nterest in the fellow; and he turned the talk on to other matters,
until it got cold and they went to sleep.

Starting early the next morning, they reached Sweetwater after an
uneventful journey, and found it by no means an attractive place.
South of it, rolling prairie ran back, grayish white with withered
grass, to the skyline; to the north, straggling poplar bluffs and
scattered Jack-pines crowned the summits of the ridges. A lake gleamed
in a hollow, a slow creek wound across the foreground in a deep ravine,
and here and there in the distance was an outlying farm. A row of
houses followed the crest of the ravine, some built of small logs, and
some of shiplap lumber which had cracked with exposure to the sun, but
all having a neglected and poverty-stricken air. The land was poor and
the settlement was located too far from a market. With leaden
thunderclouds hanging over it, the place looked as desolate as the
sad-colored waste.

Following the deeply rutted street, which had a narrow, plank sidewalk,
they reached the Imperial Hotel--a somewhat pretentious, double-storied
building of unpainted wood, with a veranda across the front. Here
Gardner took the pony from them and gave them a room which had no
furniture except a chair and two rickety iron beds. Before he left
them he indicated a printed list of the things they were not allowed to
do. Harding studied it with a sardonic smile.

"I don't see much use in prohibiting people from washing their clothes
in the bedrooms when they don't give you any water," he remarked.
"This place must be about the limit in the way of cheap hotels."

"It isn't cheap," responded Blake; "I've seen the tariff."

They found their supper better than they had reason to expect, and
afterward sat out on the veranda with the proprietor and one or two of
the settlers who boarded at the hotel. The sun had set, and now and
then a heavy shower beat upon the shingled roof, but the western sky
was clear and flushed with vivid crimson, toward which the prairie
rolled away in varying tones of blue. Lights shone in the windows
behind the veranda, and from one which stood open a hoarse voice
drifted out, singing in a maudlin fashion snatches of an old music-hall
ditty.

"It's that fool Benson--Clarke's Englishman," Gardner explained.
"Found he'd got into my bed with his boots on, after falling down in a
muskeg. It's not the first time he's played that trick; when he gets
worse than usual