g town with one street and no
society, except such as may gather around the big box-stove at Johnnie
Conyer's saloon. A number of ladies and two women lived in the camp, a
few tin-horn "gents," and about two hundred men. It is a seven months'
snow-camp, where men take their drama canned in the phonograph, their
food canned, their medicine all out of one bottle, and their morals
"without benefit of clergy." Across the front of one of the
canvas-covered log store-rooms that fringe the single street a cloth
sign is stretched. It reads, "Department Store," and inside a dance
hall, a saloon, and a gambling-place are operating. A few years ago,
when Colonel Alphabetical Morrison was travelling through the West on a
land deal for John Markley, business took him to Roosevelt, and he found
Balderson, grey of beard, shiny of pate, with unkempt, ratty back hair;
he was watery-eyed, and his red-veined skin had slipped down from his
once fat face into draperies over his lean neck and jowls. He was in the
dealer's chair, running the game.

The statute of limitations had covered all his Kansas misdeeds, and he
nodded affably as his old acquaintance came in. Later in the day the two
men went to Mrs. Smith's boarding-house to take a social bite. They sat
in front of the log-house in the evening, Balderson mellow and
reminiscent.

"Seems to me this way: I ain't cut out for society as it is organised. I
do all right in a town until the piano begins to get respectable and the
rules of order are tucked snugly inside the decalogue, then I slip my
belt, and my running gear doesn't track. I get a few grand and noble
thoughts, freeze to 'em, and later find that the hereditary
appurtenances thereunto appertaining are private property of someone
else, and there is nothing for me to do but to stand a lawsuit or
vanish. I have had bad luck, lost my money, lost my friends, lost my
conscience, lost everything, pretty near"--and here he turned his watery
eyes on his friend with a saw-toothed smile and shook his depleted
abdomen, that had been worn off climbing many hills--"I've lost
everything, pretty near, but my vermiform appendix and my table of
contents, and as like as not I'll find some feller's got them
copyrighted." He heaved a great sigh and resumed, "I suppose I could 'a'
stood it all well enough if I had just had some sort of faith, some
religious consolation, some creed, or god, or something." He sighed
again, and then leered up: "But, yo