t, 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