Page:West of Dodge (1926).pdf/309

 new shops were taking form, and up and down Custer Street steam rollers were at work smoothing the first asphalt pavement laid down in the country west of Dodge. Damascus was making the road straight and smooth for Prosperity. It did not want her to stumble on her way to the court house square.

But these were only minor wonders compared with the greater civic and moral improvement that had taken place. Owing to a disagreement on the ethics of bribery with the proprietor of the White Elephant, the county attorney had closed the joint. Its bar was out, its sign obliterated, its swinging doors removed. An active young Jew was putting what he called a racket store in the place. It was neither a music nor hardware store, as the name might imply, but a place where everything for household comfort and feminine adornment was offered at red-letter prices.

The single-barreled sports and ten-cents-ante gamblers were gone, for they belong to a genus that dries up like frogs in a drouth where there is no smell of sour beerkegs at the side-door entrance. Jim Justice had painted the West Plains Hotel and was building a wing to it, in a fair way to recoup the fortune the arch-joker of Damascus had pilfered from him through that incomparable jest.

Hall met the ladies at the train, flanked by Kraus, who had come over with a rig to take them home. Mrs. Charles, from her kitchen door, espied the group as the long passenger train cleared the station. She waved her hand in the high-sign of railroad free-masonry, supplementing it with a hearty hail. Elizabeth, remembering her sustaining kindness in her tragic hour, darted across