Page:Short Grass (1926).pdf/14

 people were housed, attendants in one capacity or another upon the prosperity of the place.

Pawnee Bend was built to the pattern of all those prairie towns: of more board and batten than plaster and stone. On the face of it the builders expressed their caution. Nobody wanted to be caught with a house on his hands that could not be disjointed readily and loaded on a flatcar when the day for moving came.

Along the broad principal street the blunt-nosed business houses stood shoulder to shoulder, some large, many of them small, all of design so exactly alike that the little ones might have been the brood of the big ones, to grow up presently all of a size, like a flock of ducks. There was a diversity of business along there, not of any wide range to be sure, for these merchants and panderers and parasites were serving men whose primitive desires could be fully expressed in three words.

Beer kegs impeded the narrow board sidewalks of this main thoroughfare; blue smoke of continual frying came out of the many restaurants, generally more stylishly designated cafés. There was so much grease afloat that regular inhabitants had no need of oil for their hair.

There never was a young man who felt so much like an opened oyster as Bill Dunham when he saw the train that had carried him to Pawnee Bend diminishing to a rapidly contracting point in the direction of Colorado. Pawnee Bend was surrounded by more country than he ever had taken in at a single gulp; such naked, raw, unfenced and useless-looking country