a
metal spout which poured refreshing water into gaping reservoirs.

In that day Willets sat in the center of a dead, dry section, swathed in
isolation so profound that passengers in the coaches turned to one
another with awe in their voices and spoke of God and the insignificance
of life.

But there was a small river near the water tank--the headwaters of the
Wolf--or there had been no tank. And a prophet of Business, noting
certain natural advantages, had influenced the railroad company to build
a corral and a station.

From that day Willets became assured of a future. Cattlemen in the Wolf
River section began to ship stock from the new station, rather than
drive to Red Rock--another shipping point five hundred miles east.

From the first it became evident that Willets would not be a boom town.
It grew slowly and steadily until its fame began to trickle through to
the outside world--though it was a cattle town in the beginning, and a
cattle town it would remain all its days.

Therefore, because of its slow growth, there were old buildings in
Willets. The frame station had an ancient appearance. Its roof sagged in
the center, its walls were bulging with weakness. But it stood defiantly
flaunting its crimson paint above the wooden platform, a hardy pioneer
among the moderns.

Business had strayed from the railroad track; it had left the station,
the freighthouse, the company corral, and some open sheds, to establish
its enterprises one block southward. There, fringing a wide, unpaved
street that ran east and west, parallel with the gleaming steel rails,
Business reared its citadels.

Willets buildings were not imposing. One-story frames predominated, with
here and there a two-storied structure, or a brick aristocrat seeming to
call attention to its substantial solidity.

Willets had plenty of space in which to grow, and the location of the
buildings on their sites, seemed to indicate that their builders
appreciated the fact that there was no need for crowding. Between each
building was space, suggestive of the unending plains that surrounded
the town. Willets sat, serene in its space and solitude, unhurried,
uncramped, sprawling over a stretch of grass level--a dingy, dirty,
inglorious Willets, shamed by its fringe of tin cans, empty bottles, and
other refuse--and by the clean sweep of sand and sage and grass that
stretched to its very doors. For Willets was man-made.

From the second story of a brick buildin