← catalogue

Claim Number One

by George W. Ogden · English · Gutenberg #30558 · 502,511 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Claim Number One
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Claim Number One

Author: George W. Ogden

Illustrator: J. Allen St. John


        
Release date: November 29, 2009 [eBook #30558]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/30558

Credits: E-text prepared by Roger Frank and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CLAIM NUMBER ONE ***


E-text prepared by Roger Frank and the Project Gutenberg Online
Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)



Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
      file which includes the original illustration.
      See 30558-h.htm or 30558-h.zip:
      (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/30558/pg30558-images.html)
      or
      (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/30558/30558-h.zip)





CLAIM NUMBER ONE

by

GEORGE W. OGDEN

Author of
The Duke of Chimney Butte
Trails End, Etc.

Frontispiece by J. Allen St. John







Grosset & Dunlap
Publishers New York

Made in the United States of America

Copyright

A. C. McClurg & Co.
1922

Published May, 1922

Copyrighted in Great Britain

Printed in the United States of America




CONTENTS
      I.    Comanche                            1
     II.    Guests for the Metropole            9
    III.    Unconventional Behavior            21
     IV.    The Flat-Game Man                  46
      V.    Skulkers                           63
     VI.    The Drawing                        79
    VII.    A Midnight Extra                  104
   VIII.    The Governor's Son                122
     IX.    Double Crookedness                140
      X.    Hun Shanklin's Coat               154
     XI.    Number One                        172
    XII.    The Other Man                     188
   XIII.    Sentiment and Nails               206
    XIV.    "Like a Wolf"                     219
     XV.    An Argument Ends                  233
    XVI.    A Promise                         255
   XVII.    A Plan                            273
  XVIII.    The Strange Tent                  288
    XIX.    Crook Meets Crook                 304
     XX.    A Sudden Cloud                    325
    XXI.    The Crisis                        343




CLAIM NUMBER ONE

CHAPTER I

COMANCHE


Coming to Comanche, you stopped, for Comanche was the end of the world.
Unless, of course, you were one of those who wished to push the
boundary-line of the world farther, to make homes in the wilderness
where there had been no homes, to plant green fields in the desert where
none had been before.

In that case you merely paused at Comanche, like the railroad, to wait
the turn of events.

Beyond Comanche was the river, and beyond the river, dim-lined in the
west, the mountains. Between the river and the mountains lay the
reservation from which the government had pushed the Indians, and which
it had cut into parcels to be drawn by lot.

And so Comanche was there on the white plain to serve the present, and
temporary, purpose of housing and feeding the thousands who had
collected there at the lure of chance with practical, impractical,
speculative, romantic, honest, and dishonest ideas and intentions.
Whether it should survive to become a colorless post-office and
shipping-station for wool, hides, and sheep remained for the future to
decide. As the town appeared under the burning sun of that August
afternoon one might have believed, within bounds, that its importance
was established for good and all.

It was laid out with the regular severity of the surveyor's art.
Behind the fresh, new railroad depot the tented streets swept away
pretentiously. In the old settlements--as much as two months before
that day some of them had been built--several business houses of wood
and corrugated sheet-iron reared above the canvas roofs of their
neighbors, displaying in their windows all the wares which might be
classified among the needs of those who had come to break the desert,
from anvils to zitherns; from beads, beds, and bridles to winches,
wagons, water bottles, and collapsible cups.

At the head of the main street stood a hydrant, which the railroad
company supplied with water, offering its refreshment to all comers--to
man, beast, and Indian, as well as to dusty tourists with red
handkerchiefs about their necks. Around it, where teams had been fed and
the overflow of water had run, little green forests of oats were
springing, testifying to the fecundity of the soil, lighting unbelieving
eyes with hope.

"Just look what a little water will do!" said the locaters and town-site
men, pointing with eloquent gesture. "All this land needs, gentlemen, is
a little water to make it a paradise!"

On the right hand of the hydrant there was a bank, presenting a front of
bricked stability, its boarded sides painted in imitation of that same
resisting material, for the comfort of its depositors perhaps, and the
benefit of its credit before the eyes of the passing world. Well out in
the desert, among the hummocks of earth heaped around anchoring sage
clumps, stood the Elkhorn Hotel. It was built of logs, with a design
toward the picturesque and an eye to the tourist class of adventurers
who were expected to throng to the opening. The logs had been cut along
the river--they were that gnarled cottonwood which grows, leaning always
toward the northeast, in that land of bitter extremes--the bark stripped
from them until they gleamed yellowly, and fitted together with studied
crudity. Upon the projecting end of the ridge-pole rode a spreading
elk-prong, weathered, white, old.

And there was the Hotel Metropole. There always is a Hotel Metropole and
a newspaper, no matter where you go. When you travel beyond them you
have penetrated the _Ultima Thule_ of modern times. The Hotel Metropole
was near the station. It was picturesque without straining for it.
Mainly it was a large, sandy lot with a rope around it; but part of it
was tents of various colors, sizes, and shapes, arranged around the
parent shelter of them all--a circus "top," weathered and stained from
the storms of many years. Their huddling attitude seemed to express a
lack of confidence in their own stability. They seemed a brood of dusty
chicks, pressing in for shelter of the mothering wing.

All was under the direction of a small man with a cream-colored
waistcoat and a most incendiary-looking nose. It seemed tempting the
laws of physics governing dry materials and live coals to bring that
nose into the shelter of a desert-bleached tent. But it was there, and
it flared its welcome with impartial ardor upon all arrivals.

The scheme of the Hotel Metropole was this: If you wanted a cot in a
tent where each bed was partitioned from the other by a drop-curtain of
calico print, you could enjoy that luxury at the rate of two dollars a
night in advance, no baggage accepted as security, no matter what its
heft or outward appearance of value. If you didn't want to go that high,
or maybe were not so particular about the privacy of your sleeping
arrangements, you might have a cot anywhere in the circus-tentful of
cots, spread out like pews. There the charge was one dollar. That rate
chancing to be too steep for you, you might go into the open and rest in
one of the outdoor canvas pockets, which bellied down under your weight
like a hammock. There the schedule was fifty cents.

No matter what part of the house you might occupy on retiring, you were
warned by the wall-eyed young man who piloted you to the cot with your
number pinned on it that the hotel was not responsible for the personal
belongings of the guests. You were also cautioned to watch out for
thieves. The display of firearms while disrobing seemed to be encouraged
by the management for its moral effect, and to be a part of the ceremony
of retiring. It seemed to be the belief in the Hotel Metropole that when
a man stored a pistol beneath his pillow, or wedged it in between his
ribs and the side of the bunk, he had secured the safety of the night.

At the distant end of the main street, standing squarely across its
center, stood the little house which sheltered the branch of the United
States land-office, the headquarters being at Meander, a town a day's
journey beyond the railroad's end. A tight little board house it was,
like a toy, flying the emblem of the brave and the free as gallantly as
a schoolhouse or a forest-ranger station. Around it the crowd looked
black and dense from the railroad station. It gave an impression of
great activity and earnest business attention, while the flag was
reassuring to a man when he stepped off the train sort of dubiously and
saw it waving there at the end of the world.

Indeed, Comanche might be the end of the world--didn't the maps show
that it _was_ the end of the world, didn't the railroad stop there, and
doesn't the world always come to an abrupt end, all white and uncharted
beyond, at the last station on every railroad map you ever saw? It might
be the end of the world, indeed, but there was the flag! Commerce could
flourish there as well as in Washington, D. C., or New York, N. Y., or
Kansas City, U. S. A.; even trusts might swell and distend there under
its benign protectorate as in the centers of civilization and patriotism
pointed above.

So there was assurance and comfort to the timid in the flag at Comanche,
as there has been in the flag in other places at other times. For the
flag is a great institution when a man is far away from home and
expecting to bump into trouble at the next step.

Opposite the bank on the main street of Comanche were the tents of the
gods of chance. They were a hungry-mouthed looking lot that presided
within them, taken at their best, for the picking had been growing
slimmer and slimmer in Wyoming year by year. They had gathered there
from the Chugwater to the Big Horn Basin in the expectation of getting
their skins filled out once more.

One could find in those tents all the known games of cowboy literature,
and a good many which needed explanation to the travelers from afar.
There was only one way to understand them thoroughly, and that was by
playing them, and there seemed to be a pretty good percentage of curious
persons in the throng that sweated in Comanche that day.

That was all of Comanche--tents, hydrant, hotels, bank, business houses,
and tents again--unless one considered the small tent-restaurants and
lodging-places, of which there were hundreds; or the saloons, of which
there were scores. But when they were counted in, that was all.

Everybody in Comanche who owned a tent was on the make, and the making
was good. Many of the home-seekers and adventure-expectant young men and
women had been on the ground two weeks. They had been paying out good
money for dusty stage-rides over the promising lands which had been
allotted to the Indians already by the government. The stage people
didn't tell them anything about that, which was just as well. It looked
like land where stuff might be grown with irrigation, inspiration,
intensity of application, and undying hope. And the locaters and
town-site boomers led their customers around to the hydrant and pointed
to the sprouting oats.

"Spill a little water on this land and it's got Egypt skinned," they
said.

So the mild adventurers stayed on for the drawing of claims, their
ideals and notions taking on fresh color, their canned tomatoes (see the
proper literature for the uses of canned tomatoes in desert countries
frequented by cowboys) safely packed away in their trunks against a day
of emergency.

Every one of them expected to draw Claim Number One, and every one of
them was under the spell of dreams. For the long summer days of Wyoming
were as white as diamonds, and the soft blue mountains stood along the
distant west beyond the bright river as if to fend the land from
hardships and inclemencies, and nurture in its breast the hopes of men.

Every train brought several hundred more to add to the throng already in
Comanche--most of them from beyond the Mississippi, many of them
schemers, most of them dreamers ready to sacrifice all the endearments
of civilization for the romance of pioneering in the West, beyond the
limits of the world as defined by the map of the railroad-line over
which they had come.




CHAPTER II

GUESTS FOR THE METROPOLE


To Comanche there came that August afternoon, when it was wearing down
to long shadows, a mixed company, drawn from the far places and the
middle distances east of Wyoming. This company had assembled in the
course of the day's acquaintance on the last long, dusty run into the
land of expectations.

At dawn these people had left their comfortable sleeping-cars at
Chadron, in the Nebraska desert, to change to the train of archaic
coaches which transported the land-seekers across the last stretch of
their journey. Before that morning the company had been pursuing its way
as individual parts--all, that is, with the exception of the miller's
wife, from near Boston; the sister of the miller's wife, who was a widow
and the mother of June; and June, who was pasty and off-color, due to
much fudge and polishing in a young ladies' school.

These three traveled together, as three of such close relationship
naturally should travel. The widow was taking June to Wyoming to see if
she could put some marketable color in her cheeks, and the miller's wife
was going along for a belated realization, at least partially, of
youthful yearnings.

Since seventeen the miller's wife had longed to see the sun set behind a
mountain with snow upon it, and to see a cowboy with dust on his
shoulders, like the cowboys of the western drama, come riding out of the
glow, a speck at first, and on, and on, until he arrived where she
waited and flung himself from his panting horse, neckerchief awry, spurs
tinkling, and swept off his broad hat in salute. Beyond that point she
had not dared to go since marrying the miller, who had dust enough on
_his_ shoulders--unromantic dust, unromantic shoulders, goodness knows!
But that was her picture, all framed in the gold of her heart. She
wanted to see the mountain with the sun behind it, and the cowboy, and
all, and then she could sigh, and go back to the miller and near Boston
to await the prosaic end.

For all of her thirty-eight years Mrs. Dorothy Mann was shy in
proportion as her miller husband, the widely known J. Milton Mann was
bold. That he was a hard-mailed knight in the lists of business, and
that he was universally known, Mrs. Mann was ready to contend and uphold
in any company. She carried with her in the black bag which always hung
upon her arm certain poems bearing her husband's confession of
authorship, which had been printed in the _Millers' Journal_, all of
them calling public attention to the noble office of his ancient trade.
Of course the miller was not of the party, so we really have nothing
more to do with him than we have with the rest of the throng that
arrived on the train with these singled-out adventurers. But his
influence traveled far, like a shadow reaching out after the heart of
his spare, pert, large-eyed wife. She was not yet so far away from him
that she dared move even her eyes as her heart longed.

In the manner of the miller's wife, there was a restraint upon the most
commonplace and necessary intercourse with strangers which seemed almost
childish. She even turned in questioning indecision toward June's mother
before taking a seat offered her by a strange man, feeling at the same
time of the black bag upon her arm, where the poems reposed, as if to
beg indulgence from their author for any liberties which she might
assume.

June's mother, Mrs. Malvina Reed, widow of that great statesman, the
Hon. Alonzo Confucius Reed, who will be remembered as the author of the
notable bill to prohibit barbers breathing on the backs of their
customers' necks, was duenna of the party. She was a dumpy, small woman,
gray, with lines in her steamed face, in which all attempts at
rejuvenation had failed.

Mrs. Reed was a severe lady when it came to respecting the conventions
of polite life, and June was her heart's deep worry. She believed that
young woman to be in the first stage of a dangerous and mysterious
malady, which belief and which malady were alike nothing in the world
but fudge. When she turned her eyes upon June's overfed face a moisture
came into them; a sigh disturbed her breast.

By one of those strange chances, such as seem to us when we meet them
nothing short of preconceived arrangement, enough seats had been left
unoccupied in the rear coach, all in one place, to accommodate a second
party, which came straggling through with hand-baggage hooked upon all
its dependent accessories. It proved very pleasant for all involved.
There the June party scraped acquaintance with the others, after the
first restraint had been dissolved in a discussion of the virtues of
canned tomatoes applied to the tongue of one famishing in the desert.

First among the others was the bright-haired young woman from Canton,
Ohio, whose gray eyes seemed older than herself, lighting as if with new
hope every time they turned to acknowledge a good wish for her luck in
the new land. It seemed at such moments as if she quickened with the
belief that she was coming upon the track of something which she had
lost, and was in a way of getting trace of it again.

She sat up straight-backed as a saint in a cathedral window, but she
unbent toward June. June was not long in finding out that she, also, was
a product of grand old Molly Bawn, that mighty institution of learning
so justly famed throughout the world for its fudge; that her name was
Agnes Horton, and that she was going to register for a piece of land.

Some five years before June had matriculated, Agnes Horton had stepped
out, finished, from the halls of Molly Bawn.

"She's old," confided June to her mother's ear. "She must be at least
twenty-five!"

Old or young, she was handsomer than any other woman on the train, and
seemingly unaware of it as she leaned her elbow upon the dusty
window-sill and gazed out in pensive introspection upon the bleak land
where glaciers had trampled and volcanoes raged, each of them leaving
its waste of worn stone and blackened ledge.

And there was the school-teacher from Iowa; a long, thin string of a
man, who combed his hair straight back from his narrow, dished forehead
and said "idear." He was thinking seriously of sheep.

And there was the commissary sergeant from Fort Sheridan, which is
within the shadow of Chicago, German-faced, towering, broad. He blushed
as if scandalized every time a woman spoke to him, and he took Limburger
cheese and onions from his cloth telescope grip for his noonday lunch.

And there was the well-mannered manufacturer of tools, who came from
Buffalo, and his bald brother with him, who followed the law. There was
the insurance man from Kansas, who grinned when he wasn't talking and
talked when he didn't grin; and the doctor from Missouri, a large-framed
man with a worn face and anxious look, traveling westward in hope; and
the lumberman from Minnesota, who wore a round hat and looked meek, like
a secretary of a Y. M. C. A., and spat tobacco-juice out of the window.

All of these men, save the school-teacher and manufacturer, were more or
less failures, one way or another. Take the sergeant--Sergeant Schaefer,
and Jake was the name in front of that--for example. He had failed in
his examination for advancement to a commission, and blamed the
aristocracy of the army for it. He was disgusted with military life; and
to him a claim, especially Claim Number One, in the Indian Reservation
of Wyoming, looked like a haven of independence and peace.

There was the bald lawyer, too; a young man old from his honest cares, a
failure in the law because he could not square his conscience with its
practices. He was ready to quit it for an alfalfa-plot and a little
bunch of fat cattle--especially if he drew Number One.

Horace Bentley sighed when he looked back upon his struggles with the
world and the law. The law had been a saddle that galled his back
through many a heavy year. And his brother William, in need of a holiday
from his busy factory, had taken a month to himself to see "the boy," as
he called Horace, established in a new calling in the high-minded,
open-faced West.

As for the insurance solicitor and lumberman, it must be owned that they
were gamblers on the drawing. They meant to register and hang around for
the lottery. Then if they should draw Number One, or even anything up to
a hundred, they would sell out for what there was to be gained.

With Dr. Warren Slavens it was quite different from the case of these
purely adventurous speculators. Dr. Slavens had been late in getting a
start. It was not a difficulty peculiar to him alone that the start
always seemed a considerable distance ahead of him. Up to that time he
had been engaged with merely the preliminaries, and they had hobbled him
and cumbered him, and heaped up continually such a mass of matter to be
smoothed out of the way of his going, that he never had struck a canter
on the highway of life.

Of all the disheartened, blue, and beaten men on that dusty train that
dusty day, Dr. Warren Slavens, late of Missouri, was without question
the deepest down in the quagmire of failure. He hated himself for the
fizzle that he had made of it, and he hated the world that would not
open the gates and give him one straight dash for the goal among men of
his size.

He went frequently to the platform of the car and took a long pull at a
big, black pipe which he carried in a formidable leather case, like a
surgical instrument, in his inner pocket. After each pull at it he
returned with a redder face and a cloudier brow, ready to snap and snarl
like an under dog that believes every foot in the world is raised to
come down on his own ribs.

But there was nobody on that train who cared an empty sardine-can for
the doctor's failures or feelings. Nobody wanted to jab him in the ribs;
nobody wanted to hear his complaint. He was wise enough to know it, in a
way. So he kept to himself, pulling his shoulders up in soldierly
fashion when he passed Agnes Horton's place, or when he felt that she
was looking at him from her station directly behind his seat.

At any rate, up to the neck as he was in the bog of failure, the doctor
was going to Wyoming with a good many practical advantages ahead of
thousands of his fellows. Before turning doctor he had been a farmer's
boy; and he told himself that, failing in his solid determination to get
up to the starting-line in his profession, he believed he could do
pretty well at his older trade. But if he drew Claim Number One he meant
to sell it for ten thousand dollars--that being the current valuation
placed on first choice--and go back home to establish himself in dignity
and build up a practice.

The school-teacher hadn't much to say, but his cast was serious. He
expected to draw Number One, not to sell, but to improve, to put sheep
on, and alfalfa, and build a long barn with his name on the roof so that
it could be read from the railroad as the trains went by.

June's mother, being a widow, was eligible for the drawing. She also
meant to register. If she drew Number One--and she hadn't yet made up
her mind about the certainty of that--she intended to sell her
relinquishment and take June to Vienna for examination by an eminent
physician.

When anybody asked Agnes Horton what she intended to do with her
winnings out of the land lottery, she only smiled with that little
jumping of hope in her eyes. It was a marvel to the whole party what a
well set-up girl like her, with her refinement and looks and clothes,
wanted to fool her time away in Wyoming for, when the world was full of
men who would wear their hands raw to smooth a way for her feet to pass
in pleasanter places. But all of them could see that in her heart the
hope of Number One was as big as a can of tomatoes--in cowboy
literature--to the eyes of a man dying of thirst in Death Valley.

Only the toolmaker, William Bentley--and he was gray at the curling hair
which turned up at his broad temples--smiled as if he held it to be a
pleasant fantasy, too nebulous and far-away to be realized upon, when
any asked him of his intentions concerning Number One. He put off his
questioners with a pleasantry when they pressed him, but there was such
a tenderness in his eyes as he looked at his pale, bald brother, old in
honest ways before his time, that it was the same as spoken words.

So it will be seen that a great deal depended on Claim Number One, not
alone among the pleasant little company of ours, but in the calculations
of every man and woman out of the forty-seven thousand who would
register, ultimately, for the chance and the hope of drawing it.

At Casper a runner for the Hotel Metropole had boarded the train. He was
a voluble young man with a thousand reasons why travelers to the end of
the world and the railroad should patronize the Hotel Metropole and no
other. He sat on the arms of passengers' seats and made his argument,
having along with him a great quantity of yellow cards, each card
bearing a number, each good for an apartment or a cot in the open. By
payment of the rate, a person could secure his bed ahead of any need for
it which, said the young man, was the precaution of a wise ginny who was
on to his job. The train conductor vouched for the genuineness of the
young man's credentials, and conditions of things at Comanche as he
pictured them.

