Page:The Cow Jerry (1925).pdf/20

 it, as happened to McPacken in its day, but a day long after this one of which you read, to be sure. Taking McPacken all over, it was not a bad town for its frontier situation. It had all the material, but never made much of its opportunity.

Between the railroad and the beginning of town there was a wide strip of unoccupied land, owned jointly by McPacken, the county and the "company" as that principal institution of the country was called. Here the county highway entered McPacken from the west, a road that ran past the small sod houses and stubborn farms and lost itself finally in the trails which split from the ends of it like ravelled strands of a lariat. It was a dusty, trampled gray stretch of beaten ground with hitching-racks along the sides of the buildings which stood at the beginning of the principal thoroughfare. Prominent on the corner of this trampled common, the Cottonwood Hotel stood, and in front of the hotel the place which concerned itself with beer kegs and defied the sovereign state.

That was the beginning of McPacken as one saw it from the railroad station: the hotel on the left, the saloon on the right. There were two cottonwood trees of considerable girth and spread of limb in front of the hotel, a pump and watering trough for horses between them. Here the sidewalk was double width, part of it being the hotel veranda, covered by a wooden awning to the curb.

Two benches, fixed solidly against the wall, flanked the door of the hotel, offering accommodations for no