d the
distance--seven hundred--no, six hundred and ninety-eight miles from
Omaha. So far westward was Benton.

It lay in the heart of barrenness, alkali, and desolation, on the face
of the windy desert, alive with dust-devils, sweeping along, yellow and
funnel-shaped--a huge blocked-out town, and set where no town could ever
live. Benton was prey for sun, wind, dust, drought, and the wind was
terribly and insupportably cold. No sage, no cedars, no grass, not even
a cactus-bush, nothing green or living to relieve the eye, which swept
across the gray and the white, through the dust, to the distant bare and
desolate hills of drab.

The hell that was reported to abide at Benton was in harmony with its
setting.

The immense train clattered and jolted to a stop. A roar of wind, a
cloud of powdery dust, a discordant and unceasing din of voices, came
through the open windows of the car. The heterogeneous mass of humanity
with which Neale had traveled jostled out, struggling with packs and
bags.

Neale, carrying his bag, stepped off into half a foot of dust. He saw a
disintegrated crowd of travelers that had just arrived, and of travelers
ready to depart--soldiers, Indians, Mexicans, Negroes, loafers,
merchants, tradesmen, laborers, an ever-changing and ever-remarkable
spectacle of humanity. He saw stage-coaches with hawkers bawling for
passengers bound to Salt Lake, Ogden, Montana, Idaho; he saw a wide
white street--white with dust where it was not thronged with moving
men and women, and lined by tents and canvas houses and clapboard
structures, together with the strangest conglomeration of painted and
printed signs that ever advertised anything in the world.

A woman, well clad, young, not uncomely, but with hungry eyes like those
of a hawk, accosted Neale. He drew away. In the din he had not heard
what she said. A boy likewise spoke to him; a greaser tried to take his
luggage; a man jostling him felt of his pocket; and as Neale walked on
he was leered at, importuned, jolted, accosted, and all but mobbed.

So this was Benton.

A pistol-shot pierced the din. Some one shouted. A wave of the crowd
indicated commotion somewhere; and then the action and noise went on
precisely as before. Neale crossed five intersecting streets; evidently
the wide street he was on must be the main one.

In that walk of five blocks he saw thousands of persons, but they were
not the soldiers who protected the line, nor the laborers who made