It was due to Sergeant Jake Schaefer that the company organized to mess
together. The hotel representative fell in with the idea with great
warmth. There was a large tent on the corner, just off Main Street,
which the company could rent, said he. A partition would be put in it
for the privacy of the ladies, and the hotel would supply the guests
with a stove and utensils. June's mother liked the notion. It relieved
her of a great worry, for with a stove of her own she could still
contrive those dainties so necessary to the continued existence of the
delicate child.

So the bargain was struck, the sergeant was placed in charge of the
conduct and supply of the camp, and everybody breathed easier. They had
anticipated difficulty over the matter of lodging and food in Comanche,
for wild tales of extortion and crowding, and undesirable conditions
generally, had been traveling through the train all day.

Comanche was quiet when the train arrived, for that was the part of the
day when the lull between the afternoon's activities and the night's
frantic reaping fell. Everyone who had arrived the day previous
accounted himself an old-timer, and all such, together with all the
arrivals of all the days since the registration began, came down to see
the tenderfeet swallow their first impressions of the coming Eden.

The Hotel Metropole was the only public house in Comanche that
maintained a conveyance to meet travelers at the station, and that was
for the transportation of their baggage only. For a man will follow his
belongings and stick to them in one place as well as another, and the
proprietor of the Metropole was philosopher enough to know that. So his
men with the wagon grabbed all the baggage they could wrench from, lift
from under, or pry out of the grasp of travelers when they stepped off
the train.

The June party saw their possessions loaded into the wagon, under the
loud supervision of Sergeant Schaefer, who had been in that country
before and could be neither intimidated, out-sounded, nor bluffed. Then,
following their traveling agent-guide, they pushed through the crowds to
their quarters.

Fortunate, indeed, they considered themselves when they saw how matters
stood in Comanche. There seemed to be two men for every cot in the
place. Of women there were few, and June's mother shuddered when she
thought of what they would have been obliged to face if they hadn't been
so lucky as to get a tent to themselves.

"I never would have got off that train!" she declared. "No, I never
would have brought my daughter into any such unprotected place as
this!"

Mrs. Reed looked around her severely, for life was starting to lift its
head again in Comanche after the oppression of the afternoon's heat.

Mrs. Mann smiled. She was beginning to take a comprehensive account of
the distance between Wyoming and the town near Boston where the miller
toiled in the gloom of his mill.

"I think it's perfectly lovely and romantic!" said she.

Mrs. Reed received the outburst with disfavor.

"Remember your husband, Dorothy Ann!" warned she.

Dorothy Ann sighed, gently caressing the black bag which dangled upon
her slender arm.

"I do, Malvina," said she.




CHAPTER III

UNCONVENTIONAL BEHAVIOR


Their situation was somewhat beyond the seat of noisy business and
raucous-throated pleasure. Mrs. Reed, while living in an unending state
of shivers on account of the imagined perils which stalked the footsteps
of June, was a bit assured by their surroundings.

In front of them was a vacant plot, in which inoffensive horses took
their siesta in the sun, awaiting someone to come along and hire them
for rides of inspection over the lands which were soon to be apportioned
by lot. A trifle farther along stood a little church, its unglazed
windows black and hollow, like gouged-out eyes. Mrs. Reed drew a vast
amount of comfort from the church, and their proximity to it, knowing
nothing of its history nor its present uses. Its presence there was
proof to her that all Comanche was not a waste of iniquity.

Almost directly in front of their tent the road branched--one prong
running to Meander, the county Seat, sixty miles away; the other to the
Big Horn Valley. The scarred stagecoaches which had come down from the
seventies were still in use on both routes, the two on the Meander line
being reenforced by democrat wagons when there was an overflow of
business, as frequently happened in those prosperous times.

Every morning the company assembled before the tent under the canvas
spread to protect the cookstove, to watch Mrs. Reed and Sergeant
Schaefer get breakfast, and to offer suggestions about the fire, and
admire June at her toast-making--the one branch of domestic art, aside
from fudge, which she had mastered. About that time the stage would
pass, setting out on its dusty run to Meander, and everybody on it and
in it would wave, everybody in the genial company before the tent would
wave back, and all of the adventurers on both sides would feel quite
primitive, in spite of the snuffling of the locomotive at the railway
station, pushing around freight-cars.

The locomotive seemed to tell them that they should not be deceived,
that all of this crude setting was a sham and a pretense, and that they
had not yet outrun the conveniences of modern life.

Dr. Slavens appeared to be getting the upper hand of his melancholy, and
to be drawing the comfort from his black pipe that it was designed to
give. Next to the sergeant he was the handiest man in the camp, showing
by his readiness to turn a full hand at anything, from paring potatoes
to making a fire, that he had shifted for himself before that day. The
ladies all admired him, as they always admire a man who has a little
cloud of the mysterious about him. Mrs. Reed wondered, audibly, in the
presence of June and Miss Horton, if he had deserted his wife.

The others were full of the excitement of their novel situation, and
drunk on the blue skies which strained the sunlight of its mists and
motes, pouring it down like a baptismal blessing. Even William Bentley,
the toolmaker, romped and raced in the ankle-deep dust like a boy.

Sunrise always found the floating population of Comanche setting
breakfastward in a clamoring tide. After that, when the land-office
opened at nine o'clock, the stream turned toward it, the crowd grew
around it, fringing off into the great, empty flat in which it stood--a
stretch of naked land so white and gleaming under the sun that it made
the eyes ache. There the land-seekers and thrill-hunters kicked up the
dust, and got their thousands of clerkly necks burned red, and their
thousands of indoor noses peeled, while they discussed the chances of
disposing of the high numbers for enough to pay them for the expense of
the trip.

After noonday the throngs sought the hydrant and the shade of the
saloons, and, where finances would permit, the solace of bottled beer.
And all day over Comanche the heel-ground dust rose as from the
trampling of ten thousand hoofs, and through its tent-set streets the
numbers of a strong army passed and repassed, gazing upon its gaudy
lures. They had come there to gamble in a big, free lottery, where the
only stake was the time spent and the money expended in coming, in which
the grand prize was Claim Number One.

"It looks to me," said Horace Bentley, the bald lawyer, "like a great
many people are going to be bitterly disappointed in this game. More
than forty thousand have registered already, and there are three days
more before the books close. The government circulars describing the
land say there are eight thousand homesteads, all told--six hundred of
them suitable for agriculture once they are brought under irrigation,
the rest grazing and mineral land. It seems to me that, as far as our
expectations go in that direction, we might as well pack up and go
home."

Four days in camp had made old-timers out of the company gathered under
the awning before their tent, waiting for the meal which Mrs. Reed and
her assistants were even then spreading on the trestle-built table.
There had been a shower that afternoon, one of those gusty, blustery,
desert demonstrations which had wrenched the tents and torn hundreds of
them from their slack anchoring in the loose soil.

After the storm, with its splash of big drops and charge of blinding
dust, a cool serenity had fallen over the land. The milk had been washed
out of the distances, and in the far southwest snowy peaks gleamed
solemnly in the setting sun, the barrier on the uttermost edge of the
desert leagues which so many thousand men and women were hungry to
share.

"Yes, it's a desperate gamble for all of us," Dr. Slavens admitted. "I
don't see any more show of anybody in this party drawing a low number
than I see hope for a man who stands up to one of the swindles in the
gambling-tents over there."

"Still," argued Milo Strong, the Iowa teacher, "we've got just the same
chance as anybody out of the forty thousand. I don't suppose there's any
question that the drawing will be fair?"

"It will be under the personal management of the United States Land
Commissioner at Meander," said Horace Bentley.

"How do they work it?" asked June, perking up her head in quick interest
from her task of hammering together the seams of a leaky new tin cup.
She had it over a projecting end of one of the trestles, and was going
about it like a mechanic.

"Where did you learn that trick?" inquired the toolmaker, a look in his
eyes which was pretty close kin to amazement.

"Huh!" said June, hammering away. "What do you suppose a college
education's good for, anyway? But how do they manage the drawing?" she
pressed.

"Did they teach you the game of policy at Molly Bawn?" the lawyer
asked.

"The idea!" sniffed Mrs. Reed.

Miss Horton smiled into her handkerchief, and June shook her head in
vigorous denial.

"I don't even know what it is," said she. "Is it some kind of
insurance?"

"It beats insurance for the man that runs the game," said Strong,
reminiscently.

"All of the names of those who register will be taken to Meander when
the registration closes," explained Horace. "There are half a dozen
clerks in the little office here transcribing the names on to small
cards, with the addresses and all necessary information for notifying a
winner. On the day of the drawing the forty thousand-odd names will be
put into a big hollow drum, fitted with a crank. They'll whirl it, and
then a blindfolded child will put his hand into the drum and draw out
Number One. Another child will then draw Number Two, and so on until
eight thousand names have come out of the wheel. As there are only eight
thousand parcels of land, that will end the lottery. What do you think
of your chance by now, Miss Horton?"

"Why, it looks fair enough, the way they do it," she answered,
questioning Dr. Slavens with her eyes.

He shook his head.

"You can't tell," he responded. "I've seen enough crookedness in this
tent-town in the past four days to set my suspicions against everything
and every official in it."

"Well, the drawing's to be held at Meander, you know," reminded William
Bentley, the toolmaker, "and Meander advertises itself as a moral
center. It seems that it was against this town from the very start--it
wanted the whole show to itself. Here's a circular that I got at Meander
headquarters today. It's got a great knock against Comanche in it."

"Yes, I saw it," said the doctor. "It sounds like one crook knocking
another. But it can't be any worse than this place, anyhow. I think I'll
take a ride over there in a day or so and size it up."

"Well, I surrender all pretensions to Claim Number One," laughed Mrs.
Reed, a straining of color in her cheeks.

June had not demanded fudge once in four days. That alone was enough to
raise the colors of courage in her mother's face, even if there hadn't
been a change in the young lady for the better in other directions. Four
days of Wyoming summer sun and wind had made as much difference in June
as four days of September blaze make in a peach on the tip of an exposed
bough. She was browning and reddening beautifully, and her hair was
taking on a trick of wildness, blowing friskily about her eyes.

It was plain that June had in her all the making of a hummer. That's
what Horace Bentley, the lawyer, owned to himself as he told her
mother in confidence that a month of that high country, with its
fresh-from-creation air, would be better for the girl's natural
endowments than all the beauty-parlors of Boston or the specialists
of Vienna. Horace felt of his early bald spot, half believing that
some stubby hairs were starting there already.

There was still a glow of twilight in the sky when lights appeared in
the windowless windows of the church, and the whine of tuning fiddles
came out of its open door. Mrs. Reed stiffened as she located the sound,
and an expression of outraged sanctity appeared in her face. She turned
to Dr. Slavens.

"Are they going to--to--_dance_ in that building?" she demanded.

"I'm afraid they are," said he. "It's used for dancing, they tell me."

"But it's a church--it's consecrated!" she gasped.

"I reckon it's worn off by this time," he comforted. "It was a church a
long, long time ago--for Comanche. The saloon man across from it told me
its history. He considered locating in it, he said, but they wanted too
much rent.

"When Comanche was only a railroad camp--a good while before the rails
were laid this far--a traveling preacher struck the town and warmed them
up with an old-style revival. They chipped in the money to build the
church in the fervor of the passing glow, and the preacher had it put
up--just as you see it, belfry and all.

"They even bought a bell for it, and it used to ding for the sheepmen
and railroaders, as long as their religion lasted. When it ran out, the
preacher moved on to fresh fields, and a rancher bought the bell to call
his hands to dinner. The respectable element of Comanche--that is, the
storekeepers, their wives, daughters and sons, and the clerks, and
others--hold a dance there now twice a week. That is their only
relaxation."

"It's a shame!" declared Mrs. Reed.

"Oh, I don't know," said the doctor easily.

"I'm _so_ disappointed in it!" said she.

"Because it represents itself as a church when it's something else?"
inquired the doctor softly. "Well, I shouldn't be, if I were you. It has
really nothing to be ashamed of, for the respectable are mightily in the
minority in Comanche, I can tell you, madam--that is, among the regular
inhabitants."

"Let's go over and look on," suggested William Bentley. "It may make
some of you gloomy people forget your future troubles for a while."

The party soon found that looking on exposed them to the contagion of
sociability. They were such wholesome-looking people at the gathering,
and their efforts to make the visitors who stood outside the door feel
at home and comfortable were so genuine, that reserve dissolved most
unaccountably.

It was not long before June's mother, her prejudices against such
frivolous and worldly use of a church blown away, was pigeoning around
with William Bentley. Likewise Mrs. Mann, the miller out of sight and
out of mind, stepped lightly with Horace, the lawyer, the sober black
bag doubled up and stored in the pocket of his coat, its handles
dangling like bridle-reins.

June alone was left unpaired, in company with the doctor and Miss
Horton, who asserted that they did not dance. Her heels were itching to
be clicking off that jolly two-step which the Italian fiddlers and
harpist played with such enticing swing. The school-teacher and the
sergeant were not with them, having gone out on some expedition of their
own among the allurements of Comanche.

But June hadn't long to bear the itch of impatience, for ladies were not
plentiful at the dance. Before anybody had time to be astonished by his
boldness, a young man was bowing before June, presenting his crooked
elbow, inviting her to the dance with all the polish that could possibly
lie on any one man. On account of an unusually enthusiastic clatter of
heels at that moment, Dr. Slavens and Miss Horton, a few paces distant,
could not hear what he said, but they caught their breaths a little
sharply when June took the proffered arm.

"Surest thing you know," they heard her eager little voice say as she
passed them with a happy, triumphant look behind.

Dr. Slavens looked at Miss Horton; Miss Horton looked at the doctor.
Both laughed.

"Well, I like that!" she exclaimed.

"Yes," he agreed, but apparently from quite a different angle, "so do I.
It's natural and unaffected; it's coming down to first principles. Well,
I don't see that there's anything left for you and me to do but use up
some of this moonlight in a walk. I'd like to see the river in this
light. Come?"

"Oh, that would be unconventional!" she protested.

But it was not a strong protest; more of a question perhaps, which left
it all to him.

"This is an unconventional country," he said. "Look at it, as white as
snow under this summer moon."

"It's lovely by night," she agreed; "but this Comanche is like a sore
spot on a clean skin. It's a blight and a disfigurement, and these
noises they make after dark sound like some savage revel."

"We'll put them behind us for two hours or so," he decided with finality
which allowed no further argument.

As they set off toward the river he did not offer her the support of his
arm, for she strode beside him with her hands swinging free, long step
to his long step, not a creature of whims and shams, he knew, quite able
to bear her own weight on a rougher road than that.

"Still it _is_ unconventional," she reflected, looking away over the
flat land.

"That's the beauty of it," said he. "Let's be just natural."

They passed beyond the straggling limits of Comanche, where the town
blended out into the plain in the tattered tents and road-battered
wagons of the most earnest of all the home-seekers, those who had staked
everything on the hope of drawing a piece of land which would serve at
last as a refuge against the world's buffeting.

Under their feet was the low-clinging sheep-sage and the running herbs
of yellow and gray which seemed so juiceless and dry to the eye, but
which were the provender of thousands of sheep and cattle that never
knew the shelter of fold or stable, nor the taste of man-grown grain or
fodder, from the day of their birth to the day of their marketing.
Winter and summer alike, under the parching sun, under the strangling
drifts, that clinging, gray vegetation was the animals' sole nutriment.

Behind the couple the noises of Comanche died to murmurs. Ahead of them
rose the dark line of cottonwoods which stood upon the river-shore.

"I want to take another look at the Buckhorn Cañon," said the doctor,
stalking on in his sturdy, farm-bred gait.

"It makes a fearful roar," she remarked as they approached the place
where the swift river, compressed into the flumelike passage which it
had whetted out of the granite, tossed its white mane in the moonlight
before plunging into the dark door of the cañon.

"I've been hearing yarns and traditions about that cañon ever since I
came here," he told her. "They say it's a thousand feet deep in
places."

"June and I came over here this morning," said Agnes, "along with
Sergeant Schaefer. He said he didn't believe that June could hike that
far. I sat here on the rocks a long time watching it. I never saw so
much mystery and terror in water before."

She drew a little nearer to him as she spoke, and he put his hand on her
shoulder in an unconscious movement of restraint as she leaned over
among the black boulders and peered into the hissing current.

"Do you suppose anybody ever went in there?" she asked.

"They say the Indians know some way of getting through," he replied,
"but no white man ever went into the cañon and came out alive. The last
one to try it was a representative of a Denver paper who came out here
at the beginning of the registration. He went in there with his camera
on his back after a story."

"Poor fellow! Did he get through--at all?"

"They haven't reported him on the other side yet. His paper offers a
reward for the solution of the mystery of his disappearance, which is no
mystery at all. He didn't have the right kind of footgear, and he
slipped. That's all there is to it."

He felt her shudder under his hand, which remained unaccountably on her
warm shoulder after the need of restraint had passed.

"It's a forbidding place by day," said she, "and worse at night. Just
think of the despair of that poor man when he felt himself falling down
there in the dark!"

"Moccasins are the things for a job like that," he declared. "I've
studied it all out; I believe I could go through there without a
scratch."

"What in the world would anybody want to do it for? What is there to be
gained by it, to the good of anybody?" she wondered.

"Well, there's the reward of five hundred dollars offered by the
newspaper in Denver," he answered.

"It's a pitiful stake against such odds!" she scorned.

"And all the old settlers say there's gold in there--rich pockets of it,
washed out of the ledges in the sides of the walls and held by the rocks
in the river-bed and along the margins. A nugget is picked up now and
then on the other side, so there seems to be ground for the belief that
fortune waits for the man who makes a careful exploration."

"He couldn't carry enough of it out to make it worth while," she
objected.

"But he could go back," Dr. Slavens reminded her. "It would be easy the
second time. Or he might put in effect the scheme a sheep-herder had
once."

"What was that?" she asked, turning her face up to him from her place on
the low stone where she sat, the moonlight glinting in her eyes.

He laughed a little.

"Not that it was much of a joke the way it turned out," he explained.
"He went in there to hunt for the gold, leaving two of his companions to
labor along the brink of the cañon above and listen for his signal shout
in case he came across any gold worth while. Then they were to let a
rope down to him and he'd send up the treasure. It was a great scheme,
but they never got a chance to try it. If he ever gave any signal they
never heard it, for down there a man's voice strained to its shrillest
would be no more than a whisper against a tornado. You can believe that,
can't you, from the way it roars and tears around out here?"

"All the gold that remains unmined wouldn't tempt me a hundred feet down
that black throat," she shuddered. "But what became of the adventurer
with the scheme?"

"He came through in time--they caught him at the outlet over there in
the mountains. The one pocket that remained in his shredded clothing was
full of gold nuggets, they say. So he must have found it, even if he
couldn't make them hear."

"What a dismal end for any man!"

"A man could beat it, though," said he, leaning forward in thoughtful
attitude. "He'd need a strong light, and moccasins, so he could cling to
the rocks. I believe it could be done, and I've thought a good deal
about exploring it myself for a day or two past. If I don't draw a low
number I think I'll tackle it."

"Don't you attempt it!" she cried, clutching his arm and turning her
white face to him affrightedly. "Don't you ever dare try it!"

He laughed uneasily, his eyes on the black gash into which the foaming
river darted.

"Oh, I don't know; I've heard of men doing riskier things than that for
money," he returned.

Agnes Horton's excitement and concern seemed to pass with his words. She
propped her chin in her palms and sat pensively, looking at the broken
waters which reared around the barrier of scattered stones in its
channel.

"Yes, men sometimes take big risks for money--even the risk of honor and
the everlasting happiness of others," said she.

It was like the wind blowing aside a tent-flap as he passed, giving him
a glimpse of its intimate interior. That little lifting of her reserve
was a glance into the sanctuary of her heart. The melancholy of her eyes
was born out of somebody's escapade with money; he was ready to risk his
last guess on that.

"Besides, there may be nothing to that story of nuggets. That may be
just one of these western yarns," she added.

"Well, in any case, there's the five hundred the Denver paper offers,
besides what I could make by syndicating the account of my adventure
among the Sunday papers. I used to do quite a lot of that when I was in
college."

"But you don't need money badly enough to go into that place after it.
Nobody ever needed it that badly," she declared.

"Don't I?" he answered, a little biting of bitter sarcasm in his tone.
"Well, you don't know, my lady, how easy that money looks to me compared
to my ordinary channels of getting it."

"It can't be so very hard in your profession," she doubted, as if a bit
offended by his attitude of martyrdom before an unappreciative world. "I
don't believe you have half as hard a time of it as some who have too
much money."

