After the robbery Sanc disappeared, and it was long till I saw him again. I decided to leave Denver. I owed them fifteen days on the chain gang, and had no wish to pay by shoveling snow in the streets. I bought a ticket to Butte, Montana, regretting the money but not caring to hit the road in the dead of winter across half a dozen of the coldest states in the Union. I did it in after years, but it was from necessity⁠—not choice.

Butte was never a “Wild West” town in the accepted sense. Cowboys were seldom seen. Miners and gamblers ruled the town. The miners were orderly, hard workers, deep drinkers, and fair fighters. They had none of the cheap, shouldering swagger of the gold-rush miner. Nearly everybody owned a gun, but the bullying, gun-toting, would-be bad men and killers never flourished in Butte. When one of them got peeved and started to lug out his cannon some hard-fisted miner beefed him like an ox with a fast one to the jaw, and kicked his “gat” out into the street where small boys scrambled for it.