etting light-headed. Get rid of such fool thoughts as those or you'll
be going off to the insane asylum; and mighty little use your family
will have of you _there_!"

Orr gave him no answer. Robbins watched his impassive face and frowned.

"He's not bad-hearted, but he's desperate. You can't appeal to a
desperate man," he thought, "and the other boys are the same way.
There'll be wild work there to-night, unless that young fool has the
papers with him and will give them up. You're a fool, George Robbins, to
mix yourself up in it on the chance of getting a few dollars from a
Kansas City paper for a telegram!"

Silently the two men looked at the nearing lights, while the wagon
creaked and swayed and rattled over the road.

"We got to save the lantern to go home by," Orr remarked at last, "else
I'd light up; they ain't got any more lights in the streets. But I guess
we can see."

There were enough lights in the windows to reveal the wide untidiness of
the street, the black, boarded windows of the empty shops, the gaps in
the sidewalk, the haggard gardens, where savage winds had blown the
heart out of deserted rose-trees and geraniums. In general the sky-line
was low and the roofs the simplest peaks; but it was broken in a few
places by three and four storied brick buildings of the florid pomp on
which a raw Western town loves to lavish its money. Now they loomed,
dark and silent, landmarks of vanished ambition. Robbins, who was a man
of parts and education, with a fanciful turn, felt the air of defeat and
desolation hanging over the town choke him like miasma. To him the
dreariness was the more poignant for the half a dozen little shops that
still flickered their challenge to fate in the guise of a dim coal-oil
lamp in the window. There appeared to be no customers at these dismal
marts; in some cases not even the shop-keeper was visible, and only the
stove in the rear of the room kept a lonesome red eye on the shelves.
The sole sparks of life in the place were at the hotel. It had been
built "during the boom"--a large rectangle of wood, with a cheap and
gaudy piazza, all painted four shades of green, which the climate had
burned and blistered and bleached into one sickly, mottled brown. Long
ago the stables of the hostelry had been abandoned, but this night the
stable yard was full of wagons.

The upper story of the hotel was dark, and the greater part of the lower
story; but the kitchen was bright, and yellow light