er to
find the ranch uninhabited. As desolate as a stranded steamer on a mud
bank, it stands in the center of several hundred acres of desert,
incapable, without irrigation, of producing anything more edible than
lizards and horned toads. Why a homesteader should have chosen to
locate there is a mystery. His reason for abandoning the place is
glaringly obvious. Though failure be written in every angle and nook
of the homestead, it is the failure of large-hearted enterprise, of
daring to attempt, of striving to make the desert bloom, and not the
failure of indolence or sloth.

Western humor like Western topography is apt to be more or less rugged.
Between the high gateposts of the yard enclosure there is a great,
twelve-foot sign lettered in black. It reads: "American Hotel." A
band of happy cowboys appropriated the sign when on a visit to
Antelope, pressed a Mexican freighter to pack it thirty miles across
the desert, and nailed it above the gateway of the water-hole ranch.
It is a standing joke among the cattle- and sheep-men of the Concho
Valley.

Sundown sat up and gazed about. The rabbit, startled out of its
ordinary resourcefulness, stiffened. The delicate nostrils ceased
twitching. "Good mornin', little fella! You been travelin' all night
too?" And Sundown yawned and stretched. Down the road sped a brown
exclamation mark with a white dot at its visible end. "Guess he don't
have to travel nights to get 'most anywhere," laughed Sundown. He
kicked back his blankets and rose stiffly. The luxury of his yawn was
stifled as he saw below him the ranchhouse with some strange kind of a
sign above its gate. "If that's the hotel," he said as he corded his
blankets, "she don't look much bigger than me own. But distances is
mighty deceivin' in this here open-face country." For a moment he
stood on the hillside, a gaunt, lonely figure, gazing out across the
limitless mesas. Then he jogged down the grade, whistling.

As he drew near the ranch his whistling ceased and his expression
changed to one of quizzical uncertainty. "That's the sign, all
right,--'American Hotel,'--but the hotel part ain't livin' up to the
sign. But some hotels is like that; mostly front."

He opened the ranch-house gate and strode to the door. He knocked
timidly. Then he dropped his blanket-roll and stepped to a window.
Through the grimy glass he saw an empty, board-walled room, a slant of
sunlight across the floor, and in the su