"The hardship of having too much money is one which I never experienced,
so I can't say as to that," he said, moved to smiles by the humor of it.
"But to understand what I mean by hardship you must know how I've
struggled in the ruts and narrow traditions of my profession, and
fought, hoped, and starved. Why, I tell you that black hole over there
looks like an open door with a light inside of it compared to some of
the things I've gone through in the seven years that I've been trying to
get a start. Money? I'll tell you how that is, Miss Horton; I've thought
along that one theme so confounded long that it's worn a groove in my
brain.

"Here you see me tonight, a piece of driftwood at thirty-five, and all
for the want of money enough to buy an automobile and take the
darned-fool world by storm on its vain side! You can't scratch it with a
diamond on its reasoning side--I've scratched away on it until my nails
are gone.

"I've failed, I tell you, I've botched it all up! And just for want of
money enough to buy an automobile! Brains never took a doctor
anywhere--nothing but money and bluff!"

"I wonder," she speculated, "what will become of you out here in this
raw place, where the need of a doctor seems to be the farthest thing in
the world, and you with your nerve all gone?"

It would have reassured her if she could have seen the fine flush which
this charge raised in his face. But she didn't even look toward him, and
couldn't have noted the change if she had, for the moonlight was not
that bright, even in Wyoming.

"But I haven't lost my nerve!" he denied warmly.

"Oh, yes, you have," she contradicted, "or you wouldn't admit that
you're a failure, and you wouldn't talk about money that way. Money
doesn't cut much ice as long as you've got nerve."

"That's all right from your view," said he pettishly. "But you've had
easy going of it, out of college into a nice home, with a lot of those
pink-faced chaps to ride you around in their automobiles, and opera and
plays and horse-shows and all that stuff."

"Perhaps," she admitted, a soft sadness in her voice. "But wait until
you've seen somebody drunk with the passion of too much money and crazy
with the hunger for more; wait until you've seen a man's soul grow black
from hugging it to his heart, and his conscience atrophy and his manhood
wither. And then when it rises up and crushes him, and all that are his
with it----"

He looked at her curiously, waiting for her to round it out with a
personal citation. But she said no more.

"That's why you're here, hoping like the rest of us to draw Number
One?"

"Any number up to six hundred will do for me," she laughed, sitting
erect once more and seeming to shake her bitter mood off as she spoke.

"And what will you do with it? Sell out as soon as the law allows?"

"I'll live on it," dreamily, as if giving words to an old vision which
she had warmed in her heart. "I'll stay there and work through the hope
of summer and the bleakness of winter, and make a home. I'll smooth the
wild land and plant trees and green meadows, and roses by the door, and
we'll stay there and it will be--_home_!"

"Yes," he nodded, understanding the feeling better than she knew. "You
and mother; you want it just that way."

"How did you know it was mother?" she asked, turning to him with a
quick, appreciative little start.

"You're the kind of a woman who has a mother," he answered. "Mothers
leave their stamp on women like you."

"Thank you," said she.

"I've often wanted to run away from it that way, too," he owned, "for
failure made a coward of me more than once in those hard years. There's
a prospect of independence and peace in the picture you make with those
few swift strokes. But I don't see any--you haven't put any--any--_man_
in it. Isn't there one somewhere?"

"No," simply and frankly; "there isn't any man anywhere. He doesn't
belong in the picture, so why should I draw him in?"

Dr. Slavens sighed.

"Yes; I've wanted to run away from it more than once."

"That's because you've lost your nerve," she charged. "You shouldn't
want to run away from it--a big, broad man like you--and you must not
run away. You must stay and fight--and fight--and _fight_! Why, you talk
as if you were seventy instead of a youth of thirty-five!"

"Don't rub it in so hard on that failure and nerve business," he begged,
ashamed of his hasty confession.

"Well, _you_ mustn't talk of running away then. There are no ghosts
after you, are there?"

The moonlight was sifting through the loose strands of her gleaming hair
as she sat there bareheaded at his side, and the strength of his life
reached out to her, and the deep yearning of his lonely soul. He knew
that he wanted that woman out of all the world full of women whom he had
seen and known--and passed. He knew that he wanted her with such strong
need that from that day none other could come across the mirror of his
heart and dim her image out of it.

Simply money would not win a woman like her; no slope-headed son of a ham
factory could come along and carry her off without any recommendation but
his cash. She had lived through that kind of lure, and she was there on
his own level because she wanted to work out her clean life in her own
clean way. The thought warmed him. Here was a girl, he reflected, with a
piece of steel in her backbone; a girl that would take the world's
lashings like a white elm in a storm, to spring resiliently back to
stately poise after the turmoil had passed. Trouble would not break
her; sorrow would only make her fineness finer. There was a girl to stand
up beside a man!

He had not thought of it before--perhaps he had been too melancholy and
bitter over his failure to take by storm the community where he had
tried to make his start--but he believed that he realized that moment
what he had needed all along. If, amid the contempt and indifference of
the successful, he'd had some incentive besides his own ambition to
struggle for all this time, some splendid, strong-handed woman to stand
up in his gloom like the Goddess of Liberty offering an ultimate reward
to the poor devils who have won their way to her feet across the bitter
seas from hopeless lands, he might have stuck to it back there and won
in the end.

"That's what I've needed," said he aloud, rising abruptly.

She looked up at him quickly.

"I've needed somebody's sympathy, somebody's sarcasm, somebody's soft
hand--which could be correctional on occasion--and somebody's
heart-interest all along," he declared, standing before her dramatically
and flinging out his hands in the strong feeling of his declaration.
"I've been lonely; I've been morose. I've needed a woman like you!"

Without sign of perturbation or offense, Agnes rose and laid her hand
gently upon his arm.

"I think, Dr. Slavens," she suggested, "we'd better be going back to
camp."

They walked the mile back to camp with few words between them. The
blatant noises of Comanche grew as they drew nearer.

The dance was still in progress; the others had not returned to camp.

"Do you care to sit out here and wait for them?" he asked as they
stopped before the tent.

"I think I'll go to bed," she answered. "I'm tired."

"I'll stand sentry," he offered.

She thanked him, and started to go in. At the door she paused, went back
to him, and placed her hand in her soothing, placid way upon his arm
again.

"You'll fight out the good fight here," said she, "for this is a country
that's got breathing-room in it."

She looked up into his face a bit wistfully, he thought, as if there
were more in her heart than she had spoken. "You'll win here--I know
you'll win."

He reached out to put his arm about her, drawn by the same warm
attraction that had pulled the words from him at the riverside. The
action was that of a man reaching out to lean his weary weight upon some
familiar object, and there was something of old habit in it, as if he
had been doing it always.

But she did not stay. He folded only moonlight, in which there is little
substance for a strong man, even in Wyoming. Dr. Slavens sighed as the
tent-flap dropped behind her.

"Yes; that's what I've needed all the time," said he.

He sat outside with his pipe, which never had seemed so sweet. But, for
all of its solace, he was disturbed by the thought that perhaps he had
made a blunder which had placed him in a false light with Miss
Horton--only he thought of her as Agnes, just as if he had the right.
For there were only occasions on which Dr. Slavens admitted himself to
be a fizzle in the big fireworks of the world. That was a charge which
he sometimes laid to himself in mortification of spirit, or as a
flagellant to spur him along the hard road. He had not meant to let it
slip him aloud over there by the river, because he didn't believe it at
all--at least not in that high-hoping hour.

So he sat there in the moonlight before the tent, the noises of the town
swelling louder and louder as the night grew older, his big frame
doubled into the stingy lap of a canvas chair, his knees almost as high
as his chin. But it was comfortable, and his tobacco was as pleasant to
his senses as the distillation of youthful dreams.

He had not attained the automobile stage of prosperity and arrogance,
certainly. But that was somewhere ahead; he should come to it in time.
Out of the smoke of his pipe that dreamy night he could see it. Perhaps
he might be a little gray at the temples when he came to it, and a
little lined at the mouth, but there would be more need of it then than
now, because his legs would tire more easily.

But Agnes had taken that foolishly blurted statement for truth. So
it was his job henceforward to prove to Agnes that he was not bankrupt
in courage. And he meant to do it he vowed, even if he had to get a
tent and hang out his shingle in Comanche. That would take nerve
unquestionably, for there were five doctors in the place already, none
of them making enough to buy stamps to write back home for money.

Already, he said, he was out of the rut of his despondency; already the
rust was knocked off his back, and the eagerness to crowd up to the
starting-line was on him as fresh again as on the day when he had walked
away from all competitors in the examination for a license before the
state board.

At midnight the others came back from the dance and broke the trend of
his smoke-born dreams. Midnight was the hour when respectable Comanche
put out its lights and went to bed. Not to sleep in every case, perhaps,
for the din was at crescendo pitch by then; but, at any event, to
deprive the iniquitous of the moral support of looking on their
debaucheries and sins.

Dr. Slavens was in no mood for his sagging canvas cot, for his new
enthusiasm was bounding through him as if he had been given an
intravenous injection of nitroglycerin. There was Wyoming before him,
all white and virginal and fresh, a big place for a big deed. Certainly,
said Dr. Slavens. Just as if made to order for his needs.

So he would look around a bit before turning in, with his high-stepping
humor over him, and that spot on his arm, where her hand had lain, still
aglow with her mysterious fire.




CHAPTER IV

THE FLAT-GAME MAN


The noises of the tented town swelled in picturesque chorus as Dr.
Slavens walked toward them, rising and trailing off into the night until
they wore themselves out in the echoless plain.

He heard the far-away roll and rumble of voices coming from the
gambling-tents; the high-tenor invitation of the barkers outside
questionable shows; the bawl of street-gamblers, who had all manner of
devices, from ring-pitching to shell-games on folding tables, which they
could pick up in a twinkling and run away with when their dupes began to
threaten and rough them up; the clear soprano of the singer, who wore
long skirts and sang chaste songs, in the vaudeville tent down by the
station.

And above all, mingled with all--always, everywhere--the brattle of
cornet and trombone, the whang of piano, the wail of violin, the tinkle
of the noble harp, an aristocrat in base company, weeping its own
downfall.

All of the flaring scene appeared to the doctor to be extremely
artificial. It was a stage set for the allurement of the unsophisticated,
who saw in this strained and overdone imitation of the old West the
romance of their expectations. If they hadn't found it there thousands of
them would have been disappointed, perhaps disillusioned with a
healthful jolt. All the reality about it was its viciousness, and that
was unquestionable.

It looked as if gambling crooks from everywhere had collected at
Comanche, and as if the most openly and notoriously crooked of them all
was the bony, dry-faced man with a white spot over the sight of his left
eye, who conducted a dice-game in the front part of the chief
amusement-place of the town. This was a combination variety theater and
saloon, where free "living pictures" were posed for the entertainment of
those who drank beer at the tables at twenty-five cents a glass.

Of the living pictures there were three, all of them in green garments,
which hung loosely upon flaccid thighs. Sometimes they posed alone, as
representations of more or less clothed statuary; sometimes they
grouped, with feet thrust out, heads thrown back, arms lifted in stiff
postures, as gladiators, martyrs, and spring songs. Always, whether
living or dead, they were most sad and tattered, famished and lean
pictures, and their efforts were received with small applause. They were
too thin to be very wicked; so it appeared, at least.

Dr. Slavens stopped in the wide-spreading door of this place to watch
the shifting life within. Near him sat a young Comanche Indian, his hair
done up in two braids, which he wore over his shoulders in front. He had
an eagle feather in his hat and a new red handkerchief around his neck,
and he looked as wistful as a young Indian ever did outside a poem or a
picture-film. He was the unwelcome guest, whom no one might treat, to
whom no one might sell.

That was one of the first things strangers in Comanche learned: one must
not give an Indian a drink of liquor, no matter how thirsty he looked.
And, although there was not a saloon-keeper in the place who would have
considered a moment before stooping to rob a dead man, there was not one
who would have sold an Indian a bottle of beer. Such is the fear, if not
respect, that brave old Uncle Sam is able to inspire.

But brave old Sam had left the bars down between his wards and the
gamblers' tables. It is so everywhere. The Indian may not drink, but he
may play "army game" and all the others where crooked dice, crooked
cards, and crooked men are to be found. Perhaps, thought the doctor, the
young man with the eagle feather--which did not make him at all
invisible, whatever his own faith in its virtues might have been--had
played his money on the one-eyed man's game, and was hanging around to
see whether retributive justice, in the form of some more fortunate
player, would, in the end, clean the old rascal out.

The one-eyed man was assisted by a large gang of cappers, a gang which
appeared to be in the employ of the gamblers' trust of Comanche. The
doctor had seen them night after night first at one game, then at
another, betting with freedom and carelessness which were the envy of
the suckers packed forty deep around them. At the one-eyed man's game
just then they were coming and going in a variety which gave a color of
genuine patronage. That was an admirable arrangement, doubtless due to
the one-eyed man's sagacity, which the doctor had noted the night
before. For the game had its fascination for him, not because the fire
of it was in his veins, but because it was such an out-and-out skin game
that it was marvelous how fools enough could be found, even in a
gathering like that, to keep it going.

The living pictures had just passed off the stage, and it was the
one-eyed man's inning. He rattled his dice in the box, throwing his
quick glance over the crowd, which seemed reluctant to quit the
beer-tables for his board. Art was the subject which the gambler took up
as he poured out his dice and left them lying on the board. He seemed so
absorbed in art for the moment that he did not see a few small bets
which were laid down. He leaned over confidentially and talked into the
eyes of the crowd.

"Art, gentlemen, is a fine thing for the human race," said he. "You have
just saw an elegant exhibition of art, and who is there in this crowd
that don't feel a better man for what he saw?"

He looked around, as if inviting a challenge. None came. He resumed:

"Art in all its branches is a elegant fine thing, gentlemen. It raises a
man up, and it elevates him, and it makes him feel like a millionaire.
If I only had a dime, as the man said, I'd spend it for a box of
cigareets just to git the chromo-card. That's what I think of art,
gentlemen, and that's how crazy I am over it.

"Now, if anybody here wants to bet me I ain't got two eyes, I ain't a
goin' to take him up, for I know I ain't, gentlemen, and I've knowed it
for thirty years. But if anybody wants to bet me I can't throw
twenty-seven----"

This was the one-eyed man's game. He stood inside the curve of a
crescent-shaped table, which struck him almost under the arms, his back
to the wall of the tent. Players could surround him, almost; still,
nobody could get behind him. In that direction there always was a way
out. He stood there offering odds of five to one to anybody who wanted
to bet him that he couldn't himself, with his own hand and his own dice,
throw twenty-seven. Any other number coming out of the box, the one-eyed
man lost.

Examine the dice, gents; examine the box. If any gent had any doubts at
all about the dice being straight, all he had to do was to examine them.
There they lay, gents, honestly and openly on the table before the
one-eyed man, his bony hand hovering over them caressingly.

Gents examined them freely. Nearly every player who put money
down--secure in that egotistical valuation of one's own shrewdness which
is the sure-thing-man's bank and goldmine and mint--rolled the dice,
weighed them, eyed them sharply. Then they bet against the one-eyed
man--and lost.

That is, they lost if he wanted them to lose. There were victims who
looked promising for a fat sacrifice who had to be tolled and primed and
led on gently up to the block. At the right time the one-eyed man
trimmed them, and he trimmed them down to the short bones.

His little boost for art finished--for the living pictures were art in
which he had a proprietary interest, and he could afford to talk for it
once in a while--the one-eyed man cast his glance over his table and saw
the small bets. By some singular fortune all of the bettors won. They
pocketed their winnings with grins as they pushed out among the
gathering crowd.

Men began to pack thickly around the gambler's crescent table, craning
over shoulders to see what was going on. He was making a great Wild-West
show of money, with a large revolver lying beside it at his elbow.
Seeing that the young man who had carried June Reed off to the dance so
intrepidly had made his way forward and was betting on the game, Dr.
Slavens pushed up to the table and stood near.

The young fellow did not bear himself with the air of a capper, but
rather with that of one who had licked a little poison and was drunk on
the taste. He had won two small bets, and he was out for more.

There were no chips, no counters except cash. Of that the young man
appeared to have plenty. He held a cheerful little wad of it in his
hand, so that no time might be lost in taking advantage of the great
opportunity to beat a man at his own game.

The display of so much money on both sides held the crowd in silent
charm. The young man was the only player, although the one-eyed man
urged others to come on and share the fortunes of his sweating patron,
whose face was afire with the excitement of easy money, and whose reason
had evaporated under the heat.

"At every roll of the dice my young friend adds to his pile," said the
gambler. "He's got a head, gents, and he knows how to use it. Look at
'im, gents, gittin' richer at every roll of the dice! You might as well
have a share in all this here money and wealth, and you would be sharin'
it if you had the nerve of my young friend."

The one-eyed man turned the dice out and lost again. There was a little
movement of the crowd, a little audible intaking of breath, a little
crowding forward, like that of cattle massed in a pen.

The suckers never did seem to get it through their heads, thought the
doctor as he beheld their dumb excitement with growing contempt, that
the one-eyed man switched the dice on them just as often as he
pleased between the table and the box, by a trick which was his one
accomplishment and sole capital. Without that deftness of hand the
one-eyed man might have remained a bartender, and a very sloppy and
indifferent one at that; but with it he was the king-pin of the
gamblers' trust in Comanche, and his graft was the best in the town.

"There it goes, gents!" he said, shaking his long, hound-shaped head
with doleful expression of face. "The tide of luck's turned ag'in' me.
You can see that as plain as water in a pan, but they ain't one of you
got the nerve to step up and help my young friend trim me.

"You fellers know what you make me think of? Well, you make me think of
a lot of little boys with ten cents to spend on Fourth of July. You
stand around with your fingers in your mouth, afraid you'll see
somethin' you like better if you let loose of your little old dime, and
you hang on to it till the fun's all over and the ice-cream's all gone.

"But my young friend here--Now, now!" he remonstrated as the highly
excited young man took up his winnings, added them to the money which he
held in reserve in his left hand, and placed the whole amount upon the
table. "Now you're a comin' it purty strong! Go easy, young feller, and
give a old man with only one eye and a game leg a chance. But you won't
do it; I can see that in the cast of your eye; you're bound to clean me
out at one smack; that's what you're bound to do."

The one-eyed man shook the dicebox very carefully, as if mixing some
rare prescription. Then he stopped shaking and held his hand over the
mouth of the box, as if he expected the cubes might jump up and join in
his ruination while his head was turned.

"Now, look-a here!" said he, addressing them generally. "I've traveled
this wide world over ever since I was a tender child, as the man said,
and I never seen a chance like this to skin a feller slide by without
more'n one lone man havin' sense enough and nerve enough to git in on
it.

"Do I see any more of your money, gents, before I roll the dice? Do I
see any more of your money of the ream and dominion of Uncle Sam, with
the eagle a spreadin' his legs, with his toes full of arrers, and his
mouth wide open a hollerin' de-fiance and destruction ag'in' his
innimies on land and sea, wheresomever they may be, as the feller said?

"Do I see any more of your money, gents? Do I git sight of any more?
Lowest bet's one dollar, gents, and you might as well git in on the
finish and let the old man go up with a whoop. I'm game, gents; I go the
limit. Do I see any more of your money? Do I see any more?"

He did. He saw considerably more than he had seen at one time since he
opened the game in Comanche. He seemed greatly affected by the sight,
shaking his head with solemnity and casting his eye around with
reproach.

"That's right! That's right!" said he. "Sock it to a old feller when
you've got him down! That's the way of this cold world. Well, all I ask
of you, gents"--he paused in his request to shake the box again, holding
it poised for the throw--"is this: When you clean me I ask you to stake
me, between you, to twenty-seven dollars. Twenty-seven's my lucky
number; I was borned on the 27th day of Jannewarry, and I always bet on
twenty-seven."

He poured the dice upon the table, reaching for his pile of bills and
gold as if to cash in on the winnings as he set the box down, even while
the dice were rolling and settling. But at that point the one-eyed man
stayed his hand, bending over the dice as if he could not believe his
eye.

"Well, bust me!" said he, sighing as if honestly disappointed in the
throw. "M' luck's turned! Dang me, fellers, if I didn't win!"

Without enthusiasm, still shaking his head sadly, he drew the winnings
over the table, sorting the bills, shuffling them into neat heaps,
adding them to his enticing pile, which lay heaped upon a green cloth at
his hand.

"I don't know why I stick to this game, gents," said he, "for it's all
ag'in' me. I don't win once in nine hundred times. This here's more
money than I've took in at any one time since I come to Comanche, and
it's more'n I ever expect to take in ag'in if I stay here forty-nine
years.

