After three months in the camps the loggers came back in to Aberdeen and the brothels ran wide open for a week and a half, ten days of orgy and bacchanal. This was the time of the big fights, when boxers would come from as far up the peninsula as Port Angeles and as far south as Salem, east to the mountains and west to the sea, twice a hundred battered, weary pugilists and young welterweights eager with the fierce hunger of desperation. Little boys walked down Wishgaw Street advertising for the fights, crying, “Smoker tonight! Fifteen cents! Smoker!”

The sawyers and the cooks and the floatermen filled the stands with their bought women, hands offering flowers, cash, whiskey, or busy beneath furs and tattered silks, eyes hot with bloodhunger.

Then they disappeared back upriver, back into the big timber, and the town relaxed in on itself, pressed ice to blackened eyes, swept itself clean and shook itself out, and waited for the next wild riot of pay day.