er had no words.

A good many years before the day that the Duke and Taterleg came riding
into Glendora, the town had supported more than one store and saloon.
The shells of these dead enterprises stood there still, windows and
doors boarded up, as if their owners had stopped their mouths when they
went away to prevent a whisper of the secrets they might tell of the old
riotous nights, or of fallen hopes, or dishonest transactions. So they
stood now in their melancholy, backs against the gray hill, giving to
Glendora the appearance of a town that was more than half dead, and soon
must fail and pass utterly away in the gray-blowing clouds of dust.

The hotel seemed the brightest and soundest living spot in the place,
for it was painted in green, like a watermelon, with a cottonwood tree
growing beside the pump at the porch corner. In yellow letters upon the
windowpane of the office there appeared the proprietor's name, doubtless
the work of some wandering artist who had paid the price of his lodging
or his dinner so.

ORSON WOOD, PROP.

said the sign, bedded in curlicues and twisted ornaments, as if a
carpenter had planed the letters out of a board, leaving the shavings
where they fell. A green rustic bench stood across one end of the long
porch, such as is seen in boarding-houses frequented by railroad men,
and chairs with whittled and notched arms before the office door, near
the pump.

Into this atmosphere there had come, many years before, one of those
innocents among men whose misfortune it is to fall before the
beguilements of the dishonest; that sort of man whom the promoters of
schemes go out to catch in the manner of an old maid trapping flies in a
cup of suds. Milton Philbrook was this man. Somebody had sold him forty
thousand acres of land in a body for three dollars an acre. It began at
the river and ran back to the hills for a matter of twenty miles.

Philbrook bought the land on the showing that it was rich in coal
deposits. Which was true enough. But he was not geologist enough to know
that it was only lignite, and not a coal of commercial value in those
times. This truth he came to later, together with the knowledge that his
land was worth, at the most extravagant valuation, not more than fifty
cents an acre.

Finding no market for his brown coal, Philbrook decided to adopt the
customs of the country and turn cattleman. A little inquiry into that
business convinced him that the expenses of growi