"But it's in m' blood to bet on twenty-seven. I can't help it, boys.
It'll be the ruination of me ag'in, like it's ruined me many a time
before; but I got to roll 'em! I got to roll 'em! And if anybody wants
to git in, let him put his money down!"

The young man seemed a little dazed by the quick change of the gambler's
luck, but his reason had no voice to speak against the clamor of his
desires. He produced more money, bills of large denomination, and
counted out a thousand dollars, defiantly flourishing every bill. He
whacked the pile down on the table with a foolishly arrogant thump of
his fist.

"I'm with you to the finish," he said, his boyish face bright with the
destructive fire of chance. "Roll 'em out!"

Other players crowded forward, believing perhaps that the queer freak of
fortune which had turned the gambler's luck would not hold. In a few
minutes there was more money on the table than the one-eyed man had
stood before in many a day.

Sorry for the foolish young man, and moved by the sacrifice which he saw
in preparation, Dr. Slavens pressed against the table, trying to flash
the youth a warning with his eyes. But the physician could not get a
look into the young man's flushed face; his eyes were on the stake.

The one-eyed man was gabbing again, running out a continual stream of
cheap and pointless talk, and offering the dice as usual for inspection.
Some looked at the cubes, among the number the young man, who weighed
them in his palm and rolled them on the table several times. Doubtless
they were as straight as dice ever were made. This test satisfied the
rest. The one-eyed man swept the cubes into his hand and, still talking,
held that long, bony member hovering over the mouth of the box.

At that moment Dr. Slavens, lurching as if shoved violently from behind,
set his shoulder against the table and pushed it, hard and suddenly,
against the one-eyed man's chest, all but throwing him backward against
the wall of the tent. The gambler's elbows flew up in his struggle to
keep to his feet, and the hand that hovered over the dicebox dropped the
dice upon the board.

Instantly a shout went up; instantly half a hundred hands clawed at the
table to retrieve their stakes. For the one-eyed man had dropped not
five dice, but ten.

He waited for no further developments. The tent-wall parted behind him
as he dived through into the outer darkness, taking with him his former
winnings and his "bank," which had been cunningly arranged on the green
cloth for no other purpose; his revolver and his dice, leaving nothing
but the box behind.

The young man gathered up his stake with nervous hands and turned his
flushed face to the doctor, smiling foolishly.

"Thank you, old man," he said. "Oh, yes! I know you now," he added,
offering his hand with great warmth. "You were with her people at the
dance."

"Of course," smiled the doctor. "How much did you lose?"

"Say, I ought to have a nurse!" said the young man abjectly. "If you
hadn't heaved that table into the old devil's ribs just then he'd 'a'
skinned me right! Oh, about six hundred, I guess; but in ten minutes
more he'd 'a' cleaned me out. Walker's my name," he confided; "Joe
Walker. I'm from Cheyenne."

Dr. Slavens introduced himself.

"And I'm from Missouri," said he.

Joe Walker chuckled a little.

"Yes; the old man's from there, too," said he, with the warmth of one
relative claiming kinship with another from far-away parts; "from a
place called Saint Joe. Did you ever hear of it?"

"I've heard of it," the doctor admitted, smiling to himself over the
ingenuous unfolding of the victim whom he had snatched from the
sacrifice.

"They don't only have to show you fellers from Missouri," pursued
Walker; "but you show _them_! That's the old man's way, from the
boot-heels up."

They were walking away from the gambling-tent, taking the middle of the
road, as was the custom in Comanche after dark, sinking instep deep in
dust at every step.

"What are you doing with all that money in a place like this?" the
doctor questioned.

"Well, it's this way," explained Walker with boyish confidence. "The old
man's going to set me up in a sheep-ranch between here and Casper. We've
got a ranch bargained for with six miles of river-front, he sent me over
here with five thousand dollars to cinch the business before the feller
changed his mind."

"Why didn't you bring a draft?" the doctor wondered.

"Some of these sheepmen wouldn't take government bonds. Nothing but
plain cash goes with them."

"Oh, I didn't think you had any particular use for even that, the way
you're slinging it around!" said the doctor, with no attempt to hide the
feeling he held for any such recklessness.

"Looked that way," admitted Walker thoughtfully. "But I've got to meet
that sheepman here at the bank in the morning, where he can have
somebody that he's got confidence in feel of the money and tell him it's
genuine, and I'll have to put up some kind of a stall to cover the money
I lost. Guess I can get away with it, somehow. Cripes! I sweat needles
every time I think of what'd 'a' happened to me if you hadn't showed us
suckers that one-eyed feller's hand!"

"Well, the important thing now, it seems to me, is to hang on to what's
left till you meet that rancher."

"Don't you worry!" rejoined Walker warmly. "I'm going to sit on the edge
of that little old bunk all night with my six-shooter in one hand and
that money in the other! And any time in future that you see me bettin'
on any man's game, you send for the fool-killer, will you?"

"Yes, if I happen to be around," promised the doctor.

"I ought to know 'em; I was raised right here in Wyoming among 'em,"
said Walker. "I thought that feller was square, or maybe off a little,
because he talked so much. He was the first talkin' gambler I ever
met."

"Talk is his trick," Slavens enlightened him. "That was old Hun
Shanklin, the flat-game man. I've looked him up since I got here. He
plays suckers, and nothing _but_ suckers. No gambler ever bets on Hun
Shanklin's game. He talks to keep their eyes on his face while he
switches the dice."

Walker was gravely silent a little while, like a man who has just
arrived at the proper appreciation of some grave danger which he has
escaped.

"I've heard of Hun Shanklin a long time, but I never saw him before," he
said. "He's killed several men in his time. Do you suppose he knows you
shoved his table, or does he think somebody back of you pushed you
against it?"

"I don't suppose he needs anybody to tell him how it happened," replied
the doctor a little crabbedly.

"Of course I've got my own notion of it, old feller," prattled Walker;
"but they were purty thick around there just then, and shovin' a good
deal. I hope he thinks it happened that way. But I know nobody shoved
you, and I'm much obliged."

"Oh, forget it!" snapped Slavens, thinking of the six hundred dollars
which had flown out of the young fellow's hand so lightly. Once he could
have bought a very good used automobile for four hundred.

"But don't you suppose--" Walker lowered his voice to a whisper, looking
cautiously around in the dark as he spoke--"that you stand a chance to
hear from Hun Shanklin again?"

"Maybe," answered Slavens shortly. "Well, here's where I turn off. I'm
stopping at the Metropole down here."

"Say!"

Walker caught his arm appealingly.

"Between you and me I don't like the looks of that dump where I've got a
bed. You've been here longer than I have; do you know of any place where
a man with all this blamed money burnin' his hide might pull through
till morning with it if he happened to slip a cog and go to sleep?"

"There's a spare cot in our tent," said the doctor, "and you're welcome
to it if you feel that you can trust yourself in our company. We mess
together in a sort of communistic fashion."

Walker was profuse in his gratitude.

"I'll feel easy among decent people!" he declared. "I'm mostly decent
myself, and my family's one of the best in this state. Don't you size me
up by what you saw me do tonight, will you?"

"The best of us slip up once in a while," Slavens said.

Walker had some business of clearing his throat. And then:

"Are you--that is--is _she_, related to you?"

"Oh, no," laughed the doctor. "I'm sorry she isn't."

"She's a peach; don't you think so?"

"Undoubtedly," admitted the doctor. "Well, here we are--at home."

They stood outside a little while, their faces turned toward the town.
It was quieting down now. Here and there a voice was raised in drunken
song or drunken yelp; here and there a pistol-shot marked the location
of some silly fellow who believed that he was living and experiencing
all the recklessness of the untamed West. Now and then the dry, shrill
laughter of a woman sounded, without lightness, without mirth, as if it
came from the lips of one who long, long ago, in the fever of pain and
despair, had wept her heart empty of its tears. Now and again, also, a
wailing cornet lifted its lone voice, dying away dimly like a
disappearing light.

"The wolves are satisfied for one night; they've stopped howling," the
doctor said.




CHAPTER V

SKULKERS


There remained but one day until chance should settle the aspirations of
the dusty thousands who waited in Comanche; one day more would see Claim
Number One allotted for selection to some more or less worthy American
citizen.

The young man, Walker, had been received on a footing of fellowship into
the commune of the circus-tent. He said that he had concluded happily
the arrangements for the purchase of the sheep-ranch, and that he
intended to go and take possession of it in a few days. Meantime, he
appeared to be considerably shot up over June. In spite of Mrs. Reed's
frowns, he hung around her like a hornet after a soft pear.

There was considerable excitement in the camp of the communists that
morning, owing to preparations which were going forward for an excursion
over the land where somebody's Number One lay shrouded in green
greasewood and gray sage. For this important occasion Walker had engaged
the most notable stage-driver in that part of the country, whose turn it
was that day to lie over from the run between Comanche and Meander.

The party was to use his stage also, and carry lunch along, and make a
grand day of it along the river, trying for trout if conditions held
favorable. Smith was the name of the driver.

Smith was smiling like a baker as he drove up, for Smith could not
behold ladies without blushing and smiling. Smith had the reputation of
being a terror to holdup men. Also, the story was current in Comanche
that he had, in a bare-handed, single encounter with a bear, choked the
animal to death. There was some variance over the particulars as to the
breed of bear, its color, age, size, and weight. Some--and they were the
unromantic, such as habitually lived in Wyoming and kept saloons--held
that it was a black cub with a broken back; others that it was a
cinnamon bear with claws seven inches long; while the extremists would
be satisfied with nothing short of a grizzly which stood five feet four
at the shoulders and weighed eighteen hundred pounds!

But, no matter what romance had done for Smith, it could not overdo his
ancient, green vehicle, with the lettering,

                            BIG HORN VALLEY

along its side near the roof. It was a Concord stage, its body
swinging on creaking straps. It had many a wound of arrowhead in its
tough oak, and many a bullet-hole, all of which had been plugged with
putty and painted over long years ago for the assurance and comfort
of nervous passengers, to whom the evidence of conflict might have been
disturbing.

Now that there was no longer any reason for concealment, the owners had
allowed the paint to crumble and the putty to fall away, baring the
veteran's scars. These were so thick that it seemed a marvel that
anybody who took passage in it in those perilous days escaped. In a
sun-cracked and time-curled leather holster tacked to the seat at
Smith's right hand, a large revolver with a prodigious black handle hung
ready for the disciplining of bandits or bears, as they might come
across Smith's way.

Smith rounded up before the tent with a curve like a skater, bringing
his four horses to a stop in fine style. No matter how Smith's parts
might be exaggerated by rumor or humor in other ways, as a teamster he
stood without a peer between Cody and Green River. He leaped to the
ground with surprising agility and set himself about arranging the
interior of the coach for the accommodation of his passengers. He was
chewing on something which might have been bear-meat or buckskin, from
its apparent tenacious and unyielding nature.

Agnes Horton was to ride on the box with Smith, for she had a camera and
wanted to catch some views. Smith grew so red over handing her up that
Dr. Slavens began to fear lest he might take fire from internal heat and
leave them with only the ashes of a driver on their hands. But they all
got placed without any such melancholy tragedy, with a great many cries
of "Oh, Mr. Smith!" here, and "Oh, Mr. Smith!" there, and many
head-puttings-out on the part of the ladies inside, and gallantries from
Mr. Walker and Mr. Horace Bentley, the lawyer.

William Bentley, the toolmaker, with the basket of lunch upon his knees,
showered the blessing of his kindly smile upon them all, as if he held
them to be only children. Mrs. Mann, her black bag on her arm, squeaked
a little when the coach lurched on the start, knocking her head and
throwing her hat awry.

Smith, proud of his load, and perhaps a little vain on account of so
much unusual loveliness at his side, swung down the main street with its
early morning crowds. People waved at them the friendly signals of the
highroad of adventure, and June, in defiance of terrible eyebrows and
admonishing pokes, waved back at them, her wild hair running over her
cheeks. So they set out in the bright morning to view the promised
land.

They struck off down the Meander stage-road, which ran for the greater
part of its way through the lands awaiting the disposition of chance.
Mainly it followed the survey of the railroad, which was to be extended
to Meander, and along which men and teams were busy even then, throwing
up the roadbed.

To the north there was a rise of land, running up in benched gradations
to white and barren distant heights; behind them were brown hills. Far
away in the blue southwest--Smith said it was more than eighty
miles--there stood the mountains with their clean robes of snow, while
scattered here and there about the vast plain through which they drove,
were buttes of blue shale and red ledges, as symmetrical of side and
smooth of top as if they had been raised by the architects of
Tenochtitlán for sacrifice to their ugly gods.

"Old as Adam," said Smith, pointing to one gray monument whose summit
had been pared smooth by the slow knife of some old glacier. The sides
of the butte looked almost gay in the morning light in their soft tones
of blue and red.

"From appearances it might very well be," agreed Agnes.

She looked at Smith and smiled. There was the glory of untrammeled space
in her clear eyes, a yearning as of the desert-born on the far bounds of
home. Smith drove on, his back very straight.

"Older," said he with laconic finality after holding his peace for a
quarter of a mile.

Smith spoke as if he had known both Adam and the butte for a long time,
and so was an unquestionable authority. Agnes was not disposed to
dispute him, so they lurched on in silence along the dust-cushioned
road.

"That ain't the one the Indian girl jumped off of, though," said Smith,
meditatively.

"Isn't it?"

She turned to him quickly, ready for a story from the picturesque
strangler of bears. Smith was looking between the ears of the
off-leader. He volunteered no more.

"Well, where is the one she jumped from?" she pressed.

"Nowhere," said Smith.

"Oh!" she said, a bit disappointed.

"Everywhere I've went," said he, "they've got some high place where the
Indian girl jumped off of. In Mezoury they've got one, and even in
Kansas. They've got one in Minnesota and Illinoy and Idaho, and bend my
eyebrows if I know all the places they ain't got 'em! But don't you
never let 'em take you in on no such yarns. Them yarns is for suckers."

Somehow Agnes felt grateful toward Smith, whose charitable purpose
doubtless was to prevent her being taken in. But she was sorry for the
fine tradition and hated to give it up.

"But _didn't_ one ever jump off a cliff or--anything?" she asked.

Smith struck out with a free-arm swing and cracked his whip so loudly
that three female heads were at once protruded from the windows below.

"What I want to know," said he argumentatively, "is, who seen 'em
jump?"

"I don't know," she admitted; "but I suppose they found their bodies."

"Don't you believe it!" depreciated Smith. "Indian maidens ain't the
jumpin' kind. I never seen one of 'em in my day that wouldn't throw down
the best feller she ever had for a red umbreller and a dime's worth of
stick candy."

"I'm sorry for the nice stories your knowledge of the Indian character
spoils," she laughed.

"The thing of it in this country is, miss, not to let 'em take you in,"
Smith continued. "That's what they're out for--to take in suckers. No
matter how wise you may be in some other place, right here in this spot
you may be a sucker. Do you git my words?"

"I think so," she responded, "and thank you. I'll try to keep my eyes
open."

"They's places in this country," Smith went on, for he liked to talk as
well as the next one, once he got under way, "where you could put your
pocketbook down at the fork of the road with your card on top of it and
go back there next week and find it O. K. But they's other places where
if you had your money inside of three safes they'd git at it somehow.
This is one of that kind of places."

They had been dropping down a slope scattered with gray lava chunks and
set with spiked soapweed, which let them to the river level. Ahead of
them, twisted cottonwoods and red willows marked the brink of the
stream.

"This is the first bench," said Smith, "and it's mainly good land.
Before the books was opened for registration the gover'ment give the
Indians choice of a homestead apiece, and they picked off all this land
down here. Oh, well, on up the river they's a little left, and if I draw
a low number I know where to put my hand on a piece."

"It looks nice and green here," said she, admiring the feathery
vegetation, which grew as tall as the stage along the roadway.

"Yes, but you want to watch out for greasewood," advised Smith, "when
you come to pick land in this country. It's a sign of alkali. Pick that
gray, dusty-lookin' stuff. That's sage, and where it grows big,
anything'll grow when you git the water on it."

"But how _do_ you get the water on this hilly land?" she asked.

The question had been troubling her ever since she had taken her first
look at the country, and nobody had come forward with a satisfactory
explanation.

"You got to go up the river till you strike your level," explained
Smith, "and then you tap it and take the water to your land."

"But if you're on the 'third bench' that I hear them talking about so
much--then what do you do up there, a thousand or two feet above the
river?"

"You go back where you come from if you're wise," said Smith.

When they reached the section which, according to Smith, had not all
been taken up by the Indians already, the party got out occasionally for
closer inspection of the land. The men gravely trickled the soil through
their fingers, while the women grabbed at the sweet-smelling herbs which
grew in abundance everywhere, and tore their sleeves reaching for the
clusters of bullberries, then turning red.

Dr. Slavens and William Bentley tried for fish, with a total catch
between them of one small trout, which was carried in triumph to the
place picked upon by Smith for the noonday camp. Smith would not trust
the coffee to any hand but his own, and he blackened up the pot
shamefully, Mrs. Reed declared.

But what did Smith care for the criticism of Mrs. Reed when he was
making coffee for Agnes? What did he care, indeed, for the judgment of
the whole world when he was laying out his best efforts to please the
finest woman who ever sat beside him on the box, and one for whom he was
ready to go any distance, and do any endeavors, to save her from being
made a sucker of and taken in and skinned?

It was pleasant there by the river; so pleasant that there was not one
of them but voted Wyoming the finest and most congenial spot in the
world, with the kindest skies, the softest summer winds, and the one
place of all places for a home.

"Yes," Smith remarked, tossing pebbles into the river from the place
where he sat cross-legged on the ground with his pipe, "it takes a hold
of you that way. It goes to twenty below in the winter, sometimes, and
the wind blows like the plug had popped out of the North Pole, and the
snow covers up the sheep on the range and smothers 'em, and you lose all
you got down to the last chaw of t'backer. But you stick, some way, and
you forgit you ever had a home back in Indiana, where strawberries
grow."

"Why, don't they grow here?" asked the miller's wife, holding a bunch of
red bullberries caressingly against her cheek.

"I ain't seen a natural strawberry in fourteen years," said Smith, more
proud than regretful, as if such a long abstinence were a virtue.

"Natural?" repeated Mrs. Reed. "Surely you don't mean that they
manufacture them here?"

"They send 'em here in cans," explained Smith, "pale, with sour water on
'em, no more like real, ma'am, than a cigarette's like a smoke."

The men with pipes chuckled their appreciation of the comparison. Horace
Bentley, with a fresh cigarette--which he had taken out of a silver
case--in his fingers, turned it, quizzically smiling as he struck a
match.

"It's an imitation," said he; "but it's good enough for me."

The sun was slanting near the rough hills beyond the river when they
started back to Comanche.

"You've seen the best of the reservation," explained Smith, "and they
ain't no earthly use in seein' the worst of it."

They were well along on the way, passing through a rough and outcast
stretch of country, where upheaved ledges stood on edge, and great
blocks of stone poised menacingly on the brows of shattered cliffs, when
Smith, who had been looking sharply ahead, pulled in suddenly and turned
to Agnes with apologetic questioning in his eyes. It seemed to her that
he had something on his mind which he was afraid to put into words.

"What is it, Mr. Smith?" she asked.

"I was just goin' to say, would you mind goin' inside and lettin' that
doctor man take your place for a while?"

Smith doubtless had his reason, she thought, although it hurt her pride
that he should withhold his confidence. But she yielded her place
without further questioning, with a great amount of blushing over the
stocking which a protruding screwhead was responsible for her showing to
Dr. Slavens as he assisted her to the ground.

The sudden stop, the excitement incident to changing places, threw the
women within the coach into a cackle.

"Is it robbers?" demanded Mrs. Reed, getting hold of June's hand and
clinging to it protectingly as she put her head out and peered up at
Smith, who was sitting there stolidly, his eyes on the winding trail
ahead, his foot on the brake.

"No, ma'am," answered Smith, not looking in her direction at all.

"What is it, then?" quavered Mrs. Mann from the other side of the
stage.

She could not see Smith, and the desolation of their surroundings set
her fancy at work stationing dusty cowboy bandits behind each riven,
lowering stone.

"Oh, I _hope_ it's robbers!" said June, bouncing up and down in her
seat. "That would be just fine!"

"Hush, hush!" commanded her mother, shaking her correctively. "Such a
wicked wish!"

Milo Strong, the teacher from Iowa, had grown very pale. He buttoned his
coat and kept one hand in the region of his belt. One second he peered
wildly out of the windows on his side, the next he strained to see if
devastation and ruin were approaching from the other.

