Page:West of Dodge (1926).pdf/279

 Panama hat, and set off for Old Doc Ross' door. The hot wind flapped the pliant brim of his hat and ballooned his thin coat out at the back; heat glimmered up from the hard, dry ground, which was riven in jagged cracks as if ripped by lightning, gaping fissures appealing to the mottled hot sky for the rain that did not come.

There was not a loafer in sight the length of Custer Street. Jim Justice's veranda was swept by hot wind and hotter sun clean of the human rubbish that commonly eddied around its posts. Even Jim's splint-bottomed chair was gone from the place where its legs had worn hollows in the floor, and Jim's head had made a dark spot on the side of the house where he leaned.

Several horses were hitched in front of the saloon and around the square, some with heads thrust under the pole of the hitching-racks for the little line of shadow; others stood in the dejection of misery, stamping fretfully to dislodge the swarms of flies which gnawed their fetlocks and shins. The owners of these beasts were in the saloon, out of which the sound of clashing pool balls came, and the droning of a mouth organ, and a drift of cigar smoke over the latticed doors.

Hall passed on his way with a freedom from publicity that was quite a comfort to his pride, but he might as well have advertised the object of that hot Sunday afternoon walk in the paper, for all the somnolence of the town. Pink Fergus was as persistently active as the southwest wind. She came to her door, nodding her false bangs, grinning her perfectly natural big teeth at Dr. Hall as he tried to swish by on an especially hard gust of wind. She opened the screen to put her head out and watch him; followed the head with her flounced, tight-laced, bustle