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 pass