Do you think me fool enough to lend a fellow five hundred dollars, and then after it increases to five thousand, square the account with a return of what I lent and a little more? That’s not my way of doing biz. How much stock have you got here on hand?”
Bob carefully committed to writing the invoice verbally furnished.
“Now,” said he, putting the memorandum in his pocket, “I’ll hold you responsible for all these traps—the whole outfit. You’ve got to close up and get out of this without any delay. I’ll give you twenty-four hours to do it in. You must then deliver everything safe into my hands.”
The unfortunate saloon-keeper knew that the law as administered in that mountain town would afford him no redress. He also knew that to refuse compliance with the demand of Cherokee Bob, however unjust, would precipitate a quarrel which would probably cost him his life. So when Bob, accompanied by two or three confederates, came the next morning to the saloon to take possession, he was prepared to submit to the imposition without resistance. Walking within the bar, Cherokee Bob emptied the money drawer and gave the contents to his victim. He then invited his friends to drink to the success of the new “outfit,” and finding himself in undisturbed occupancy, increased the amount of his gift to the man he had expelled to several hundred dollars. This was the manner in which he became, as Cynthia said, “settled in business.”
Florence was now the established headquarters of the robbers. Its isolated location, its distance from the seat of government, its mountain surroundings, and, more than all, its utter destitution of power to enforce law and order, gave it peculiar fitness as a base for the criminal and bloody operations of the desperate gang which infested it. At all hours of the day and night some of them were to be seen at the two saloons kept by Cherokee Bob and Cyrus Skinner. When one company disappeared another took its place, and at no time were there less than twenty or thirty of these desperadoes at one or both of their haunts, plotting and contriving deeds of plunder and robbery which involved the hard earnings, possibly the lives, of many of the fortunate miners of the vicinity. The crowd from both East and West had arrived. The town was full of gold hunters. Expectation lighted up the countenance of every newcomer. Few had yet realized the utter despair of failure in a mining camp. In the presence of vice in all its forms, men who were staid and exemplary at home laid aside their morality like a useless garment and yielded to the seductive influences spread for their ruin. The gambling shops and hurdy-gurdy saloons—beheld for the first time by many of these fortune-seekers—lured them on step by step, until many of them abandoned all thought of the object they had in pursuit, for lives of shameful and criminal indulgence.