Claim Number One Part 10

More than two hundred names were in the first extra run off _The Chieftain's_ press at half-past ten. The name of the winner of Number One was Axel Peterson; his home in Meander, right where he could step across the street and file without losing a minute.

Milo Strong, the schoolmaster from Iowa, drew Number Thirty-Seven. None of the others in the colony at the Hotel Metropole figured in the first returns.

They went back as silently as they had come, the doctor carrying the list in his hand. Before the tent stood the lumberman and the insurance agent, their bags in their hands.

"We've got just six minutes to catch the first train out," said the insurance agent, his big smile just as wide as ever. "Good luck to you all, and hope we meet again."

The lumberman waved his farewell as he ran. For them the gamble was off.

They had staked on coming in below one hundred, and they had lost. There was nothing more to hang around Comanche for, and it is supposed that they caught the train, for they were seen there no more.

There were several hundred others in that quick-coming and quick-going population whose hopes were dispersed by the printed list. And so the town suffered a heavy drain with the departure of the first train for the East. The railroad company, foreseeing the desire to be gone, had arranged a long string of coaches, with two engines. .h.i.tched up and panting to set out. The train pulled away with every inch of s.p.a.ce occupied.

All day the enterprising editor printed and sold extras. His press, run by an impertinent little gasoline engine, could turn out eighteen hundred of those single-sheet dodgers in an hour, but it couldn't turn them out fast enough. Every time Editor Mong looked out of his tent and saw two men reading one paper he cursed his limited vision which had stood in the way of putting sixty dollars more into a press of twice that capacity. As it was, the day's work brought him nearly three thousand dollars, money on the spot; no back subscriptions to worry over, no cabbage or cordwood in exchange.

When the drawing closed for the day and the last extra was off, more than three thousand numbers had been taken from the wheel at Meander.

The only one among the Metropole colony to draw after the first published list was Agnes Horton. Claim Number Nine Hundred and Five fell to her lot.

Claims that high were useless, and everybody knew it; so interest dropped away, the little gasoline engine popped its last impertinent pop and subsided, and the crowds drifted off to get ready to depart as fast as trains could be made up to haul them. Sergeant Schaefer, having failed of his expectations, felt a revival of interest in the military life, and announced that he would leave on the first train out next morning.

That night the price of cots suffered a dispiriting drop. Fifty cents would hire the most exclusive bed in the phantom city of Comanche.

As for Dr. Slavens, the day's events had left him with a dazed feeling of insecurity. His air was cleared of hope; he could not touch a stable bit of footing as far around him as he could reach. He had counted a good deal on drawing something along in the early hundreds; and as the day wore along to his disappointment in that hope he thought that he might come tagging in at the end, in the mean way that his cross-grained luck had of humiliating him and of forcing the fact that he was more or less a failure before his eyes.

No matter what he drew under three thousand, he said, he'd take it and be thankful for it. If he could locate on a trickle of water somewhere and start out with a dozen ewes and a ram, he'd bury himself away in the desert and pull the edges of it up around him to keep out the disappointments of the world. A man might come out of it in a few years with enough money--that impenetrable armor which gives security even to fools--to buy a high place for himself, if he couldn't win it otherwise.

Men had done well on small beginnings with sheep; that country was full of them; and it was a poor one, indeed, that wasn't able to buy up any ten doctors he could name.

So Dr. Slavens ran on, following the lead of a fresh dream, which had its foundation on the sands of despair. When the drawing had pa.s.sed the high numbers which he had set as his possible lowest, he felt like sneaking away, whipped, to hide his discouragement where there was no one to see. His confounded luck wouldn't even grant him the opportunity of burying himself out there in that gray sea of blowing dust!

There was no use in trying to disguise the fact any longer; he was a fizzle. Some men were designed from the beginning for failures, and he was one of the plainest patterns that ever was made. There was a place for Axel Peterson, the alien, but there was no place for him.

In spite of his age and experience, he did not understand that the world values men according to the resistance they interpose against it; according to the stamping down of feet and the presenting of shoulders and the squaring arms to take its blows. Cowards make a front before it and get on with amazing success; droves of poltroons bl.u.s.ter and storm, with empty sh.e.l.ls of hearts inside their ribs, and kick up a fine dust in the arena, under the cloud of which they s.n.a.t.c.h down many of the laurels which have been hung up for worthier men. Success lies princ.i.p.ally in understanding that the whole game is a bluff on the world's part, and that the biggest bluffer in the ring takes down the purse.

