Page:West of Dodge (1926).pdf/20



this scene of Damascus, when the sun was red on the rim of the world one April evening, there arrived a stranger whose stride was so swift it seemed he must be hastening on in the fear that whatever slim chance there might be for a man west of Dodge would be used up before he could arrive. He carried an overcoat across his arm, a strapped suitcase with swelled sides in his hand.

There was something far more eager and alert about this stranger than the general drift of men who came to Damascus, although he seemed to be an indoors man who had not straightened his back from wrestling with the soil to come to that country looking for land. But there was something in his eye; he seemed to have it just before him as he poled along toward the hotel. Some of the loafers along the way said he looked like he'd been sent for to put out a fire.

At the corner of the square in front of the White Elephant, the stranger stopped, put his over-packed valise on the ground to rest his arm, and stood looking around the town, and such of the country beyond it as he could see. Not with the undecided, dazed look of a man who had come to the end of the road and did not know which way to turn, but with something of a glad expectancy, a swelling eagerness, as if he had made that