Page:West of Dodge (1926).pdf/289

 this mid-July, in that undress array of gray shirt, belted loose trousers and little else, thinking over his situation in that sun-pelted, leafless, unlovely little town. He reviewed how he had come there and stumbled into its affairs; how he had gone on, undesignedly, against any intention or will, knitting himself up with its life and ambitions, thrust forward by some grotesque chance as the chief figure through it all. Now the play was over, the adventures were done. Damascus had achieved its ambition. If there was any virtue in being a county seat, its fortunes were secure.

He had raised up many friends in that unlikely place. Where they had laughed at his way of assurance at the beginning, they came to him now with their sins. That was something; that was considerable, when everything was considered. It made a man swell up a little. Sitting there, his legs stretched wide, he gathered the muscles of his calves, pressed his toes to the ground, trying out the machinery for hoisting himself in his old-time, comfortable way.

Still, he could not see himself in Damascus a year hence, ten years hence, the new generation of prairieborn people growing up around him. A sturdy people they would be; a fast-striding, keen-faced people, with new visions which they would bring to realities, new desires which they would build into the form of utility and live. It would be a great life there among them, sweeping along in the crowding events their fuller lives would bring. Maybe there would be trees in Damascus then, and water works, and lights, and beautiful white houses with green lawns.

But he could not see it so. He could see nothing but