Page:West of Dodge (1926).pdf/17

 ruptible in western Kansas; the state prohibitory law, which had stood a dead letter in that part of the state since enactment, was beginning to be enforced. These two conditions supplied the fuel for a last flare-up in Damascus, out on the very edge of things as it lay. The prosecuting attorney of that county was not an incorruptible man. He was one, at least, who saw a big chance for a person of his stripe lying around loose west of Dodge, and immediately proceeded to turn it into cash.

The result was that Damascus was just about as wide-open as lawlessness could pry it. Not so violently picturesque as Dodge had been; not so romantically gory. Yet trouble never was so far out of sight that a man could not find it if so bent. Now and then one made the discovery. Not always with happy finale.

Now another kind of adventurers were coming into that land which had felt successively the feet of the soldier, the railroad builder, the stockman, and the scum of the earth which hung parasitically upon them, sweepings which the broom of the law had purged from the threshold of well-regulated society. These newcomers were adventurers of the soil, men who came singly, with eyes far-set, as if they had followed elusive hope from the old places to that frontier, doubt upon them that they had overtaken it yet; who came with young wives at their sides, fresh in the vigor of united courage; who came old and stress-driven, out of the long, long road set with abandoned hearthstones, markers in their progression of defeat; who came in the strength of middle life, ruddy and bearded, with stripling sons and half-ripe daughters, and little ones bulging the canvas of their