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.

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.

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 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:

“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.

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.

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.

“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.”

“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.

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.

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.

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?”

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.

“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.

“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.”

“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:

“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.

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.

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,

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.

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.

“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?”

“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.”

“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.

“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.

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.

“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.”

“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.

“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.

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.

“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.

“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 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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?”

“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!”

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

“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.

“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?”

“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.

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.

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.”

“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 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.

“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.

“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.

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.

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.