Page:The Cow Jerry (1925).pdf/21

 fewer than twenty loafers. At certain hours of the day these were filled, especially at evening, when the railroaders' day was done, and the withdrawing sun left it cool and pleasant there. Then Angus Valorous Macdougal, night clerk, dish washer, potato parer and waiter in a pinch, appeared with sprinkling can, gave the sidewalk planks a wetting down, leaving behind him a pleasant odor of allayed dust, reminiscent of a shower.

At such hour the railroaders and chance guests from the range planted their chairs in the street and cocked back with feet on the sidewalk edge, where they viewed at pleasure the passing life of McPacken. That was the original motion picture entertainment, very popular in its day, in Kansas towns, and other towns, a great deal bigger than McPacken. There is not an inch of room for legitimate question that the students of anatomy lined up along the sidewalk of that progressive city were of as much consequence in their orbit, their arguments and conclusions; of as much wit, wisdom and importance, as hotel loungers anywhere, before and since their time.

At the hour of this opening scene in McPacken, and on the veranda of the Cottonwood Hotel, there was very little wit and wisdom being discharged anywhere along the length and breadth of Santa Fe Street, as the main avenue was called. It was midafternoon of a withering hot summer day. Heat danced and wavered like clouds of transparent ephemera over the unpaved street, glimmered in distorting vexation above rails and