ich he had limited
himself in thought, but his entire month's salary,--he might lose all by
the lack of a paltry dollar or so.

He was dressed with more care than on the day previous: he wore a dark
suit, the coat to which now swung on a stick over his shoulder, a rubber
collar, a tie of orange brocade erected on a superstructure of cardboard;
his head was covered by a hard, black felt hat, pushed back from his
sweating brow, and his trousers hung from a pair of obviously
home-knitted, yarn suspenders. He shifted the stick from right to left.
His revolver dragged chafing against a leg, and he removed it and thrust
it into a pocket of the coat.

He followed by turn an old rutted postroad and faint, forest trails, and
shortened distances by breaking through the trackless underbrush, watching
subconsciously for rattlesnakes. The sun slowly declined, its rays fell
diagonally, lengthening, through the trees; in a glade the air seemed
filled with gold dust; the sky burned in a single flame of apricot. The
air, rather than grow dark, appeared to thicken with raw color, with mauve
and ultramarine, silver and cinnabar.

When he arrived at the little, deeply-grassed plain that held Sprucesap,
it was bathed in a flaring after-glow, a magical, floating light. A double
row of board structures faced each other across a street of raw clay and
narrow, wood sidewalks; they were, for the most part, unpainted, hasty
erections of a single story. A building labelled the Steel Spud Hotel was
more pretentious. The others were eating houses, stores with small windows
filled with a threatening miscellany--revolvers, leather slung shots and
brass knuckles, besides lumbering boots, gaudy Mackinaw jackets, gleaming
knives and ammunition. Beyond the street a single car track ran
precariously over the green, and ended abruptly, without roadbed or
visible terminus; at one side was a rude platform, on the other a great
pile of bark, rotting from long exposure--the result of some artificial
condition of the market, the spite of powerful and vindictive merchants.

A second hotel stood alone, beyond the car tracks, and there Gordon
removed the marks of his journey, resettled his collar and the resplendent
tie. He felt in his coat for the revolver, in order to transfer it to a
more convenient pocket.... Its bulk, apparently, evaded his fingers. His
search quickened--it had gone! He had lost it somewhere on his long,
devious passage of Cheap Mountain. W