ul outlook and social inclination attain
the age of five and fifty without contracting superfluous avoirdupois
and distinctive mannerism. That Colonel William Landor was no exception
to the first rule was proven by the wheezing effort with which he made
his descent from the two-seated canvas-covered surrey in front of Bob
Manning's store, and, with a deftness born of experience, converted the
free ends of the lines into hitch straps. That the second premise held
true was demonstrated ten seconds later in the unconscious grunt of
soliloquy with which he greeted the sight of a wisp of black rag tacked
above the knob of the door before him.
"Mourning, eh," he commented to his listening ego. "Looks like a strip
of old Bob's prayer-meeting trousers." He tried the entrance, found it
locked, and in lieu of entering tested the badge of sorrow between thumb
and finger. "Pant stuff, sure enough," he corroborated. "It can't be Bob
himself, or they'd have needed these garments to lay him out in. Now
what in thunder, I wonder--"
He glanced across the street at Slim Simpson's eating house. Like the
general store, the door was closed, and just above the catch, flapping
languidly in a rising prairie breeze, was the mate to the black rag
dangling at his back. The spectator's shaggy eyebrows tightened in
genuine surprise, and with near-sighted effort he inspected the fronts
of the short row of other buildings along the street.
"Civilisation's struck Coyote Centre good and proper, at last,
evidently," he commented. "They'll be having a bevel plate hearse with
carved wood tassels and a coon driver next!" He halted, indecisive, and
for the first time became conscious that not a human being was in sight.
In the street before him a pair of half-grown cockerels with ludicrously
long legs and abbreviated tails were scratching a precarious living from
amid the litter. On the sunny expanse of sidewalk before Buck Walker's
meat market a long-eared mongrel lay stretched out luxuriously in the
physical contentment of the subservient unmolested; but from one end of
the single street to the other not a human being was in sight; save the
present spectator, not a single disturber of the all-pervading quiet.
Landor had seen the spot where the town now stood when it was virgin
prairie, had watched every building it boasted rise from the earth, had
hitherto observed it through the gamut of its every mood from nocturnal
recklessness to profoundest dayb
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