at to do with when the old man gets
soft-hearted again."

"He's d----d hard on you, Greek. He's got more--"

"Oh, I don't know." Greek laughed again. "He's a good sort, and we get
along first rate together. Only he's got some infernally uncomfortable
ideas about a man going to work and doing something for himself in
this little old vale of tears. He shaves himself five times out of
six, and I've seen him black his own boots!" He chuckled amusedly.
"Just to show people he can, you know."

Roger shook his head and applied himself to his glass, failing to see
the humor of the thing. And while the bigger man continued to muse
with twinkling eyes over the idiosyncrasies of an enormously wealthy
but at the same time enormously hard-headed father, with old-fashioned
ideas of the dignity of labor, Roger sat frowning into his glass.

The silence, into which the click of the rails below had entered so
persistently as to become a part of it rather than to disturb it, was
broken at last by the clamorous screaming of the engine. The train was
slackening its speed. Greek flipped up the shade and looked out.

"Another one of those toy villages," he called over his shoulder. "Who
in the devil would want to get off here?"

Roger sank a trifle deeper into his chair, indicating no interest. The
fat man had dropped his newspaper to the floor and was leaning out the
window.

"Great country, ain't it?" he called to Greek.

"Yes, it certainly _ain't_! What gets me is, why do people live in a
place like this? Are they all crazy?"

The train now was jerking and bumping to a standstill. Sixty yards
away was a little, bluish-gray frame building, by far the most
pretentious of the clutter of shacks, flaunting the legend, "Prairie
City." Beyond the station was the to-be-expected general store and
post-office. A bit farther on a saloon. Beyond that another, and then
straggling at intervals a dozen rough, rambling, one-storied board
houses. For miles in all directions the desert stretched dry and
barren. The faces of women and children peered out of windows, the
forms of roughly garbed men lounged in the doorways of the store and
the saloons. All the denizens of Prairie City manifested a mild
interest in the arrival of Number 1.

"I guess you called the turn," sputtered the fat man. "Here come the
crazy folks now!"

A cloud of dust swirling higher and higher in the still air, the
clatter of hoofs, and two horses swept around the farthes