rges thirty miles south across the
sunlight in a shallow, futile lake, a cienaga, called Las Palomas. Then
it evaporates into the ceaseless blue sky.

The water you get in Sharon is dragged by a herd of wind-wheels from
the bowels of the sand. Over the town they turn and turn--Sharon's upper
story--a filmy colony of slats. In some of the homes beneath them you
may go up-stairs--in the American homes, not in the adobe Mexican
caves of song, woman, and knives; and brick and stone edifices occur.
Monuments of perished trade, these rise among their flatter neighbors
cubical and stark; under-shirts, fire-arms, and groceries for sale
in the ground-floor, blind dust-windows above. Most of the mansions,
however, squat ephemerally upon the soil, no cellar to them, and no
staircase, the total fragile box ready to bounce and caracole should the
wind drive hard enough. Inside them, eating, mending, the newspaper, and
more babies, eke out the twelvemonth; outside, the citizens loiter to
their errands along the brief wide avenues of Sharon that empty into
space. Men, women, and children move about in the town, sparse and
casual, and over their heads in a white tribe the wind-wheels on their
rudders veer to the breeze and indolently revolve above the gaping
obsoleteness. Through the dumb town the locomotive bell tolls
pervadingly when a train of freight or passengers trundles in from the
horizon or out along the dwindling fence of telegraph poles. No matter
where you are, you can hear it come and go, leaving Sharon behind, an
airy carcass, bleached and ventilated, sitting on the sand, with the sun
and the hot wind pouring through its bones.

This town was the magnate's child, the thing that was to keep his memory
green; and as I took it in on that first walk of discovery, Stuart told
me its story: how the magnate had decreed the railroad shops should be
here; how, at that, corner lots grew in a night; how horsemen galloped
the streets, shooting for joy, and the hasty tents rose while the
houses were hammered together; how they had song, dance, cards, whiskey,
license, murder, marriage, opera--the whole usual thing--regular as the
clock in our West, in Australia, in Africa, in every virgin corner
of the world where the Anglo-Saxon rushes to spend his animal
spirits--regular as the clock, and in Sharon's case about fifteen
minutes long. For they became greedy, the corner-lot people. They ran
up prices for land which the railroad, the b