gentlemen, is
a little water to make it a paradise!"

On the right hand of the hydrant there was a bank, presenting a front of
bricked stability, its boarded sides painted in imitation of that same
resisting material, for the comfort of its depositors perhaps, and the
benefit of its credit before the eyes of the passing world. Well out in
the desert, among the hummocks of earth heaped around anchoring sage
clumps, stood the Elkhorn Hotel. It was built of logs, with a design
toward the picturesque and an eye to the tourist class of adventurers
who were expected to throng to the opening. The logs had been cut along
the river--they were that gnarled cottonwood which grows, leaning always
toward the northeast, in that land of bitter extremes--the bark stripped
from them until they gleamed yellowly, and fitted together with studied
crudity. Upon the projecting end of the ridge-pole rode a spreading
elk-prong, weathered, white, old.

And there was the Hotel Metropole. There always is a Hotel Metropole and
a newspaper, no matter where you go. When you travel beyond them you
have penetrated the _Ultima Thule_ of modern times. The Hotel Metropole
was near the station. It was picturesque without straining for it.
Mainly it was a large, sandy lot with a rope around it; but part of it
was tents of various colors, sizes, and shapes, arranged around the
parent shelter of them all--a circus "top," weathered and stained from
the storms of many years. Their huddling attitude seemed to express a
lack of confidence in their own stability. They seemed a brood of dusty
chicks, pressing in for shelter of the mothering wing.

All was under the direction of a small man with a cream-colored
waistcoat and a most incendiary-looking nose. It seemed tempting the
laws of physics governing dry materials and live coals to bring that
nose into the shelter of a desert-bleached tent. But it was there, and
it flared its welcome with impartial ardor upon all arrivals.

The scheme of the Hotel Metropole was this: If you wanted a cot in a
tent where each bed was partitioned from the other by a drop-curtain of
calico print, you could enjoy that luxury at the rate of two dollars a
night in advance, no baggage accepted as security, no matter what its
heft or outward appearance of value. If you didn't want to go that high,
or maybe were not so particular about the privacy of your sleeping
arrangements, you might have a cot anywhere in the circus-tentful of
c