n street of Comanche were the tents of the
gods of chance. They were a hungry-mouthed looking lot that presided
within them, taken at their best, for the picking had been growing
slimmer and slimmer in Wyoming year by year. They had gathered there
from the Chugwater to the Big Horn Basin in the expectation of getting
their skins filled out once more.

One could find in those tents all the known games of cowboy literature,
and a good many which needed explanation to the travelers from afar.
There was only one way to understand them thoroughly, and that was by
playing them, and there seemed to be a pretty good percentage of curious
persons in the throng that sweated in Comanche that day.

That was all of Comanche--tents, hydrant, hotels, bank, business houses,
and tents again--unless one considered the small tent-restaurants and
lodging-places, of which there were hundreds; or the saloons, of which
there were scores. But when they were counted in, that was all.

Everybody in Comanche who owned a tent was on the make, and the making
was good. Many of the home-seekers and adventure-expectant young men and
women had been on the ground two weeks. They had been paying out good
money for dusty stage-rides over the promising lands which had been
allotted to the Indians already by the government. The stage people
didn't tell them anything about that, which was just as well. It looked
like land where stuff might be grown with irrigation, inspiration,
intensity of application, and undying hope. And the locaters and
town-site boomers led their customers around to the hydrant and pointed
to the sprouting oats.

"Spill a little water on this land and it's got Egypt skinned," they
said.

So the mild adventurers stayed on for the drawing of claims, their
ideals and notions taking on fresh color, their canned tomatoes (see the
proper literature for the uses of canned tomatoes in desert countries
frequented by cowboys) safely packed away in their trunks against a day
of emergency.

Every one of them expected to draw Claim Number One, and every one of
them was under the spell of dreams. For the long summer days of Wyoming
were as white as diamonds, and the soft blue mountains stood along the
distant west beyond the bright river as if to fend the land from
hardships and inclemencies, and nurture in its breast the hopes of men.

Every train brought several hundred more to add to the throng already in
Comanche--most of them from beyon