"Smith doubtless had some very commonplace reason for making the
change," said William Bentley, making room for Agnes beside him. "I
expect Miss Horton talked too much."

With that the stage started and their fears subsided somewhat. On the
box Smith was looking sharply at the doctor. Then he asked:

"Can you drive better than you can shoot, or shoot better than you can
drive?"

"I guess it's about a stand-off," replied the doctor without a ripple of
excitement; "but I was brought up with four mules."

Without another word Smith stood on the footboard, and Dr. Slavens slid
along to his place. Smith handed the physician the lines and took the
big revolver from its pocket by the seat.

"Two fellers on horseback," said he, keeping his eyes sharply on the
boulder-hedged road, "has been dodgin' along the top of that ridge kind
of suspicious. No reason why any honest man would want to ride along up
there among the rocks when he could ride down here where it's smooth.
They may be straight or they may be crooked. I don't know. But you meet
all kinds along this road."

The doctor nodded. Smith said no more, but stood, one knee on the seat,
with his pistol held in readiness for instant action. When they reached
the top of the ridge nobody was in sight, but there were boulders
enough, and big enough, on every hand to conceal an army. Smith nodded;
the doctor pulled up.

The stage had no sooner stopped than Walker was out, his pistol in hand,
ready to show June and all her female relatives so dear that he was
there to stand between them and danger as long as their peril might
last.

Smith looked around carefully.

"Funny about them two fellers!" he muttered.

From the inside of the stage came June's voice, raised in admiration of
Mr. Walker's intrepidity, and her mother's voice, commanding her to be
silent, and not draw down upon them the fury of the bandits, who even
then might be taking aim at them from behind a rock.

Nobody appearing, between whom and June he might precipitate himself,
Walker mounted a rock for a look around. He had no more than reached the
top when the two horsemen who had caused the flurry rode from behind the
house-size boulder which had hidden them, turned their backs, crouching
in their saddles as if to hide their identity, and galloped off.

"Huh! Old Hun Shanklin's one of 'em," sniffed Smith, plainly disgusted
that the affair had turned out so poorly.

He put his weapon back in its place and took the lines.

"And that feller, he don't have to go around holdin' people up with a
gun in his hand," he added. "He's got a safer and surer game of it than
that."

"And that's no cross-eyed view of it, either," Dr. Slavens agreed.

Walker came over and stood beside the near wheel.

"One of them was Hun Shanklin!" said he, whispering up loudly for the
doctor's ear, a look of deep concern on his youthful face.

Slavens nodded with what show of unconcern he could assume. For, knowing
what he knew, he wondered what the gambler was there for, and why he
seemed so anxious to keep the matter of his identity to himself.

When they arrived at Comanche the sun was down. Mrs. Reed hurried June
indoors, all exclamations and shudders over what she believed to have
been a very narrow escape. Vowing that she never would go exploring
around in that wild land again, she whisked off without a word for
Smith.

The others shook hands with the driver, Agnes coming last. He took off
his hat when it came her turn.

"Keep your eyes skinned," he advised her, "and don't let 'em play you
for a sucker. Any time you need advice, or any help that I can give you,
if I'm not here I'm on the road between here and Meander. You can git me
over there by telephone."

"Thank you, Mr. Smith," said she warmly and genuinely, wondering why he
should take such an unaccountable interest in her.

The others had gone about their business, thinking strongly of supper,
leaving Smith and her alone beside the old green stage.

"But don't ask for Smith if you call me up," said he, "for that's only
my first name, and they's a horse-wrangler over there with that for his
last. They might think you wanted him."

"Oh, I didn't know!" she stammered, all confusion over the familiarity
that she had been taking all day. "I didn't know your other name--nobody
ever told me."

"No; not many of 'em down here knows it," he responded. "But up at
Meander, at the barn, they know it. It's Phogenphole."

"Oh!"

"But if you don't like it," added Smith, speaking with great fervor, and
leaning toward her a little eagerly and earnestly, "I'll have a bill put
through the Legislature down at Cheyenne and change it!"

They ate supper that evening by lantern-light, with the night noise of
Comanche beginning to rise around them earlier than usual. Those who
were there for the reaping realized that it would be their last big
night, for on the morrow the drawing would fall. After the first day's
numbers had been taken from the wheel at Meander, which would run up
into the thousands, the waiting crowds would melt away from Comanche as
fast as trains could carry them. So those who were on the make had both
hands out in Comanche that night.

They all wondered how it would turn out for them, the lumberman and the
insurance agent--who had not been of the party that day in Smith's
coach--offering to lay bets that nobody in the mess would draw a number
below five hundred. There were no takers. Then they offered to bet that
all in the mess would draw under five hundred. Mrs. Reed rebuked them
for their gambling spirit, which, she said, was rampant in Comanche,
like a plague.




CHAPTER VI

THE DRAWING


As has been previously said, one must go fast and far to come to a place
where there is neither a Hotel Metropole nor a newspaper. Doubtless
there are communities of civilized men on the North American continent
where there is neither, but Comanche was not one of them.

In Comanche the paper was a daily. Its editor was a single-barreled
grafter who wore a green mohair coat and dyed whiskers. His office and
establishment occupied an entire twelve-by-sixteen tent; the name of the
paper was _The Chieftain_.

_The Chieftain_ had been one of the first enterprises of Comanche. It
got there ahead of the first train, arriving in a wagon, fully equipped.
The editor had an old zinc cut of a two-storied brick business house on
a corner, which he had run with a grocery-store advertisement when he
was getting out a paper in Tulsa, Oklahoma. This he now made use of with
impressive effect and inspiring display of his cheerful confidence in
his own future and that of the town where, like a blowing seed of
cottonwood, he had found lodgment.

He ran this cut in every issue at the top of what would have been his
editorial column if there had been time for him to write one, with these
words:

                  FUTURE HOME OF _THE CHIEFTAIN_ ON THE
                    CORNER THIS PAPER NOW OCCUPIES,
                     AS DESIGNED BY THE EDITOR AND
                         OWNER, J. WALTER MONG

From the start that Editor Mong was making in Comanche his dream did not
appear at all unreasonable. Everybody in the place advertised, owing to
some subtle influence of which Mr. Mong was master, and which is known
to editors of his brand wherever they are to be found. If a business man
had the shield of respectability to present to all questioners, he
advertised out of pride and civic spirit; if he had a past, J. Walter
Mong had a nose, sharpened by long training in picking up such scents;
and so he advertised out of expediency.

That being the way matters stood, _The Chieftain_ carried very little
but advertisements. They paid better than news, and news could wait its
turn, said the editor, until he settled down steadily into a weekly and
had room for it.

But Mr. Mong laid himself out to give the returns from the drawing for
homesteads, it being one of those rare chances in which an editor could
combine business and news without putting on an extra form. The
headquarters of the United States land-office for that territory being
at Meander, the drawing was to take place there. Meander was sixty miles
farther along, connected with the railroad and Comanche by stage and
telephone. So, every hour of the eventful day, Editor Mong was going to
issue an extra on telephonic information from the seat of the drawing.

On the day of the drawing, which came as clear and bright as the painted
dreams of those who trooped Comanche's streets, there remained in the
town, after the flitting entrants had come and gone, fully thirty
thousand expectant people. They were those in whom the hope of low
numbers was strong. For one drawing a low number must make his selection
of land and file on it at Meander within a few days.

In the case of the first number, the lucky drawer would have but three
days to make his selection and file on it. If he lapsed, then Number Two
became Number One, and all down the line the numbers advanced one.

So, in case that the winner of Number One had registered and gone home
to the far East or the middle states, he couldn't get back in time to
save his valuable chance. That gave big hope to those who expected
nothing better than seven or nine or something under twenty. Three or
four lapses ahead of them would move them along, each peg adding
thousands to their winnings, each day running out for them in golden
sands.

By dawn the streets were filled by early skirmishers for breakfast, and
sunrise met thousands more who, luggage in hand, talked and gesticulated
and blocked the dusty passages between the unstable walls of that city
of chance, which soon would come down and disappear like smoke from a
wayside fire. The thousands with their bags in hand would not sleep
another night beneath its wind-restless roofs. All those who expected to
draw Claim Number One were ready to take the stage or hire a special
conveyance to Meander, or, failing of their expectations in the lottery,
to board the special trains which the railroad had made ready, and leave
for home.

By nine o'clock it seemed to the waiting throngs that several ordinary
days had passed since they left their sagging canvas cots at daybreak to
stand attendant upon the whim of chance. They gathered in the blazing
sun in front of the office of the paper, looking in at Editor Mong, who
seemed more like a quack doctor that morning than ever before, with his
wrinkled coat-sleeves pushed above his elbows and his cuffs tucked back
over them, his black-dyed whiskers gleaming in shades of green when the
sun hit them, like the plumage of a crow.

For all the news that came to Comanche over the telephone-wire that day
must come through the office of _The Chieftain_. There was but one
telephone in the town; that was in the office of the stage-line, and by
arrangement with its owners, the editor had bottled up the slightest
chance of a leak.

There would be no bulletins, the editor announced. Anyone desiring news
of the drawing must pay twenty-five cents for a copy of the paper
containing it. It was the editor's one great chance for graft, and he
meant to work it until it was winded.

The lottery was to open in Meander at ten o'clock; but long before that
hour the quivering excitement which shook the fabric of Comanche had
reached the tent where Mrs. Reed mothered it over the company of
adventurers. The lumberman and insurance agent were away early; Sergeant
Schaefer and Milo Strong followed them to the newspaper office very
shortly; and the others sat out in front, watching the long shadows
contract toward the peg that June had driven in the ground the day
before at the line of ten o'clock.

"Well, this is the day," said William Bentley. "What will you take for
your chance, Doctor?"

"Well, it wouldn't take very much to get it this morning," Dr. Slavens
replied, peering thoughtfully at the ground, "for it's one of those
things that grow smaller and smaller the nearer you approach."

"I'd say twenty-five hundred for mine," offered Horace.

"Great lands!" exclaimed Mrs. Reed, blinking, as she looked out across
the open toward the river. "If anybody will give me three dollars for my
chance he can take it, and welcome."

"Then you'd feel cheap if you won," June put in. "It's worth more than
that even up in the thousands; isn't it, Mr. Walker?"

Walker was warm in his declaration that it would be a mighty small and
poor piece of Wyoming that wouldn't be worth more than that.

"We haven't heard from you, Miss Horton," said William Bentley.

"I'm afraid nothing would tempt me to part with my chance," Agnes
replied. "I hold it just the reverse of Dr. Slavens. The longer I look
at it the bigger it gets."

The doctor was the only one present who understood fully how much she
had built around that chance. Their eyes met as he looked across at her;
he remembered what she had said of planting trees, and having roses
beside her door.

"It's almost there!" cried June, looking at her stake.

"Twenty minutes yet," announced Horace, who sat with his watch in his
palm.

They were all bonneted and booted, ready for an expedition, although
they had none in sight. It was as if they expected Number One to come
flying through the town, to be caught and held by the swiftest of foot,
the one alert and ready to spring up and dash after it.

"Shall we go over to the newspaper office?" asked the doctor, looking
across again and catching Agnes' eyes.

June jumped up and accepted the proposal for all.

"Oh, let's do!" she exclaimed. "Let's be there to get the very first
word!"

On the part of the ladies there was a dash into the tent to adjust their
headgear before glasses and to renew the powder on their noses. While
they were gone Horace Bentley, the lawyer, stood with his watch exposed
to his impatient eye.

"In five minutes," he announced as the ladies rejoined them, "they will
draw the first name from the wheel at Meander. I hope that it may be the
name of someone in this party."

"I hope it will be yours," said Dr. Slavens' eyes as he looked earnestly
at Agnes; and: "Number Two would do very well for me in case your name
came first," her eyes seemed to answer him.

But there was none by who knew what had passed between them of their
hopes, so none could read the messages, even if there had been any so
curious as to try.

Mrs. Mann was humming a little song as they started away toward the
newspaper office, for she was tiring of Wyoming, where she had not seen
a single cowboy yet; and the prospect of returning to the miller was
growing dear to her heart. There was a quiet over Comanche that morning
which seemed different from the usual comparative peace of that portion
of the day--a strained and fevered quiet, as of hushed winds before a
gale. It took hold of even June as the party passed through the main
street, joining the stream of traffic which pressed in one direction
only.

They could not arrive within a square of the newspaper-tent, for the
crowd around it was packed and dense; so they stopped where there was
breathing-space among groups of men who stood with their gripsacks
between their feet, waiting for the first word.

At five minutes past ten the editor of _The Chieftain_ handed his
printer a slip of paper, and the name of the winner of Claim Number One
was put in type. The news was carried by one who pushed through the
throng, his hat on the back of his head, sweat drenching his face. The
man was in a buck-ague over the prospect of that name being his own, it
seemed, and thought only of drawing away from the sudden glare of
fortune until he could collect his wits.

Some people are that way--the timid ones of the earth. They go through
life leaving a string of baited traps behind them, lacking courage to go
back and see what they have caught.

More than two hundred names were in the first extra run off _The
Chieftain's_ press at half-past ten. The name of the winner of Number
One was Axel Peterson; his home in Meander, right where he could step
across the street and file without losing a minute.

Milo Strong, the schoolmaster from Iowa, drew Number Thirty-Seven. None
of the others in the colony at the Hotel Metropole figured in the first
returns.

They went back as silently as they had come, the doctor carrying the
list in his hand. Before the tent stood the lumberman and the insurance
agent, their bags in their hands.

"We've got just six minutes to catch the first train out," said the
insurance agent, his big smile just as wide as ever. "Good luck to you
all, and hope we meet again."

The lumberman waved his farewell as he ran. For them the gamble was off.
They had staked on coming in below one hundred, and they had lost. There
was nothing more to hang around Comanche for, and it is supposed that
they caught the train, for they were seen there no more.

There were several hundred others in that quick-coming and quick-going
population whose hopes were dispersed by the printed list. And so the
town suffered a heavy drain with the departure of the first train for
the East. The railroad company, foreseeing the desire to be gone, had
arranged a long string of coaches, with two engines hitched up and
panting to set out. The train pulled away with every inch of space
occupied.

All day the enterprising editor printed and sold extras. His press, run
by an impertinent little gasoline engine, could turn out eighteen
hundred of those single-sheet dodgers in an hour, but it couldn't turn
them out fast enough. Every time Editor Mong looked out of his tent and
saw two men reading one paper he cursed his limited vision which had
stood in the way of putting sixty dollars more into a press of twice
that capacity. As it was, the day's work brought him nearly three
thousand dollars, money on the spot; no back subscriptions to worry
over, no cabbage or cordwood in exchange.

When the drawing closed for the day and the last extra was off, more
than three thousand numbers had been taken from the wheel at Meander.
The only one among the Metropole colony to draw after the first
published list was Agnes Horton. Claim Number Nine Hundred and Five fell
to her lot.

Claims that high were useless, and everybody knew it; so interest
dropped away, the little gasoline engine popped its last impertinent pop
and subsided, and the crowds drifted off to get ready to depart as fast
as trains could be made up to haul them. Sergeant Schaefer, having
failed of his expectations, felt a revival of interest in the military
life, and announced that he would leave on the first train out next
morning.

That night the price of cots suffered a dispiriting drop. Fifty cents
would hire the most exclusive bed in the phantom city of Comanche.

As for Dr. Slavens, the day's events had left him with a dazed feeling
of insecurity. His air was cleared of hope; he could not touch a stable
bit of footing as far around him as he could reach. He had counted a
good deal on drawing something along in the early hundreds; and as the
day wore along to his disappointment in that hope he thought that he
might come tagging in at the end, in the mean way that his cross-grained
luck had of humiliating him and of forcing the fact that he was more or
less a failure before his eyes.

No matter what he drew under three thousand, he said, he'd take it and
be thankful for it. If he could locate on a trickle of water somewhere
and start out with a dozen ewes and a ram, he'd bury himself away in the
desert and pull the edges of it up around him to keep out the
disappointments of the world. A man might come out of it in a few years
with enough money--that impenetrable armor which gives security even to
fools--to buy a high place for himself, if he couldn't win it otherwise.
Men had done well on small beginnings with sheep; that country was full
of them; and it was a poor one, indeed, that wasn't able to buy up any
ten doctors he could name.

So Dr. Slavens ran on, following the lead of a fresh dream, which had
its foundation on the sands of despair. When the drawing had passed the
high numbers which he had set as his possible lowest, he felt like
sneaking away, whipped, to hide his discouragement where there was no
one to see. His confounded luck wouldn't even grant him the opportunity
of burying himself out there in that gray sea of blowing dust!

There was no use in trying to disguise the fact any longer; he was a
fizzle. Some men were designed from the beginning for failures, and he
was one of the plainest patterns that ever was made. There was a place
for Axel Peterson, the alien, but there was no place for him.

In spite of his age and experience, he did not understand that the world
values men according to the resistance they interpose against it;
according to the stamping down of feet and the presenting of shoulders
and the squaring arms to take its blows. Cowards make a front before it
and get on with amazing success; droves of poltroons bluster and storm,
with empty shells of hearts inside their ribs, and kick up a fine dust
in the arena, under the cloud of which they snatch down many of the
laurels which have been hung up for worthier men. Success lies
principally in understanding that the whole game is a bluff on the
world's part, and that the biggest bluffer in the ring takes down the
purse.

But the timid hearts of the earth never learn this; the sentimentalists
and the poets do not understand it. You can't go along sweeping a clear
path for your feet with a bunch of flowers. What you need is a good,
sound club. When a hairy shin impedes, whack it, or make a feint and a
bluff. You'll be surprised how easily the terrifying hulks of adversity
are charmed out of the highway ahead of you by a little impertinence, a
little ginger, and a little gall.

Many a man remains a coward all his life because somebody cowed him when
he was a boy. Dr. Slavens had put his hands down, and had stood with his
shoulders hunched, taking the world's thumps without striking back, for
so many years in his melancholy life that his natural resistance had
shrunk. On that day he was not as nature had intended him, but as
circumstances had made him.

It had become the friendly fashion in camp for the doctor and Agnes to
take a walk after supper. June's mother had frowned on the boldness of
it, whispering to June's aunt. But the miller's wife, more liberal and
romantic, wouldn't hear of whisperings. She said their conduct was as
irreproachable in that country as eating peas with a spoon.

"I wish I was in her place!" she sighed.

"_Dorothy Ann!_" gasped Mrs. Reed. "Remember your husband, Dorothy
Ann!"

"I do," sighed the miller's wife.

"Well, if you _were_ in her place you'd ask somebody to accompany you on
your moonlight strolls, I hope. I _hope_ that's what you'd do, Dorothy
Ann."

"No," answered the miller's wife thoughtfully. "I'd propose. She'll lose
him if she doesn't."

On the evening of that day of blasted hopes the two of them walked away
in the gloaming toward the river, with few words between them until they
left the lights of Comanche behind.

"Mr. Strong is considerably elated over his luck," said Agnes at last,
after many sidling glances at his gloomy profile.

"That's the way it goes," Dr. Slavens sighed. "I don't believe that
chance is blind; I think it's just perverse. I should say, not counting
myself, that Strong is the least deserving of any man in the crowd of
us. Look at old Horace Bentley, the lawyer. He doesn't say anything, but
you can see that his heart is aching with disappointment."

"I have noticed it," she agreed. "He hasn't said ten words since the
last extra."

"When a man like that dreams, he dreams hard--and deep," the doctor
continued. "But how about yourself?"

She laughed, and placed a restraining hand upon his arm.

"You're going too fast," she panted. "I'll be winded before we get to
the river."

"I guess I was trying to overtake my hopes," said he. "I'm sorry; we'll
go slower--in all things--the rest of the way."

She looked at him quickly, a little curiously, but there was no
explanation in his eyes, fixed on the graying landscape beyond the
river.

"It looks like ashes," said he softly, with a motion of the hand toward
the naked hills. "There is no life in it; there is nothing of the dead.
It is a cenotaph of dreams. But how about your claim?"

"It's a little farther up than I had expected," she admitted, but with a
cheerful show of courage which she did not altogether feel.

"Yes; it puts you out of the chance of drawing any agricultural land,
throws you into the grazing and mineral," said he.

"Unless there are a great many lapses," she suggested.

"There will be hundreds, in my opinion," he declared. "But in case there
are not enough to bring you down to the claim worth having--one upon
which you could plant trees and roses and such things?"

"I'll stick to it anyhow," said she determinedly.

"So this is going to be home?" he asked.

"Home," she answered with a caressing touch upon the word. "I came here
to make it; I sha'n't go away without it. I don't know just how long it
will take me, nor how hard it will be, but I'm going to collect interest
on my hopes from this country before I turn my back."

