the vastness and stillness that spoke of infinity, brought
a curious sense of peace to him. Impostor though he was, he would
leave Silverdale better than he found it, and afterwards it would be of
no great moment what became of him. Countless generations of toiling
men had borne their petty sorrows before him, and gone back to the dust
they sprang from, but still, in due succession, harvest followed
seed-time, and the world whirled on. Then, remembering that, in the
meanwhile, he had much to do which would commence with the sun on the
morrow, he went back into the house and shook the fancies from him.

CHAPTER XIII

MASTERY RECOGNIZED

There was, considering the latest price of wheat, a somewhat
astonishing attendance in the long room of the hotel at the railroad
settlement one Saturday evening. A big stove in the midst of it
diffused a stuffy and almost unnecessary heat, gaudy nickeled lamps an
uncertain brilliancy, and the place was filled with the drifting smoke
of indifferent tobacco. Oleographs, barbaric in color and drawing,
hung about the roughly-boarded walls, and any critical stranger would
have found the saloon comfortless and tawdry.

It was, however, filled that night with bronzed-faced men who expected
nothing better. Most of them wore jackets of soft black leather or
embroidered deerskin, and the jean trousers and long boots of not a few
apparently stood in need of repairing, though the sprinkling of more
conventional apparel and paler faces showed that the storekeepers of
the settlement had been drawn together, as well as the prairie farmers
who had driven in to buy provisions or take up their mail. There was,
however, but little laughter, and their voices were low, for
boisterousness and assertion are not generally met with on the silent
prairie. Indeed, the attitude of some of the men was mildly
deprecatory, as though they felt that in assisting in what was going
forward they were doing an unusual thing. Still, the eyes of all were
turned towards the table where a man, who differed widely in appearance
from most of them, dealt out the cards.

He wore city clothes, and a white shirt with a fine diamond in the
front of it, while there was a keen intentness behind the half-ironical
smile in his somewhat colorless face. The whiteness of his long
nervous fingers and the quickness of his gestures would also have
stamped his as a being of different order from the slowly-spoken
prairie far