CHAPTER III


WHICH ONE'S WHICH

Eagle Butte sprawled hot and thirsty under the melting sunshine of
mid-forenoon. It was not a prepossessing town. All told, no more than
two hundred buildings were within its corporate limits. A giant mound,
capped by a crown of crumbling, weather-tinted rock, rose abruptly at
the northern edge of the village and gave the place its name. Cimarron
River, sluggish and yellow, bounded the town on the south. The dominant
note of Eagle Butte was a pathetic mixture of regret for glories of
other days and clumsy ambition to assume the ways of a city. Striving
hard to be modern it succeeded only in being grotesque.

The western plains are sprinkled with towns like that. Towns that once,
in the time of the long-horn steer and the forty-four and the nerve to
handle both, were frankly unconventional. Touched later by the black
magic of development, bringing brick buildings, prohibition, picture
shows, real-estate boosters, speculation and attendant evils or benefits
as one chooses to classify them, they became neither elemental nor
ethical--mere gawky mimics of both.

When western Texas was cow-country and nothing else Eagle Butte at
least was picturesque. Flickering lights, gay laughter--sometimes curses
and the sounds of revolver shots, of battles fought close and quick and
to a finish--wheezy music, click of ivory chips, the clink of glasses,
from old Bonanza's and similar rendezvous of hilarity lured to the
dance, faro, roulette, the poker table or the hardwood polished bar.