s 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