e days of too many paper
novels, of too much tobacco, of too little else, followed each other
with the sameness of so many raw oysters. Then there came a chill night
of wide moonlit vacuity passed on the prairie by the side of the driver
of a "jumper,"--a driver who slumbered, happy man!--and at peep of dawn
I found myself standing, stiff and shivering, in a certain little Texas
town. A much-soiled, white little street, a bit of greenish-yellow,
treeless plain soft in the morning mist, a rosy fringe at the edge of
the sky,--it was of these things, together with a disagreeable sense of
imponderability of body from the cold and sleepless ride, that I was
vaguely aware as the jumper--rigorous vehicle!--disappeared round a
corner. Frontier towns are not lovely, and the death-like peace which
seemed properly to accompany the chalky pallor of the buildings was
somewhat uncanny; but it proved to be only what sleep can do for a
village with railroad influences one hundred miles away. We entered
boldly the adobe before which we had been dropped, and found a genial
landlord in an impromptu costume justified by the hour, an inn-album of
quite cosmopolitan range of inscriptions, and a breakfast for which a
week of traveller's fare had amply fortified the spirit.

The village was the chief, indeed, wellnigh the only, town of a great
west-by-north county, in which Rhode Island would be lost and
Massachusetts find elbow-room. It was an irregular little bunch of
buildings gathered along an arterial street which, after a run of three
hundred yards or so, broke to pieces and scattered its dispersed
shanties about a high, barren plain. It stood on the steep bank of a
little river, and over against it, on a naked hill, was Uncle Sam's
military village,--a fort by courtesy,--where, when not sleeping, black
soldiers and white strolled about in the warm sun. When the little
street was fairly awake, it presented a very lively appearance and had
the air of doing a great deal of business. The wan houses emitted their
occupants, and numerous pink-faced riders, in leathers and broad hats,
poured in from all sides, and, tying their heavily-accoutred ponies,
disappeared into the shops with a sort of bow-legged waddle, like
sailors ashore. Off his horse, the cow-boy is frankly awkward. Purchases
made, they departed with a rush, filling the glare with dust. Officers
from the post, with cork helmets and white trousers, came across the
river and stood i