"You seem to believe in it," said he.

"Perhaps I believe more in myself," she answered thoughtfully. "Have you
determined what you are going to do?"

He laughed--a short, harsh expression of ironical bitterness.

"I've gone through the mill today of heat and cold," said he. "First, I
was going to sell my relinquishment for ten thousand dollars as soon as
the law would allow, but by noon I had come down to five hundred. After
that I took up the notion of sheep stronger than Milo, from Iowa, ever
thought of it. It took just one more extra to put that fire out, and now
the ashes of it aren't even warm. Just what my next phantasy will be I
can't say."

"But you're going to stay here, aren't you?"

"I've thought of that, too. I've thought of making another try at it in
a professional way. But this is a big, empty country. Few people live in
it and fewer die. I don't know."

"Well, you're a doctor, not an undertaker, anyhow," she reminded him.

"Yes; I missed my calling," he laughed, with the bitterness of defeat.

"No," she corrected; "I didn't mean that. But perhaps at something else
you might get on faster here--business of some kind, I mean."

"If I had the chance!" he exclaimed wearily, flinging his hat to the
ground as he sat beside her on a boulder at the river's edge. "I've
never had a square and open chance at anything yet."

"I don't know, of course," said she. "But the trouble with most of us,
it seems to me, is that we haven't the quickness or the courage to take
hold of the chance when it comes. All of us let so many good ones get
away."

Dusk had deepened. The star-glow was upon the river, placid there in its
serene approach to the rough passage beyond. He sat there, the wind
lifting the hair upon his forehead, pondering what she had said.

Was it possible that a man could walk blindly by his chances for
thirty-five years, only to be grasping, empty-palmed, after them when
they had whisked away? For what else did his complainings signify? He
had lacked the courage or the quickness, or some essential, as she had
said, to lay hold of them before they fled away beyond his reach
forever.

There was a chance beside him going to waste tonight--a golden, great
chance. Not for lack of courage would he let it pass, he reflected; but
let it pass he must. He wanted to tell her that he would be a different
man if he could remain near her all the rest of his years; he longed to
say that he desired dearly to help her smooth the rough land and plant
the trees and draw the water in that place which she dreamed of and
called home.

But there was nothing in his past to justify her confidence in his
future. Women worth having did not marry forlorn hopes in the
expectation of making a profit out of them by and by. He had no hearth
to offer her; he had no thatch; he had not a rood of land to lead a
mountain stream across and set with the emerald and royal purple of
alfalfa; not a foot of greensward beside the river, where a yeaning ewe
might lie and ease the burden of her pains. He had nothing to offer,
nothing to give. If he asked, it must be to receive all and return
nothing, except whatever of constancy time might prove out of his
heart.

If he had even a plan to lay down before her and ask her to share, it
would be something, he thought; or a brave resolve, like her own. But
there was emptiness all around him; his feet could not find a square
yard of solid earth to shape his future upon. It was not that he
believed that she cared for money or the material rewards of success,
for she had spoken bitterly of that. The ghosts of money's victims were
behind her; she had said as much the first time they had talked of their
hopes in that new land.

There must be something in that place for him, as she had said; there
must be an unimproved opportunity which Fate had fashioned for his hand.
Hope lifted its resilient head again. Before the morning he must have a
plan, and when he had the plan he would speak.

"We'll have to be breaking up camp in a day or two more," Agnes said,
disturbing the long silence which had settled between them.

"I suppose so," he responded; "but I don't know what the plans of the
others are."

"Mr. Strong is going to Meander in the morning," she told him; "and
Horace Bentley is going with him, poor fellow, to look around, he says.
William Bentley told me this evening that he would leave for home in a
day or two, and Mrs. Reed and her charges are waiting to hear from a
friend of June's who was in school with her--I think she is the
Governor's daughter, or maybe he's an ex-governor--about a long-standing
invitation to visit her in her summer home, which is near here, as they
compute distances in Wyoming."

"And Schaefer is leaving in the morning," reflected the doctor. "That
leaves but you and me unaccounted for. Are you going on to Meander
soon?"

"Yes; I want to be there to file when my time comes."

"I've thought of going over there to feel things out, too," Dr. Slavens
went on. "This place will shrink in a few days like a piece of wet
leather in the sun. They'll have nothing left of it but the stores, and
no business to sustain them until the country around here is settled.
That may be a long time yet. Still, there may be something around here
for me. I'm going to look into the possibilities tomorrow. And we'll
have at least another talk before we part?"

"Many more, I hope," she said.

Her answer presented an alluring lead for him to say more, but before he
could speak, even if minded to do it, she went on:

"This has been a pleasant experience, this camping in the clean, unused
country, and it would be a sort of Persian poet existence if we could go
on with it always; but of course we can't."

"It isn't all summer and fair skies here," he reminded her, "any more
than it is in--well, Persia. Twenty below in winter sometimes, Smith
said. Do you remember?"

"Yes," she sighed. "But it seems impossible."

"You wouldn't believe this little river could turn into a wild and
savage torrent, either, a few hundred yards along, if you had nothing to
judge it by but this quiet stretch," he returned. "But listen to it down
there, crashing against the rocks!"

"There's no news of that rash man who went into the cañon for the
newspaper?" Agnes asked.

"He must have lodged in there somewhere; they haven't picked him up on
the other side," he said, a thoughtful abstraction over him.

"I hope you've given up the thought of trying to explore it?"

"I haven't thought much about it lately," he replied; "but I'm of the
same opinion. I believe the difficulties of the cañon are greatly
exaggerated. In fact, as I told you before, the reward posted by that
newspaper looks to me like easy money."

"It wouldn't pay you if the reward were ten times as large," she
declared with a little argumentative heat.

"Perhaps not," said he, as if he had but a passing and shallow interest
in the subject.

Sitting there bareheaded to the wind, which was dropping down coldly
from the far mountains, he seemed to be in a brooding humor.

"The moon is late tonight," he noted. "Shall we wait till it rises?"

"Yes," she answered, feeling the great gentleness that there was about
him when he was in a serious way.

Why he had not been successful in the profession for which nature
plainly had designed him she could not understand; for he was a man to
inspire confidence when he was at his best, and unvexed by the memory of
the bitter waters which had passed his lips. She felt that there would
be immeasurable solace in his hand for one who suffered; she knew that
he would put down all that he had in life for a friend.

Leaning her chin upon her palm, she looked at him in the last light of
the west, which came down to them dimly, as if falling through dun
water, from some high-floating clouds. As if following in her thought
something that had gone before, she said:

"No; perhaps you should not stay in this big, empty country when there
are crowded places in the world that are full of pain, and little
children in them dying for the want of such men as you."

He started and turned toward her, putting out his hand as if to place it
upon her head.

"How did you know that it's the children that give me the strongest call
back to the struggle?" he asked.

"It's in your eyes," said she. And beneath her breath she added: "In
your heart."

"About all the success that I ever won I sacrificed for a child," he
said, with reminiscent sadness.

"Will you tell me about it?"

"It was a charity case at that," he explained, "a little girl who had
been burned in a fire which took all the rest of the family. She needed
twenty-two square inches of skin on her breast. One gave all that he
could very well part with----"

"That was yourself," she nodded, drawing a little nearer to him quite
unconsciously.

"But that was not half enough," he continued as if unaware of the
interruption. "I had to get it into the papers and ask for volunteers,
for you know that an average of only one in three pieces of cuticle
adheres when set into a wound, especially a burn. The papers made a good
deal of it, and I couldn't keep my name out, of course. Well, enough
school-children came forward to patch up three or four girls, and
together we saved her.

"No matter. The medical association of that city jumped me very promptly.
The old chaps said that I had handled the case unprofessionally and had
used it merely for an advertisement. They charged unprofessional
conduct against me; they tried me in their high court and found me
guilty. They dug the ground from under my feet and branded me as a
quack. They broke me, they tried to have my license to practice revoked.
But they failed in that. That was three years ago. I hung on, but I
starved. So when I speak in what may seem a bitter way of the narrow
traditions of my profession, you know my reason is fairly well grounded."

"But you saved the little girl!"

It was too dark for him to see her eyes. The tears that lay in them
could not drop their balm upon his heart.

"She's as good as new," said he cheerfully, fingering the inner pocket
of his coat. "She writes to me right along. Here's a picture-card that
followed me here, mailed from the home that the man who gave his tough
old hide to mend her found for her when she was well. She lives in
Oklahoma now, and her sweet fortitude under her misfortune has been a
remembrance to sustain me over many a hungry day."

"But you saved the little girl!" Agnes repeated with unaccountable
insistence, as if trying to beat down the injustice of his heavy penance
with that argument.

And then he saw her bow her head upon her folded arms like a little
child, and weep in great sobs which came rackingly as if torn from the
core of her heart.

Dr. Slavens picked up his hat, put it on, got to his feet, and took a
stride away from her as if he could not bear the sight of her poignant
sympathy. Then he turned, came back, and stooped above her, laying his
hand upon her hair.

"Don't do that!" he pleaded. "All that's gone, all that I've missed, is
not worth a single tear. You must not make my troubles your own, for at
the worst there's not enough for two."

She reached out her tear-wet hand and clung to his, wordless for a
little while. As it lay softly within his palm he stroked it soothingly
and folded it between his hands as if to yield it freedom nevermore.
Soon her gust of sorrow passed. She stood beside him, breathing brokenly
in the ebb of that overmastering tide. In the opening of the broad
valley the moon stood redly. The wind trailed slowly from the hills to
meet it, as if to warm itself at its beacon-fire.

"You saved the little girl!" said she again, laying her warm hand for a
moment against his cheek.

In that moment it was well for Dr. Warren Slavens that the lesson of his
hard years was deep within his heart; that the continence and abnegation
of his past had ripened his restraint until, no matter how his lips
might yearn to the sweets which were not his own, they would not taste.
He took hold of himself with a rough hand, for the moonlight was upon
her trembling lips; it stood imprisoned in the undried tears which lay
upon her cheeks.

The invitation was there, and the time, such as the lines of a man's
life are plotted to lead up to from the beginning. But there was lacking
too much on his part for an honest man to stoop and gather what
presented. He might have folded his arms about her and drawn her to his
breast, as the yearning of his soul desired; he might have kissed her
lips and dispelled the moonlight from her trembling tears--and spoiled
it all for both.

For that would have been a trespass without mitigation, a sacrilege
beyond excuse. When a man took a woman like that in his arms and kissed
her, according to his old-fashioned belief, he took from every other man
the right to do so, ever. In such case he must have a refuge to offer
her from the world's encroachments, and a security to requite her in all
that she yielded for his sake.

Such he had not. There was no hearthstone, there was no roof-tree, there
was no corner of refuge in all the vast, gray world. He had no right to
take where he could not give, although it wrenched his heart to give it
up.

He took the soft, warm hand which had bestowed its benediction on his
cheek, and held it in childish attitude, swinging at his side. No word
was said as they faced back to the unstable city, their shadows trailing
them, long and grotesque, like the sins of men which come after them,
and gambol and grimace for all the world to see but those who believe
them hidden.




CHAPTER VII

A MIDNIGHT EXTRA


Dr. Slavens sat on the edge of his cot, counting his money. He hadn't a
great deal, so the job was not long. When he finished he tucked it all
away in his instrument-case except the few coins which he retained in
his palm.

It would not last much longer, thought he. A turn would have to be made
soon, or he must hunt a job on the railroad or a ranch. Walker had
talked a lot about having Dr. Slavens come in on the new sheep venture
with him, on the supposition, of course, that the physician had money.
Walker had told him also a great deal about men who had started in that
country as herders, "running a band of sheep" on shares, receiving so
much of the increase of the flock year by year. Many of the richest
sheepmen in that country had started that way only a few years before,
so Walker and others said.

Perhaps, thought Dr. Slavens, there might be a chance to hook up with
Walker under such an arrangement, put his whole life into it, and learn
the business from the ground up. He could be doing that while Agnes was
making her home on her claim, perhaps somewhere near--a few hundred
miles--and if he could see a gleam at the farther end of the undertaking
after a season he could ask her to wait. That was the best that he could
see in the prospect just then, he reflected as he sat there with his
useless instrument-case between his feet and the residue of the day's
expenses in his hand.

Agnes had gone into the section of the tent sacred to the women; he
supposed that she was going to bed, for it was nearly eleven o'clock.
Strong and Horace were asleep in their bunks, for they were to take the
early stage for Meander in the morning. Walker and William Bentley and
Sergeant Schaefer were out.

The little spark of hope had begun to glow under Slavens' breath.
Perhaps Walker and sheep were the solution of his life's muddle. He
would find Walker before the young man took somebody else in with him,
expose the true state of his finances, and see whether Walker would
entertain a proposal to give him a band of sheep on shares.

Like every man who is trying to do something that he isn't fitted to,
because he has failed of his hopes and expectations in the occupation
dearest to his heart, Slavens heated up like a tin stove under the
trashy fuel of every vagrant scheme that blew into his brain.

Sheep was all that he could see now. Already he had projected ahead
until he saw himself the complacent owner of vast herds; saw the miles
of his ranches; saw the wool of his flocks being trampled into the long
sacks in his own shearing-sheds. And all the time his impotent
instrument-case shone darkly in the light of his candle, lying there
between his feet at the edge of the canvas bed.

With a sigh he came back from his long flight into the future, and took
up his instrument-case with caressing hand. Placing it on his knees, he
opened it and lifted the glittering instruments fondly.

Of course, if he _could_ make it go at his profession that would be the
thing. It would be better than all the sheep on Wyoming's dusty hills. A
little surgery somewhere, with its enameled table and white fittings,
and automobiles coming and going all day, and Agnes to look in at
evening----. Yes, that _would_ be the thing.

Perhaps sheep for a few years would help to that end. Even five years
would leave him right in the middle stretch of life, with all his vigor
and all the benefit of experience. Sheep looked like the solution
indeed. So _thinking_, he blew out his candle and went out to look for
Walker.

At the door of the tent he stopped, thinking again of Agnes, and of the
moonlight on her face as they stood by the riverside, trembling again
when the weight of the temptation which had assailed him in that moment
swept over him in a heart-lifting memory. Perhaps Agnes condemned him
for refusing the opportunity of her lips. For when a woman expects to be
kissed, and is cheated in that expectation, it leaves her in censorious
mood. But scorn of an hour would be easier borne than regret of years.

So he reflected, and shook his head solemnly at the thought. He passed
into the shadows along the deserted street, going toward the sounds
which rose from beneath the lights beyond.

Comanche appeared livelier than ever as he passed along its thronged
streets. Those who were to leave as soon as they could get a train were
making a last reckless night of it; the gamblers were busy at their
various games.

The doctor passed the tent where Hun Shanklin had been stationed with
his crescent table. Shanklin was gone, and another was in his place with
an army-game board, or chuck-a-luck, doing well with the minnows in the
receding sea. Wondering what had become of Shanklin, he turned to go
down a dark little street which was a quick cut to the back entrance of
the big gambling-tent, where he expected to find Walker and go into the
matter of sheep.

Even at that moment the lights were bright in the office of _The
Chieftain_. The editor was there, his green coat wide open, exposing his
egg-spattered shirt-front to all who stopped to look, and making a
prodigious show of excitement at the imposing-stone, where the form of
the last extra of the day lay under his nervous hand.

The printer was there also, his hair standing straight where he had
roached it back out of his eyes with inky fingers, setting type for all
he was worth. In a little while those on the street heard the familiar
bark of the little gasoline engine, and hundreds of them gathered to
inquire into the cause of this late activity.

"Running off an extra," said Editor Mong. A great, an important piece of
news had just reached the office of _The Chieftain_, and in a few
minutes an extra would be on the streets, with the secret at the
disposal of every man who had two bits in his pants. Those were the
identical words of that advance-guard of civilization and refinement,
Mr. J. Walter Mong.

It was midnight when the circulator of _The Chieftain_--engaged for that
important day only--burst out of the tent with an armful of papers,
crying them in a voice that would have been red if voices had been
colored in Comanche, it was so scorched from coming out of the tract
which carried liquor to his reservoir.

"_Ho-o-o!_ Git a extree! Git a extree! All about the mistake in the
winner of Number One! Git a extree! _Ho-o-o-o!_"

People caught their breaths and stopped to lean and listen. Mistake in
the winner of Number One? What was that? The parched voice was plain
enough in that statement:

"Mistake in the winner of Number One."

A crowd hundreds deep quickly surrounded the vender of extras, and
another crowd assembled in front of the office, where Editor Mong stood
with a pile of papers at his hand, changing them into money almost as
fast as that miracle is performed by the presses of the United States
Treasury.

Walker and William Bentley bored through the throng and bought a paper.
Standing under the light at a saloon door, they read the exciting news.
Editor Mong had cleared a place for it, without regard to the beginning
or the ending of anything else on the page, in the form which had
carried his last extra of the day. There the announcement stood in bold
type, two columns wide, under an exclamatory

                               EXTRA!

William Bentley read aloud:

    Owing to a mistake in transmitting the news by telephone, the
    name of the winner of Claim Number One in today's land-drawing at
    Meander was omitted. The list of winners published heretofore in
    _The Chieftain_ is correct, with the single exception that each
    of them moves along one number. Number One, as announced, becomes
    Number Two, and so on down the list.

    The editor regrets this error, which was due entirely to the
    excitement and confusion in the office at Meander, and takes this
    earliest opportunity of rectifying it.

    The editor also desires to announce that _The Chieftain_ will
    appear no longer as a daily paper. Beginning with next Monday it
    will be issued as a four-page, five-column weekly, containing all
    the state, national, and foreign news. Price three dollars a year
    in advance. The editor thanks you for your loyal support and
    patronage.

    The winner of Claim Number One is Dr. Warren Slavens, of Kansas
    City, Missouri. Axel Peterson, first announced as the winner,
    drew Number Two.

Editor Mong had followed the tradition of the rural school of journalism
in leaving the most important feature of his news for the last line.

"Well!" said the toolmaker. "So our doctor is the winner! But it's a
marvel that the editor didn't turn the paper over to say so. I never saw
such a botch at writing news!"

He did not know, any more than any of the thousands who read that
ingenuous announcement, that Editor Mong was working his graft overtime.
They did not know that he had entered into a conspiracy to deceive them
before the drawing began, the clerk in charge of the stage-office and
the one telephone of the place being in on the swindle.

Mong knew that the Meander stage would leave for Comanche at eight in
the morning, or two hours before the drawing began. It was the only
means, exclusive of the telephone, by which news could travel that day
between the two places, and as it could carry no news of the drawing his
scheme was secure.

Mong had feared that his extras might not move with the desired
celerity during the entire day--in which expectation he was agreeably
deceived--so he deliberately withheld the name of the winner of Number
One, substituting for it in his first extra the name of the winner of
Number Two. He believed that every person in Comanche would rush out of
bed with two bits in hand for the extra making the correction, and his
guess was good.

Walker and Bentley hurried back to the Hotel Metropole to find that
Sergeant Schaefer had arrived ahead of them with the news. They were all
up in picturesque _déshabillé_, Horace with a blanket around him like a
bald-headed brave, his bare feet showing beneath it. The camp was in a
state of pleasurable excitement; but Dr. Slavens was not there to share
it, nor to receive the congratulations which all were ready to offer
with true sincerity.

"I wonder where he is?" questioned Horace a little impatiently.

He did not like to forego the ceremony, but he wanted to get back to
bed, for a man's legs soon begin to feel chilly in that mountain wind.

"He left here not very long ago," said Agnes; "perhaps not more than an
hour. I was just preparing to go to bed."

"It's a fine thing for him," commented Sergeant Schaefer. "He can
relinquish as soon as he gets his papers for ten or twelve thousand
dollars. I understand the railroad's willing to pay that."

"It's nice and comfortable to have a millionaire in our midst," said
June. "Mother, you'd better set your cap for him."

"June Reed!" rebuked her mother sharply above the laughter which the
proposal provoked.

But under the hand of the night the widow blushed warmly, and with a
little stirring of the treasured leaves of romance in her breast. She
_had_ thought of trying for the doctor, for she was only forty-seven,
and hope lives in the female heart much longer than any such trifling
term.

They sat and talked over the change this belated news would make in the
doctor's fortunes, and the men smoked their pipes, and the miller's wife
suggested tea. But nobody wanted to kindle a fire, so she shivered a
little and went off to bed.

The night wore on, Comanche howling and fiddling as it never had howled
and fiddled before. One by one the doctor's friends tired of waiting for
him and went to bed. Walker, William Bentley, and Agnes were the last of
the guard; the hour was two o'clock in the morning.

