A boisterous wind swept the high plain and round, white-edged clouds
rolled across the sky. The grass that ran back from the horizon was
parched, and in the distance a white streak of blowing dust marked a
dried alkali lake. Dust of dark color drove along the row of wooden
stores and houses that fronted the railroad track, across which three
grain elevators rose like castles. The telegraph posts along the track
melted into the level waste, and behind the spot where they vanished the
tops of a larger group of elevators cut the edge of the plain.

The street was not paved, and the soil was deeply ploughed by wheels.
The soil was the black gumbo in which the wheat plant thrives, but the
town occupied the fringe of a dry belt and farming had not made much
progress. Now, however, a company was going to irrigate the land with
water from a river fed by the Rockies' snow. The town was square, and
although it looked much smaller than real-estate agents' maps indicated,
it was ornamented by four wooden churches, a Y.M.C.A. like a temple, and
an ambitious public hall.

The Tecumseh Hotel occupied a corner lot at the end of the street and
was not remarkably commodious or clean, but its charges were less than
the Occidental's by the station, and Lister and Kemp were not
fastidious. Some time had gone since they pulled the gravel cars out of
the swamp and they had not been sent to the lake section. In
consequence, they had applied to the irrigation company for a post, and
having been called to meet the engineers and directors, imagined they
were on the short list.

Lister lounged against the rails on the Tecumseh veranda. The boards
were cracked and dirty; burned matches and cigar ends were scattered