But the timid hearts of the earth never learn this; the sentimentalists and the poets do not understand it. You can't go along sweeping a clear path for your feet with a bunch of flowers. What you need is a good, sound club. When a hairy shin impedes, whack it, or make a feint and a bluff. You'll be surprised how easily the terrifying hulks of adversity are charmed out of the highway ahead of you by a little impertinence, a little ginger, and a little gall.

Many a man remains a coward all his life because somebody cowed him when he was a boy. Dr. Slavens had put his hands down, and had stood with his shoulders hunched, taking the world's thumps without striking back, for so many years in his melancholy life that his natural resistance had shrunk. On that day he was not as nature had intended him, but as circ.u.mstances had made him.

It had become the friendly fashion in camp for the doctor and Agnes to take a walk after supper. June's mother had frowned on the boldness of it, whispering to June's aunt. But the miller's wife, more liberal and romantic, wouldn't hear of whisperings. She said their conduct was as irreproachable in that country as eating peas with a spoon.

"I wish I was in her place!" she sighed.

"_Dorothy Ann!_" gasped Mrs. Reed. "Remember your husband, Dorothy Ann!"

"I do," sighed the miller's wife.

"Well, if you _were_ in her place you'd ask somebody to accompany you on your moonlight strolls, I hope. I _hope_ that's what you'd do, Dorothy Ann."

"No," answered the miller's wife thoughtfully. "I'd propose. She'll lose him if she doesn't."

On the evening of that day of blasted hopes the two of them walked away in the gloaming toward the river, with few words between them until they left the lights of Comanche behind.

"Mr. Strong is considerably elated over his luck," said Agnes at last, after many sidling glances at his gloomy profile.

"That's the way it goes," Dr. Slavens sighed. "I don't believe that chance is blind; I think it's just perverse. I should say, not counting myself, that Strong is the least deserving of any man in the crowd of us. Look at old Horace Bentley, the lawyer. He doesn't say anything, but you can see that his heart is aching with disappointment."

"I have noticed it," she agreed. "He hasn't said ten words since the last extra."

"When a man like that dreams, he dreams hard--and deep," the doctor continued. "But how about yourself?"

She laughed, and placed a restraining hand upon his arm.

"You're going too fast," she panted. "I'll be winded before we get to the river."

"I guess I was trying to overtake my hopes," said he. "I'm sorry; we'll go slower--in all things--the rest of the way."

She looked at him quickly, a little curiously, but there was no explanation in his eyes, fixed on the graying landscape beyond the river.

"It looks like ashes," said he softly, with a motion of the hand toward the naked hills. "There is no life in it; there is nothing of the dead.

It is a cenotaph of dreams. But how about your claim?"

"It's a little farther up than I had expected," she admitted, but with a cheerful show of courage which she did not altogether feel.

"Yes; it puts you out of the chance of drawing any agricultural land, throws you into the grazing and mineral," said he.

"Unless there are a great many lapses," she suggested.

"There will be hundreds, in my opinion," he declared. "But in case there are not enough to bring you down to the claim worth having--one upon which you could plant trees and roses and such things?"

"I'll stick to it anyhow," said she determinedly.

"So this is going to be home?" he asked.

"Home," she answered with a caressing touch upon the word. "I came here to make it; I sha'n't go away without it. I don't know just how long it will take me, nor how hard it will be, but I'm going to collect interest on my hopes from this country before I turn my back."

"You seem to believe in it," said he.

"Perhaps I believe more in myself," she answered thoughtfully. "Have you determined what you are going to do?"

He laughed--a short, harsh expression of ironical bitterness.

"I've gone through the mill today of heat and cold," said he. "First, I was going to sell my relinquishment for ten thousand dollars as soon as the law would allow, but by noon I had come down to five hundred. After that I took up the notion of sheep stronger than Milo, from Iowa, ever thought of it. It took just one more extra to put that fire out, and now the ashes of it aren't even warm. Just what my next phantasy will be I can't say."

"But you're going to stay here, aren't you?"

"I've thought of that, too. I've thought of making another try at it in a professional way. But this is a big, empty country. Few people live in it and fewer die. I don't know."

"Well, you're a doctor, not an undertaker, anyhow," she reminded him.

"Yes; I missed my calling," he laughed, with the bitterness of defeat.