awe in their voices and spoke of God and the
insignificance of life.
But there was a small river near the water tank--the headwaters of the
Wolf--or there had been no tank. And a prophet of Business, noting
certain natural advantages, had influenced the railroad company to
build a corral and a station.
From that day Willets became assured of a future. Cattlemen in the
Wolf River section began to ship stock from the new station, rather
than drive to Red Rock--another shipping point five hundred miles east.
From the first it became evident that Willets would not be a boom town.
It grew slowly and steadily until its fame began to trickle through to the
outside world--though it was a cattle town in the beginning, and a cattle
town it would remain all its days.
Therefore, because of its slow growth, there were old buildings in
Willets. The frame station had an ancient appearance. Its roof sagged in
the center, its walls were bulging with weakness. But it stood defiantly
flaunting its crimson paint above the wooden platform, a hardy pioneer
among the moderns.
Business had strayed from the railroad track; it had left the station, the
freighthouse, the company corral, and some open sheds, to establish its
enterprises one block southward. There, fringing a wide, unpaved street
that ran east and west, parallel with the gleaming steel rails, Business
reared its citadels.
Willets buildings were not imposing. One-story frames predominated,
with here and there a two-storied structure, or a brick aristocrat
seeming to call attention to its substantial solidity.
Willets had plenty of space in which to grow, and the location of the
buildings on their sites, seemed to indicate that their builders
appreciated the fact that there was no need for crowding. Between each
building was space, suggestive of the unending plains that surrounded
the town. Willets sat, serene in its space and solitude, unhurried,
uncramped, sprawling over a stretch of grass level--a dingy, dirty,
inglorious Willets, shamed by its fringe of tin cans, empty bottles, and
other refuse--and by the clean sweep of sand and sage and grass that
stretched to its very doors. For Willets was man-made.
From the second story of a brick building that stood on the southern
side of the street, facing the station, Gary Warden could look past the
red station into the empty corrals beside the railroad track. Jim
Lefingwell, Warden's predecessor, had usually smiled when he saw the
corral comfortably filled with steers. But Gary Warden smiled because
the corral was empty.
Warden was standing beside a flat-topped desk at one of his office
windows. Warden was big, though not massive. He seemed to have the
frame of a tall, slender man, and had he stayed slender he might have
carried his flesh gracefully. But Warden had lived well, denying
himself nothing, and the flesh which had been added had formed in
flabby bunches, drooping his shoulders, sagging his jaws, swelling the
back of his neck.
And yet Warden was not old; he had told some new-made friends in
Willets that he was thirty-five. But he looked older, for a certain blasé
sophistication that shone from his eyes and sat on the curves of his lips,
did much to create the impression of past maturity.
Warden dressed well. He was coatless, but he wore a shirt of some soft,
striped material, with a loose, comfortable-looking collar and a neat
bow tie. His hair was short, with bristles in the roll of fat at the back of
his neck; while at his forehead it was punctiliously parted, and
plastered down with precision.
Warden was not alone. At another window, her elbows on the sill, her
hands crossed, her chin resting on the knuckles of the upper one, sat a
woman.
She was young, slender, lissom. There was grace in every line of her,
and witchery in the eyes that watched Warden with a steady gaze. She
too, was hatless, seemingly conscious of the beauty of her hair, which
was looped and twisted into glistening strands that fell over her temples
and the back of her neck.
As she watched Warden, who was smiling at the empty corral, she
withdrew her elbows from the window-sill, twisted around, so that she
faced Warden, and idly twirled the felt hat that she took from her lap.
"Does something please you, Gary?" she asked with slight, bantering
emphasis.
Warden's smile broadened. "Well, I'm not exactly displeased."
"With Willets--and the rest of it?"
"With that corral--over there." He pointed.
"Why, it's empty!"
"That's why."
"Why you are pleased! That is odd. As a buyer, I should think you
would be more pleased if the corral were full--had cows in it. That is
what you are here for, isn't it?"
"Yes," grinned Warden; "to keep it empty until it
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