Page:West of Dodge (1926).pdf/16

 Around this court house in Damascus, built of brick, although there was white limestone fit for palaces and railroad bridges close at hand, the town clustered its few dozen dwellings and flat-nosed business fronts. Damascus, being on the front of things, was a sort of permanent railroad camp in addition to its importance as a cattle-lands center. On its skirts there were settlements of dusty tents to shelter man, woman, and the inevitable result of such conjunction; where baled hay was piled high, and raw-boned mules stood hitched to long, unsheltered mangers chopping the sod to dust with stamping hooves.

Not a lovely place at all, this town; no umbrageous elm trees in that day along its sun-warped walks and dusty streets. If there was a flower of any kind within the confines of the place, it was a wild hardy one that wheel and hoof, and ground-gripping Kansas feet had spared. Somebody had set catalpa trees around the court house square, but the life had perished out of them when they had come no higher than the brim of a man's hat. A few of the dry, sad, twisted little trunks remained there still.

People were not thinking of ornamentation and beauty in Damascus in those days; only of the belief that a man hadn't much of a chance west of Dodge. Such of them as called it home were forging their efforts to hold on in the face of great natural odds, magnified by tradition and report.

The lights were out at Dodge City; the notorious characters who had given the town an infernal fame throughout the country were under the buffalo grass or scattered far. County attorneys were beginning to grow incor-