in amazement at the rare personage into whose society fate had
thrown me.

Town, as they called it, pleased me the less, the longer I saw
it. But until our language stretches itself and takes in a new
word of closer fit, town will have to do for the name of such a
place as was Medicine Bow. I have seen and slept in many like it
since. Scattered wide, they littered the frontier from the
Columbia to the Rio Grande, from the Missouri to the Sierras.
They lay stark, dotted over a planet of treeless dust, like
soiled packs of cards. Each was similar to the next, as one old
five-spot of clubs resembles another. Houses, empty bottles, and
garbage, they were forever of the same shapeless pattern. More
forlorn they were than stale bones. They seemed to have been
strewn there by the wind and to be waiting till the wind should
come again and blow them away. Yet serene above their foulness
swam a pure and quiet light, such as the East never sees; they
might be bathing in the air of creation's first morning. Beneath
sun and stars their days and nights were immaculate and
wonderful.

Medicine Bow was my first, and I took its dimensions, twenty-nine
buildings in all,--one coal shute, one water tank, the station,
one store, two eating-houses, one billiard hall, two tool-houses,
one feed stable, and twelve others that for one reason and
another I shall not name. Yet this wretched husk of squalor spent
thought upon appearances; many houses in it wore a false front to
seem as if they were two stories high. There they stood, rearing
their pitiful masquerade amid a fringe of old tin cans, while at
their very doors began a world of crystal light, a land without