"I believe you'd just as well go to bed, Miss Horton," suggested
Bentley, "and save the pleasure of congratulating him until tomorrow. I
can't understand why he doesn't come back."

"I didn't know it was so late," she excused, rising to act on his
plainly sensible view of it.

"Walker and I will skirmish around and see if we can find him," said
Bentley. "It's more than likely that he's run across some old friend and
is sitting talking somewhere. You've no notion how time slips by in such
a meeting."

"And perhaps he doesn't know of his good fortune yet," she suggested.

"Oh, it's all over town long ago," Walker put in. "He knows all about it
by this time."

"But it isn't like him to keep away deliberately and shun sharing such
good news with his friends," she objected.

"Not at all like him," agreed Bentley; "and that's what's worrying me."

She watched them away until the gloom hid them; then went to her
compartment in the tent, shut off from the others like it by gaily
flowered calico, such as is used to cover the bed-comforts of the
snoring proletariat. It was so thin that the light of a candle within
revealed all to one without, or would have done so readily, if there had
been any bold person on the pry.

There she drew the blanket of her cot about her and sat in the dark
awaiting the return of Bentley and Walker. There was no sleep in her
eyes, for her mind was full of tumult and foreboding and dread lest
something had befallen Dr. Slavens in the pitfalls of that gray city,
the true terrors and viciousness of which she could only surmise.

Bentley and Walker went their way in silence until they came to the
lights. There was no thinning of the crowds yet, for the news in the
midnight extra had given everybody a fresh excuse for celebrating, if
not on their own accounts, then on account of their friends. Had not
every holder of a number been set back one faint mark behind the line of
his hopes?

Very well. It was not a thing to laugh over, certainly, but it was not
to be mended by groans. So, if men might neither groan nor laugh, they
could drink. And liquor was becoming cheaper in Comanche. It was the
last big night; it was a wake.

"Well, I'll tell you," said Walker, "I don't think we'd better look for
him too hard, for if we found him he wouldn't be in any shape to take
back there by now."

"You mean he's celebrating his good luck?" asked Bentley.

"Sure," Walker replied. "Any man would. But I don't see what he wanted
to go off and souse up alone for when he might have had good company."

"I think you've guessed wrong, Walker," said Bentley. "I never knew him
to take a drink; I don't believe he'd celebrate in that way."

Even if he had bowled up, protested Walker, there was no harm in it. Any
man might do it, he might do it himself; in fact, he was pretty sure
that he _would do it_, under such happy conditions, although he believed
a man ought to have a friend or two along on such occasions.

From place to place they threaded their way through the throng, which
ran in back-currents and cross-currents, leaving behind it upon the bars
and gaming-tables an alluvium of gold. Dr. Slavens was not at any of the
tables; he was not reeling against any of the bars; nor was he to be
seen anywhere in the sea of faces, mottled with shadows under the smoky
lights.

"Walker, I'm worried," Bentley confessed as they stood outside the last
and lowest place of diversion that remained to be visited in the town.

"I tell you, it flies up and hits a man that way," protested Walker.
"Sheep-herders go that way all of a sudden after a year or two without a
taste of booze, sometimes. He'll turn up in a day or two, kind of mussed
up and ashamed; but we'll show him that it's expected of a gentleman in
this country once in a while, and make him feel at home."

"Yes, of course," Bentley agreed, his mind not on the young man's
chatter nor his own reply. "Well, let's run through this hole and have
it over with."

Inside the door four dusty troopers, on detached duty from the military
post beyond Meander, sat playing cards. As they appeared to be fairly
sober, Walker approached them with inquiries.

No, they hadn't seen Dr. Slavens. Why? What had he done? Who wanted
him?

Explanations followed.

"Well," said a sergeant with service-stripes on his sleeve and a broad,
blue scar across his cheek, "if I'd 'a' drawed Number One you bet you
wouldn't have to be out lookin' for me. I'd be up on the highest point
in Comanche handin' out drinks to all my friends. Ain't seen him,
pardner. He ain't come in here in the last two hours, for we've been
right here at this table longer than that."

They passed on, to look upon the drunken, noisy dance in progress beyond
the canvas partition.

"Not here," said Walker. "But say! There's a man over there that I
know."

Bentley looked in that direction.

"The one dancing with the big woman in red," directed Walker.

Bentley had only a glance at Walker's friend, for the young man pulled
his arm and hurried him out. Outside Walker seemed to breathe easier.

"I'll tell you," he explained. "It's this way: I didn't suppose he'd
want to be seen in there by anybody that knew him. You see, he's the
Governor's son."

"Oh, I see," said Bentley.

"So if we happen to run across him tomorrow you'll not mention it, will
you?"

"I'll not be advertising it that I was in there in very big letters,"
Bentley assured him.

"A man does that kind of a thing once in a while," said Walker. "It
bears out what I was saying about the doctor. No matter how steady a man
is, it flies up and hits him that way once in a while."

"Maybe you're right," yielded Bentley. "I think we'd just as well go to
bed."

"Just as well," Walker agreed.

The chill of morning was in the air. As they went back the crowds had
thinned to dregs, and the lights in many tents were out.

"She thinks a lot of him, doesn't she?" observed Walker reflectively.

"Who?" asked Bentley, turning so quickly that it seemed as if he
started.

"Miss Horton," Walker replied. "And there's class to that girl, I'm here
to tell you!"

Agnes, in the darkness of her compartment, strained forward to catch the
sound of the doctor's voice when she heard them enter, and when she knew
that he was not there a feeling which was half resentment, half
accusation, rose within her. Was she to be disappointed in him at last?
Had he no more strength in the happy light of his new fortune than to go
out and "celebrate," as she had heard the sergeant confidentially
charging to Horace, like any low fellow in the sweating throng?

But this thought she put away from her with humiliation and self-reproach,
knowing, after the first flash of vexation, that it was unjust. Her fears
rose towering and immense again; in the silence of the graying morning
she shivered, drawing her cold feet up into the cot to listen and wait.

Walker and Bentley had gone quietly to bed, and in the stillness around
her there was an invitation to sleep. But for her there was no sleep in
all that night's allotment.

The roof of the tent toward the east grew transparent against the sky.
Soon the yellow gleam of the new sun struck it, giving her a sudden warm
moment of hope.

It is that way with us. When our dear one lies dying; when we have
struggled through a night hideous with the phantoms of ruin and
disgrace, then the dawn comes, and the sun. We lift our seamed faces to
the bright sky and hope again. For if there is still harmony in the
heavens, how can the discord of the earth overwhelm us? So we comfort
our hearts, foolishly exalting our troubles to the plane of the eternal
consonance.

The sun stood "the height of a lance" when Agnes slipped quietly to the
door of the tent. Over the gray desert lands a smoky mist lay low.
Comanche, stirring from its dreams, was lighting its fires. Here passed
one, the dregs of sleep upon him, shoulders bent, pail in hand, feet
clinging heavily to the road, making toward the hydrant where the green
oats sprang in the fecund soil. There, among the horses in the lot
across the way, another growled hoarsely as he served the crowding
animals their hay.

Agnes looked over the sagging tent-roofs with their protruding
stovepipes and wondered what would be revealed if all were swept
suddenly away. She wondered what fears besides her own they covered,
silent in the pure light of day. For Comanche was a place of secrets and
deceits.

She laid a fire in the tin stove and put the kettle on to boil. Horace
Bentley and Milo Strong were stirring within the tent, making ready for
the stage, which departed for Meander at eight.

Mrs. Mann, the miller's wife, came out softly, the mark of the comb in
her hair, where it had become damp at the temples during her ablution.
She looked about her swiftly as she stood a moment in the door, very
trim and handsome in her close-fitting black dress, with a virginal
touch of white collar and a coral pin.

Agnes was bending over a bed of coals, which she was raking down to the
front of the stove for the toast--a trick taught the ladies of the camp
by Sergeant Schaefer--and did not seem to hear her.

"Dr. Slavens hasn't come back?" Mrs. Mann whispered, coming over softly
to Agnes' side.

Agnes shook her head, turning her face a moment from the coals.

"I heard you get up," said Mrs. Mann, "and I hurried to join you. I know
just how you feel!"

With that the romantic little lady put an arm around Agnes' neck and
gave her a hurried kiss, for Horace was in the door. A tear which sprang
suddenly leaped down Agnes' face and hissed upon the coals before the
girl could take her handkerchief from her sweater-pocket and stop its
wilful dash. Under the pretext of shielding her face from the glow she
dried those which might have followed it into the fire, and turned to
Horace with a nod and smile.

What was there, she asked herself, to be sitting there crying over, like
a rough-knuckled housewife whose man has stayed out all night in his
cups? If he wanted to stay away that way, let him stay! And then she
recalled his hand fumbling at the inner pocket of his coat, and the
picture post-card which he had handed her at the riverside.

Still, it wasn't a matter to cry about--not yet at least. She would
permit no more disloyal thoughts. There was some grave trouble at the
bottom of Dr. Slavens' absence, and she declared to herself that she
would turn Comanche over, like a stone in the meadow of which the
philosopher wrote, and bare all its creeping secrets to the healthy sun,
but that she would find him and clear away the unjust suspicions which
she knew were growing ranker in that little colony hour by hour.

They all gathered to bid Sergeant Schaefer good-bye, for he was to
rejoin them no more. June pressed upon him a paper-bag of fudge, which
she had prepared the day before as a surprise against this event. The
sergeant stowed it away in the side pocket of his coat, blushing a great
deal when he accepted it.

There was a little sadness in their hearts at seeing the soldier go, for
it foretold the dissolution of the pleasant party. And the gloom of Dr.
Slavens' absence was heavy over certain of them also, even though
Sergeant Schaefer tried to make a joke of it the very last thing he
said. They watched the warrior away toward the station, where the engine
of his train was even then sending up its smoke. In a little while
Horace and Milo followed him to take the stage.

There came a moment after the men had departed when Agnes and William
Bentley found themselves alone, the width of the trestle-supported table
between them. She looked across at him with no attempt to veil the
anxiety which had taken seat in her eyes. William Bentley nodded and
smiled in his gentle, understanding way.

"Something has happened to him," she whispered, easing in the words the
pent alarm of her breast.

"But we'll find him," he comforted her. "Comanche can't hide a man as
big as Dr. Slavens very long."

"He'll have to be in Meander day after tomorrow to file on his claim,"
she said. "If we can't find him in time, he'll lose it."




CHAPTER VIII

THE GOVERNOR'S SON


After a conference with Walker in the middle of the morning, Bentley
decided that it would be well to wait until afternoon before beginning
anew their search for the doctor. In case he had been called in his
professional capacity--for people were being born in Comanche, as
elsewhere--it would be exceedingly embarrassing to him to have the
authorities lay hands on him as an estray.

"But his instrument-case is under his cot in the tent," persisted Agnes,
who was for immediate action.

"He may have had an emergency call out of the crowd," explained
Bentley.

In spite of his faith in the doctor, he was beginning to lean toward
Walker's view of it. Slavens was big enough to take care of himself, and
experienced enough to keep his fingers out of other people's porridge.
Besides that, there had to be a motive behind crime, and he knew of none
in the doctor's case. He was not the kind of man that the sluggers and
holdups of the place practiced upon, sober and straight as he always had
been. Then it must be, argued Bentley, that the doctor had his own
reason for remaining away. His unexpected luck might have unbalanced him
and set him off on a celebration such as was common in such cases.

"Very well," agreed Agnes. "I'll wait until noon, and then I'm going to
the police."

Being a regularly incorporated city, Comanche had its police force.
There were four patrolmen parading about in dusty _déshabillé_ with
prominent firearms appended, and a chief who presided over them in a
little box-house, where he might be seen with his coat off and a diamond
in the front of his white shirt, smoking cigars all day, his heels on
the window-sill.

As Dr. Slavens had not appeared at the time designated as her limit by
Agnes, Bentley went with her to the chief's office to place the matter
before him. It was well that they did not go there for sympathy, and
unfortunate that they expected help. The chief received them with
disdainful aloofness which amounted almost to contempt. He seemed to
regard their appeal to him for the elucidation of the doctor's mystery
as an affront.

The chief was a short man, who vainly believed that he could sustain his
trousers in dignified position about his hipless body with a belt. The
result of this misplaced confidence was a gap between waistcoat and
pantaloons, in which his white shirt appeared like a zebra's stripe.

He was a much-bedizened and garnitured man, for all that he lacked a
coat to hang his ornaments upon. Stones of doubtful value and
unmistakable size ornamented the rings upon his stocky fingers, and
dangled in an elaborate "charm" upon the chain of his watch. The only
name they ever addressed him by in Comanche other than his official
title was Ten-Gallon. Whether this had its origin in his capacity, or
his similarity of build to a keg, is not known, but he accepted it with
complacency and answered to it with pride.

Ten-Gallon was the chief guardian of the interests of the gamblers'
trust of Comanche, which was responsible for his elevation to
office--for even the office itself--and which contributed the fund out
of which his salary came. It is a curious anomaly of civilization,
everywhere under the flag which stretched its stripes in the wind above
the little land-office at Comanche, that law-breaking thrives most
prosperously under the protection of law.

Gambling in itself had not been prohibited by statute at that time in
Wyoming, though its most profitable side diversions--such as dropping
paralyzing poisons in a man's drink, snatching his money and clearing
out with it, cracking him on the head with a leaden billet, or standing
him up at the point of a pistol and rifling him--were, as now,
discountenanced under the laws.

But what profit is there in gambling if the hangers-on, the cappers, the
steerers, and the snatchers of crumbs in all cannot find protection
under the flag and its institutions? That was what the gamblers' trust
of Comanche wanted to know. In order to insure it they had the city
incorporated, and put in a good, limber-wristed bartender as chief of
police.

It was to that dignitary that Dr. Slavens' friends had come with their
appeal for assistance. There was discouragement in the very air that
surrounded the chief, and in the indifference with which he heard their
report. He looked at Agnes with the slinking familiarity of a man who
knows but one kind of woman, and judges the world of women thereby. She
colored under the insult of his eyes, and Bentley, even-tempered and
slow to wrath as he was, felt himself firing to fighting pitch.

"Well," said the chief, turning from them presently with a long gape,
terminating in a ructatious sigh, "I'll shake out all the drunks in the
calaboose this afternoon, and if your friend's among 'em I'll send him
on over to you. No harm could happen to him here in Comanche. He'd be as
safe here, night or day, as he would be playin' tennis in the back yard
at home."

The chief mentioned that game with scorn and curling of the lip. Then he
gazed out of the window vacuously, as if he had forgotten them, his
mashed cigar smoking foully between his gemmed fingers.

Bentley looked at Agnes in amazed indignation. When he squared off as if
to read his mind to the chief she checked him, and laid her hand on his
arm with a compelling pressure toward the door.

"That man's as crooked as the river over there!" he exclaimed when they
had regained the sunlight outside the smoke-polluted office.

"That's plain," she agreed; "and it doesn't mitigate my fears for the
doctor's safety in the least."

"Walker and I were wrong in our opinion; something has happened to
Slavens," said Bentley.

"Your opinion?" she questioned.

"Well, I should say Walker's rather," he corrected. "I only concurred
weakly along toward the end. Walker has held out all the time that
Slavens went out to hold a celebration all by himself."

"No; he didn't do that," said she calmly. "I thought so for a little
while this morning, too. But I know he didn't. Do you suppose----"

She stopped, as if considering something too extravagant to utter.

"Suppose?" he repeated.

"He talked a good deal about going into the cañon to clear up the
mystery of that newspaperman and earn the reward," said she.

Bentley shook his head.

"He'd hardly start at night and without preparation."

"He seemed to be a man of peculiar moods. If it came over him suddenly
and strongly in an hour of depression he might even go to that desperate
length. He believed the difficulties of the cañon were largely
exaggerated, anyhow. Once he told me that he would undertake to go
through it with nothing more than a pair of moccasins and a lantern. It
was his theory that a man would need the moccasins for clinging to the
rocks."

"It's a queer notion," said Bentley reflectively.

"Do you think----" she began, halting her words again and looking at him
with distended eyes.

"There's no telling what a man might do when desperate and despondent,"
he answered. "But I don't believe he'd go without leaving some word, or
at least making some disposition of his property in writing, in case he
never returned. We'll open his bags and see what we can find."

They hurried forward to carry out this intention.

The doctor's baggage consisted of his battered suitcase and the black
bag which contained his instruments. Neither was locked, but neither
contained any word to explain where he had gone, nor to give support to
the belief that he had intended going anywhere.

Walker, whom Bentley and Agnes rejoined at the camp, sat pondering the
information supplied by the girl concerning the doctor's designs on the
cañon.

"I'll tell you," he declared at length, as if talking to himself, "that
man had the nerve to tackle it!"

Agnes looked at him, her face quickening.

"What do you know about him?" she asked.

"I know," said Walker mysteriously, with no intention of bringing his
own indiscretions up for the censure of June and her severe mother,
"that he had courage enough to tackle anything. I've seen proof of that
right here in Comanche, and I want to tell you people that doctor wasn't
any man's coward."

"Thank you for saying that," blurted Agnes, wholly unintentionally, a
glow of pride on her cheeks.

Mrs. Reed and June looked at her, the widow with a severe opening of her
mouth, out of which no sound came; June with a smile behind her hand.

Walker shook his head.

"He had the courage," said he, "but he had too much sense to try to go
through that cañon. No white man ever went in there and came out alive.
And even if the doctor had wanted to go he wouldn't have started at
night."

"I don't know that it would make much difference," said Agnes. "It's
always night in that terrible cañon."

"And that's so, too," Walker agreed. "I think I'll go over there and
take a look around."

"Do you mind if Mr. Bentley and I go with you?" Agnes asked.

"I was going to suggest it," Walker replied, looking longingly at June.

June asked permission with her eyes; Mrs. Reed nodded, having overcome
her fears of Walker, owing to the substantial credentials which he was
able to show. Mrs. Mann put on her hat and slipped her black bag a bit
farther up her arm, and stood ready in a moment to join the expedition.
Mrs. Reed was to remain alone in camp to watch things, for they had been
warned that morning by the hotel people against a band of visiting
Indians, who picked up anything and everything that was not anchored at
least at one end.

It was late in the afternoon; the sun was low when they reached the
river. There wasn't anything to be made out of the footprints there. The
mouth of the cañon had been visited by a great many tourists, some of
whom had ventured within a little way to bring out stones for mementos
of their daring days of fearsome adventures in the West.

The party stood looking into the mouth of the narrow slit between the
high-towering walls. Down there it was already dark; the eye could
pierce the gloom but a little way.

"There are places in there where the sun never shines, even for a second
a day," Walker declared. "And that water goes through there with power
enough in it to grind a man's bones against the rocks. There must be a
fall of more than a thousand feet."

"I don't believe he went in there," said Agnes with finality, after
standing as if trance-bound for a long time, gazing after the foam-white
river as it roared into the echoing depths.

"No," Walker agreed. "He had too much sense for that."

They were all cheered and lightened by this conclusion. A daylight study
of the terrors of the place was sufficient to convince anybody that a
man would have to be driven to desperate lengths before he would venture
for the dubious reward or narrow notoriety to be gained by following
that wild river through its dark way.

"I camped over at the other side one summer," Walker told them as they
turned away to go back to Comanche, "and I used to pick up things that
had come through--boards and things that people had dropped in over at
Meander. It pounds things up, I tell you!"

"Did you ever pick up any gold on the other side?" asked June.

"I never found a trace of any," said Walker. "I think that's all a
sheep-herder's yarn."

They saw one of the police force in conversation with Mrs. Reed in front
of the tent as they drew near, and hastened forward in the hope that he
had brought news of the missing man. Mrs. Reed received them with
shocked expression, and a gesture of the hands denoting hopelessness for
the salvation of the world.

"It's scandalous!" she declared.

The policeman, a carpenterly looking man full of sandy hairs, stood by,
grinning.

"What is it, Mother?" asked June.

"I'll not repeat what he says," announced Mrs. Reed. "I
will--not--repeat--it!"

They turned to the officer, who wore his tarnished badge--evidently
bought after long service in a pawn-shop at Cheyenne--pinned to his
suspender at a point where he could turn his eye down on it whenever the
longing, or a desire to feed upon the pride of his official importance,
overcame him.

"I was tellin' her that the chief sent me over to say that your friend,
the doctor, was seen last night at half-past two in the mornin', jagged
up so tight he took two steps back'ards for every one he went ahead. The
chief told me to tell you he was layin' under a tent somewhere, and that
he'd be as safe as a calf in a barn. I hope that's what you wanted to
know."

