ER XII

WITHIN THE CONQUEROR'S OWN COUNTRY

It was the day set for the wedding, the eighteenth since the girl had
left, the sixteenth since a new mound had arisen on the bare lot
adjoining that beneath which rested Landman Bud Smith, the twelfth since
How Landor had arrived to haunt the tiny railway terminus. The one train
from the East was due at 8:10 of the morning. It was now eight o'clock.
Within the shambling, ill-kept hotel, with its weather-stained exterior
and its wind-twisted sign, the best room, paid for in advance and
freshly dusted for the occasion, awaited an occupant. In a stall of the
single livery, a pair of half-wild bronchos, fed and harnessed according
to directions, were passively waiting. An old surrey, recently oiled and
tightened in all its senile joints, was drawn up conveniently to the
door. In a tiny room, designated the study, of the Methodist parsonage,
on the straggling outskirts of the town, the only minister the
settlement boasted sat staring at the unpapered wall opposite. He was a
mild-featured young man of the name of Mitchell, recently graduated from
a school of theology, and for that reason selected as a sacrifice to the
frontier. In front of him on the desk lay a duly prepared marriage
licence, and upon it a bright gold half eagle. From time to time he
glanced thereat peculiarly, and in sympathy from it to the tiny
fast-ticking clock at its side. He did so now, and frowned
unconsciously.

At the station the crowd of loafers that always preceded the arrival or
departure of a train were congregated. In some way suggestions of the
unusual had passed about, and this day their number was greatly
augmented. Just what they anticipated they did not know; they did not
care. Restless, athirst for excitement, they had dumbly responded to the
influence in the air and come. In the foreground, where a solitary
Indian stood motionless, waiting, there was being repeated the same
puerile pantomime and horse-play of a former occasion. At intervals,
from the rear, sounded the war whoop travesty. It was all the same as
that afternoon eighteen days before, when the girl had left, similar
even to the cloud of black smoke in the distance lifting lazily into the
sky; only now the trail, instead of growing thinner and lighter, became
denser and blacker minute by minute. In sympathy, the humorists on the
platform redoubled their efforts. The instinct of anticipation, of
Anglo-Saxon love of excitement tha