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 poor little cowboys far away from the pool hall at MePacken."

Jim Kelly's house was built of straight up-and-down planks, stripped with battens, like a barn. It was not as comfortable as a sod house, and nothing could have been more unattractive, its raw planks stark and unpainted against the harmony of gray prairie and blue sky in that treeless immensity. But it was a mark of affluence and superiority to live in a plank house where sod houses were the rule. Comfort and æsthetics have been sacrificed to the same vanity in other places at other times.

Kelly's house was a notable one on the old cattle trail leading from Texas through the Cherokee Outlet; there was nothing as grand or as costly within many a day's travel to the south. The material had been freighted from McPacken, in itself not much of a task, the house knocked together like a huge box without foundation or previous leveling of the land. There were irregular pillars of rock under one end of it to lift it to a level, making a convenient place beneath the floor for chickens and dogs.

It was a long quadrangular building, with five doors opening in its front. It looked like a barracks, or a bunk-house, with all these exits ready to the necessity of men in a hurry, but it was devoted solely to the use of Jim's family, which comprised himself and his wife Jinny, a little Jim and a littler Jinny.

There was no doubt which was the main door among all the doors. It was easily picked out by the grease