The policeman turned and went his dusty way after delivering his message
from the chief, the wagon-spoke which he carried at the end of a thong
twirling at his wrist.

Walker looked around with a little flash of triumph in his eyes, for a
man likes to be vindicated in his opinion, even at the expense of his
friends' honor. But the gust of pain and disappointment which he saw
sweep over Agnes' face set him back with a sudden wrench.

"Say," said he with an assumption of indignation which he did not
altogether feel, "I don't believe that!"

"Nor I," declared Bentley, with no need of assuming a part to say it. "I
heard a man describing a crook the other day. He said the fellow was so
crooked that if you were to shoot him in the top of the head the bullet
would make seven holes in his body before it hit the ground. That's the
kind of a man that chief is."

"Well, it's scandalous!" declared Mrs. Reed. "Even it he comes back, his
conduct is simply disgusting, and I'll never permit him to address a
word to my daughter again!"

Agnes had drawn a little apart from them. She had no heart to come to
Dr. Slavens' defense, although she knew that the charge was calumnious.
But it furnished her a sudden and new train of thought. What interest
had the chief of police in circulating such a report? Was the motive for
Dr. Slavens' disappearance behind that insidious attempt to discredit
him, and fasten a character upon him wholly foreign to his own?

It was a matter worth looking into. Had Dr. Slavens incurred, somehow,
the disfavor of the vicious element which was the backbone of the place?
And had he paid the penalty of such temerity, perhaps with his life?

Thinking over the futility of a further appeal to the authorities there,
and wondering where she could turn for honest assistance beyond William
Bentley, who could do no more than herself, Agnes walked away from the
camp a short distance, retracing the way they had come.

"Of all the deluded, deceived creatures!" said Mrs. Reed.

"Hush-sh-sh!" said the miller's wife.

It was almost sunset when Agnes, overtaking her thoughts, halted with a
start to find that she had gone half the distance back to the river.
Hoping that they would not be waiting supper on her account, she turned
and hurried back.

Meanwhile, at camp there had been a little running-up of excitement,
occasioned by the arrival of the Governor's son, who came on a
commission from his mother and sister, bearing a note of invitation to
Mrs. Reed, her sister, Mrs. Mann, and June Reed.

Jerry Boyle--for that was the name of the Governor's son--was greatly
surprised to find his friend, Joe Walker, in the camp. But that only
made it easier for him, he declared, seeing that Walker could vouch for
him and put him on unquestionable terms at once.

"Just as if it were necessary!" exclaimed Mrs. Reed, glowing with
pleasure. "And you the brother of my daughter's dearest friend!"

Jerry Boyle seemed older by ten years than Walker. He was a tall man,
with a little forward bend to him that gave him an awkward cast. He was
dark-skinned and big-nosed, with black eyebrows which met at its bridge
and appeared to threaten an invasion of that structure. Little
sensitive, expressive ripples ran over his face as he talked, and that
was all the time. For Boyle was as voluble as a political press-agent.

Bentley recognized him, even before he was introduced, as the man whom
Walker had pointed out in the dance-house the night before. He said
nothing about that, but he smiled to himself when he recalled Walker's
anxiety to leave the place. It was a sort of guilty honor, he thought,
such as that which was anciently supposed to stand between thieves.

As Agnes approached, Boyle was in the middle of a story of his
experiences in Comanche during the days of its infancy. Mrs. Reed, busy
about the stove, had grown so deeply interested that she stood with a
lamb chop in her hand poised above the frying-pan, her face all smiles.
Boyle was seated on a low box, and some of the others were standing
around him, hiding him from Agnes, who stopped near the stove on
catching the sound of the new voice. Mrs. Reed nodded reassuringly.

"It's the Governor's son," said she.

Boyle caught sight of Agnes at that moment and jumped to his feet.
Walker turned to introduce him.

"No need," said Boyle, striding forward to their great amazement, his
hand outstretched. "Miss Gates and I are old friends."

Agnes drew back with a frightened, shrinking start, her face very
white.

"I beg your pardon, sir!" she protested with some little show of
indignation.

"This is Miss Horton," said Walker, coming to her rescue with
considerable presence. "She's one of us."

Boyle stammered, staring in amazement.

"I apologize to Miss Horton," said he with something like an insolent
emphasis upon the name. "The resemblance is remarkable, believe me!"

Agnes inclined her head in cold acknowledgment, as if afraid to trust
her tongue, and passed on into the tent. Boyle stared after her, and a
feeling that there was something out of tune seemed to fall upon the
party waiting there for supper in the red sunset.

Boyle forgot the rest of his story, and the others forgot to ask him to
resume it. He repeated something about remarkable resemblances, and
seemed to have fallen into a period of abstraction, from which he roused
himself presently with a short, grunting laugh.

"I must be gettin' on," said he, arising and taking his cowboy hat from
the table, where it lay among the plates--to the great satisfaction and
delight of Mrs. Mann, who believed that she had met a real westerner at
last.

"Oh, stay for supper!" pleaded June.

"You'll get enough of me when you come out to the ranch," he laughed,
giving her cheek a brotherly pinch.

While Mrs. Reed would have resented such familiarity with June's cheek
on the part of Mr. Walker, or even Mr. Bentley, she took it as an act of
condescension and compliment on the part of the Governor's son, and
smiled.

Walker went off down the street with Boyle, to speed him on his way. The
Governor's son was to send out to the ranch, some forty miles distant,
for a conveyance to carry Mrs. Reed and her party thither. It was to be
there early on the morning of the second day from that time, that being,
for that country, only an easy day's drive for a double team to a
democrat wagon.

There was an uncomfortable air of uneasiness and constraint upon them
during supper and afterward, a period usually filled with banter and
chatter, and shrill laughter from June. They were not able to get clear
of the suspicion raised by Boyle's apparent recognition of Agnes and her
denial that she was Miss Gates. The two older women especially seemed to
believe that Agnes had been guilty of some serious misdemeanor in her
past.

"He _wasn't_ mistaken in her identity," whispered Mrs. Reed to Mrs. Mann
when Agnes went in for a wrap as the chill of night began to settle.

Mrs. Mann, charitable and romantic as she was in her mild way, shook her
head sadly.

"I'm afraid he wasn't," said she.

"I'm sorry that I can't take June away from here tomorrow," lamented
Mrs. Reed. "There's something hidden in that woman's life!"

Agnes had come out silently, as anyone must have come over that
velvet-soft earth, which much trampling only made the softer. In the
gloom she stood just behind Mrs. Reed. That pure-minded lady did not
know that she was there, and was unable to see the rolling warning in
her sister's eyes.

"Would you mind walking over to the stage-office with me, Mr. Bentley?"
asked Agnes. "I want to engage passage to Meander for tomorrow."

On the way to the stage-office they talked matters over between them.
Her purpose in going to Meander was, primarily, to enlist the sheriff of
the county in the search for Dr. Slavens, and, remotely, to be there
when her day came for filing on a piece of land.

"I made up my mind to do it after we came back from the cañon," she
explained. "There's nothing more to be hoped for here. That story the
police told us only strengthens my belief that a crime has been
committed, and in my opinion that chief knows all about it, too."

She said nothing of Boyle and the start that his salutation had given
her. Whatever Bentley thought of that incident he kept to himself. But
there was one thing in connection with Boyle's visit which he felt that
she should know.

"The Governor's son told Walker that he saw the doctor late last night
in about the same condition as that policeman described," he said. "It
came up when Walker asked Boyle to keep an eye open and let us know if
he happened to run across him."

"Well, in spite of the high authority, I don't believe it," said she
with undisturbed conviction.

For a little while Bentley walked on beside her in silence. When he
spoke there was the softness of reverence in his voice.

"If I had the faith of a good woman in such measure as that," said he,
"I'd think I was next door to heaven!"

"It is the being who inspires faith that is more admirable than the
faith itself, it seems to me," she rejoined. "Faith has lived in many a
guilty heart--faith in somebody, something."

"Yes," he agreed gently. And then, after a little while: "Yes."

"Will you be returning to the East soon?" she asked.

"I've been thinking some of going on to Meander to get a fuller
impression of this country and see how the boy is getting on," he
replied.

"Then go with me," she invited.

"I wondered if you had faith enough in me to ask me," he laughed.

There was an extra stage out the next morning, owing to the movement
toward Meander of people who must file on their claims within the next
ten days. Smith was to drive it. He was in the office when they
arrived.

"I think I'll assume the responsibility of taking the doctor's two bags
with me," said Bentley.

She agreed that there was little use in leaving them behind. Walker was
to go to his ranch the next day; the others would break camp the
following morning. There would be nobody to leave his possessions in
charge of, except the hotel-keeper, who had a notoriously short memory,
and who was very likely to forget all about it, even if the doctor ever
returned.

Bentley made arrangements for the transportation of that much excess
baggage, therefore. The cost was reminiscent of freight charges in the
days of the Santa Fé Trail.

"We'll leave word for him at the hotel-office," said he.

As they came out of the stage-office a man was mounting a horse before
the stable door, a group of stage employees around him. He galloped off
with a flourish. The man who had caparisoned his horse stood looking
after him as he disappeared in the night.

"That feller's in a hurry--he couldn't wait for the stage in the
morning," said Smith. "He's ridin' relay to Meander tonight on our
horses, and he'll be there long before we start. He's the Governor's
son."




CHAPTER IX

DOUBLE CROOKEDNESS


Comanche was drying up like a leaky pail. There remained only the dregs
of the thronging thousands who had chopped its streets to dust beneath
their heels; and they were worked out, panned down to scant profit, and
growing leaner picking every day.

The ginger was gone out of the barker's spiel; the forced gaiety was
dying out of the loud levees where the abandoned of the earth held their
nightly carousals. Comanche was in the lethargy of dissolution; its
tents were in the shadow of the approaching end.

Most of the shows had gone, leaving great gaps in the tented streets
where they had stood, their débris behind them, and many of the saloons
were packing their furnishings to follow. It had been a seasonable
reaping; quick work, and plenty of it while it lasted; and they were
departing with the cream of it in their pouches. What remained ran in a
stream too thin to divide, so the big ones were off, leaving the little
fellows to lick up the trickle.

A few gambling-joints were doing business still, for men will gamble
when they will neither eat nor drink. Hun Shanklin had set up a tent of
his own, the big one in which he had made his stand at the beginning
having been taken down. To make sure of police protection, he had
established himself on Main Street, next door to headquarters.

Ten-Gallon, the chief, now constituted the entire force, all his special
officers having been dropped to save expense to the municipality, since
the population had begun to leak away so rapidly and the gamblers' trust
had been dissolved.

The chief slept until the middle of each afternoon. Then he went on duty
in Hun Shanklin's tent, where he usually remained the rest of the day,
his chair tilted back against the pole at the front end. It was
generally understood that he had a large interest in the game, which was
the same old one of twenty-seven.

On the side there was an army-game outfit at which a pimple-faced young
man presided, small whiskers growing between his humors where they had
escaped the razor, like the vegetation of that harsh land in the low
places, out of the destroying edge of the wind. For army-game was held
so innocuous in Comanche that even a cook might run it.

It was the third day after the drawing, and the middle of the afternoon.
That short-time had seen these many changes in Comanche, and every hour
was witnessing more. Mrs. Reed and her party had gone that morning in
the wagon sent for them from the Governor's ranch. The Hotel Metropole,
now almost entirely without guests for its many tents and cots, was
being taken down.

The red-nosed proprietor was loading cots into a wagon, his large wife,
in a striped kimono with red ruffles at the sleeves and a large V of
bare bosom showing, standing in the door of the office-tent directing
his labors in a voice which suggested a mustache and knee-boots. A
dangling strand of her greasy black hair swung in the wind across her
cheek, at times lodging in the curve of it and obscuring her eye. As the
lady's hands were both employed, one in holding up the train of her
florescent garb, the other in supporting her weight against the
tent-pole, she had no free fingers to tuck the blowing wisp in place.
So, when it lodged she blew it out of the way, slewing her mouth around
to do so, and shutting one eye as if taking aim.

All these employments left her no time for the man who had approached
within a few feet of her and stood with an inquiring poise as if asking
permission to speak. She went on with her directing, and skirt-holding,
and leaning against the tent-pole, and blowing, without giving him a
full look, although she had taken his appraisement with the corner of
her eye.

The man was not of an appearance to inspire the hope of gain in the
bosom of the hostess. His band-less slouch-hat flapped down over his
forehead and face, partly hiding a bandage, the sanguine dye of which
told what it concealed. A black beard of some days' growth, the dust of
the range caught in it, covered his chin and jowls; and a greasy khaki
coat, such as sheep-herders wear, threatened to split upon his wide
shoulders every time he moved his arms.

His trousers were torn, and streaked with the stain of rain and clay. He
had pinned the rents about his knees together, but he seemed so
insecurely covered that a strong wind might expose him, or a sudden
start burst his seams and scant contrivances to shield his nakedness. He
touched his hat in a moment when he caught the quick eye of the
landlord's wife upon him again, and moved a little nearer.

"Can you tell me, madam," said he respectfully, "what has become of the
party that was camped in the tent around on the other side--four ladies
and several men?"

"We don't lodge either sheep-herders or sheep-shearers unless they take
a bath first," said she, turning from him disdainfully.

"But I am neither a herder nor a shearer," he protested, "although I
may----"

"May be worse," she finished, though perhaps not in the way he
intended.

"Suit yourself about it," he yielded. "I don't want lodging, anyhow."

The landlord came staggering in with an armload of cheap bed-covers and
threw them down where his dragoon of a wife directed with imperious
gesture.

"Just look at all that money invested and no return!" she lamented.

The battered stranger appealed to the landlord, repeating his question.

"None of your business," the landlord replied crabbedly. "But they're
gone, if that'll do you any good."

"Did they leave two grips--a suitcase and a doctor's instrument-case--with
you?" inquired the man.

"They left a pie-anno and a foldin'-bed, and a automobile and a
safety-razor!" said the landlord, looking reproachfully at his big wife,
who was motioning him out to his labors again.

"Or any word for Dr. Slavens?" the stranger pursued with well-contained
patience.

"What do you want to know for?" asked the woman, turning upon him
suddenly.

"Because the grips belonged to me, madam; I am Dr. Slavens."

The landlord looked at him sharply.

"Oh, you're the feller that went off on a drunk, ain't you? I remember
you now. Well, they didn't leave no grips here."

"And no word either that I know of," added the woman.

She swept Dr. Slavens with wondering eyes, for she had held a pretty
good opinion of him before his sudden, and evidently heavy, fall.

"But where in this world have you been, man?" she asked.

"Nowhere in _this_ world," he answered. "I've been taking a little
side-trip to hell!"

"You cert'nly look like it, mister!" the woman shuddered, closing the
wide V at her bosom, the flaring garment clutched in her great
ring-encumbered hand.

"Will you tell me, then, about my friends?" he asked.

"Gone; that's all we know," said she.

"Part went on the train, two or three days ago; some went on the stage;
and the rest left in a wagon this morning," said the landlord.

But he couldn't tell who went on the train, the stage, or the wagon. It
was none of his business, he said. They paid their bill; that was all he
knew, or cared.

"May I take a look around the tent to see if they left any written word
for me there?" the doctor requested.

"Go on," said the woman, a little softening of sympathy coming into her
hard eyes.

Dr. Slavens went back to the tent, which stood as it had been left that
morning when the last of the party went away. The canvas under which
their table stood stretched there hospitably still, and the stove with
the morning's ashes cold upon its little hearth. Inside, the cots were
all in place, but there was not a line of writing from any friendly hand
to tell him where they had gone, or where his property had been left.

He walked toward the business part of the town and turned down Main
Street, considering with himself what turn to make next. His head bent
in meditation, he passed along lamely, his hands in the pockets of his
torn trousers, where there was nothing, not even the thickness of a
dime, to cramp his finger-room. Pausing in the aimless way of one who
has no unfinished business ahead of him, he looked around, marking the
changes which had come upon the street during those few days.

The litter of broken camp was on every hand; broken barrels, piles of
boxes, scattered straw, bottles sown as thickly upon the ground as if
someone had planted them there in the expectation of reaping a harvest
of malt liquors and ardent spirits. Here the depression of a few inches
marked where a tent had stood, the earth where the walls had protected
it from the beating feet showing a little higher all around; there in
the soft ground was the mark of a bar, the vapors of spilled liquors
rising sharply in the sun.

Bands of boys and camp-dregs, of whom he might have been one from his
appearance, scraped and dug among the débris, searching for what might
have been dropped from careless or drunken hands and trampled out of
sight. That they were rewarded frequently was attested by the sharp
exclamations and triumphant cries.

Across from where he stood was the site of a large place, its littered
leavings either already worked over or not yet touched. No one scratched
and peered among its trash-heaps or clawed over its reeking straw. Dr.
Slavens took possession of the place, turning the loose earth and heaped
accumulations with his feet as he rooted around like a swine. It must
have been worked over and exhausted, he concluded, for it turned no
glint of silver to the sun. Persisting, he worked across the space which
the tent had covered, and sat down on a box to rest.

The sun was low; the tops of two tall, round tents across the way came
between it and his eyes when he sat down. That was the luck of some
people, thought he, to arrive too late. The pay-dirt was all worked out;
the pasturage was cropped; the dry sage was all gathered and burned.

No matter. A man had but one moment of life to call his own, wrote
Marcus Aurelius. The moment just passed into the score of time's count,
the moment which the hand of the clock trembles over, a hair's breadth
yet to go--these are no man's to claim. One is gone forever; the other
may mark the passing of his soul. Only this moment, this throb of the
heart, this half-drawn breath, is a living man's to claim. The beggar
has it; the monarch can command no more. Poor as he was, Dr. Slavens
thought, smiling as he worked his foot, into the trampled dust, he was
as rich in life's allotment as the best.

The sole of his cut and broken shoe struck some little thing which
resisted, then turned up white beneath his eye. Broken porcelain, or
bone fragment, it appeared. He would have pushed it aside with his toe;
but just then it turned, showing the marking of a die.

Here was a whimsical turn of circumstance, thought he. An outcast die
for a broken man, recalling by its presence the high games of chance
which both of them had played in their day and lost, perhaps. It was a
little, round-cornered die, its spots marked deep and plain. As it lay
in his hand it brought reminiscences of Hun Shanklin, for it was of his
pattern of dice, and his size, convenient for hiding between the fingers
of his deceptive hand.

Dr. Slavens rolled it on the box beside him. It seemed a true and honest
die, for it came up now an ace, now trey; now six, now deuce. He rolled
it, rolled it, thinking of Hun Shanklin and Hun's long, loose-skinned
hand.

For a place of wiles, such as Comanche had been and doubtless was still,
it was a very honest little die, indeed. What use would anybody have for
it there? he wondered. The memory of what he had seen dice do there
moved him to smile. Then the recollection of what had stood on that spot
came to him; the big tent, with the living pictures and variety show,
and Hun Shanklin's crescent table over against the wall.

That must have been the very spot of its location, with the divided wall
of the tent back of him, through which he had disappeared on the night
that Walker lost his money and Shanklin dropped his dice. Of course.
That was the explanation. The little cube in Slavens' palm was one of
Shanklin's honest dice, with which he tolled on the suckers. He had lost
one of them in his precipitate retreat.

Dr. Slavens put the cube in his pocket and got up, turning the débris of
the camp again with his foot, watching for the gleam of silver. As he
worked, a tubby man with whiskers turned out of the thin stream of
traffic which passed through the street and sat on one of the boxes
near at hand. He sat there wiping his face, which was as red and
sweat-drenched as if he had just finished a race, holding his hat in
his hand, exclaiming and talking to himself.

He was so self-centered in his overflowing indignation that he did not
notice the man kicking among the rubbish just a few feet away. Presently
the little man drew out a roll of money and counted it on his knee, to
look up when he had finished, and shake his fist at the tent which stood
shoulder-to-shoulder by the police station. The gesture was accompanied
by maledictions upon crooks and robbers, and the force of his
expressions made necessary the use of the handkerchief again. This the
man took from his hat, which he held in his hand ready to receive it
again like a dish, and scrubbed his fiery face, set over with fiery
whiskers and adorned with a fiery nose. When he had cooled himself a bit
he sat watching the doctor at his labor, lifting his eyebrows every time
he blinked.

"Lost something?" he asked.

"Yes," replied the doctor, kicking away, not even looking at his
questioner.

"Well, if you dropped it out of your hand or through a hole in your
pocket you're lucky!" said the little man, shaking his fist at the tent
where his wrath appeared to center. "This place is full of crooks.
They'll rob you when you're asleep and they'll skin you when you're
awake, with both eyes ope

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/30558