s hat and
dropped into one of the rickety chairs against the wall. And there he
sat until Conniston had negotiated for two rooms for the night. Then
he got jerkily to his feet and stalked after his friend and their
hostess to the back of the house. A moment later he and Conniston,
left alone, sat upon their two beds and stared at each other through
the doorway connecting their rooms. Conniston studied the bare floors,
the bare walls of rough, unplaned twelve-inch boards set upright with
cracks between them ranging from a quarter of an inch to an inch in
width, and, rumpling up his hair, sat back and grinned into Hapgood's
woebegone face. And Hapgood after the same examination and a sight of
the rough beds covered with patchwork comforters, groaned aloud.

"Maybe it's funny," he muttered. "But if it is, I don't see it."

"What are you going to do about it?" chuckled Conniston. "You can't
fling out and go to the rival hotel, because there isn't any! You
can't sleep outdoors very well. And you can't catch a train until a
train comes. Which, I believe, will be sometime to-morrow morning."

It was already late afternoon. That day Roger Hapgood got no farther
than the bar-room at the front of the house. There he sat in one of
the rickety chairs, brooding, sullen, and silent, smoking cigarettes,
drinking high-balls, and cursing the whole God-forsaken West. And
there Conniston left him.

In spite of his naturally buoyant spirits, in spite of the fact that
he knew he had only to swing upon the next train which came through,
Conniston felt suddenly depressed. The silence was a tangible thing
almost, and he felt shut out from the world, lost to his kind,
marooned upon a bleak, inhospitable island in an ocean of sand. The
few men whom he met upon the sun-baked street eyed him with an
indifference which was worse than actual hostility. When he spoke they
nodded briefly and passed on. It was clear that if he looked upon them
as aliens, they looked upon him as a being with whom and whose class
they had nothing in common, no desire to have anything in common. For
a moment his good nature died down before a flash of anger that these
beings, with little, circumscribed existences, should feel and
manifest toward him the same degree of contempt that he, a visitor
from a higher plane of life, experienced toward them. But in Greek
Conniston good humor was a habit, and it returned as he assured
himself that what these desert-dwellers felt