Under Handicap | Page 7

set upright with cracks
between them ranging from a quarter of an inch to an inch in width, and,
rumpling up his hair, sat back and grinned into Hapgood's woebegone
face. And Hapgood after the same examination and a sight of the rough
beds covered with patchwork comforters, groaned aloud.
"Maybe it's funny," he muttered. "But if it is, I don't see it."
"What are you going to do about it?" chuckled Conniston. "You can't
fling out and go to the rival hotel, because there isn't any! You can't

sleep outdoors very well. And you can't catch a train until a train comes.
Which, I believe, will be sometime to-morrow morning."
It was already late afternoon. That day Roger Hapgood got no farther
than the bar-room at the front of the house. There he sat in one of the
rickety chairs, brooding, sullen, and silent, smoking cigarettes, drinking
high-balls, and cursing the whole God-forsaken West. And there
Conniston left him.
In spite of his naturally buoyant spirits, in spite of the fact that he knew
he had only to swing upon the next train which came through,
Conniston felt suddenly depressed. The silence was a tangible thing
almost, and he felt shut out from the world, lost to his kind, marooned
upon a bleak, inhospitable island in an ocean of sand. The few men
whom he met upon the sun-baked street eyed him with an indifference
which was worse than actual hostility. When he spoke they nodded
briefly and passed on. It was clear that if he looked upon them as aliens,
they looked upon him as a being with whom and whose class they had
nothing in common, no desire to have anything in common. For a
moment his good nature died down before a flash of anger that these
beings, with little, circumscribed existences, should feel and manifest
toward him the same degree of contempt that he, a visitor from a higher
plane of life, experienced toward them. But in Greek Conniston good
humor was a habit, and it returned as he assured himself that what these
desert-dwellers felt was worth only his amusement.
At the store he bought some tobacco for his pipe and engaged the
storekeeper in trifling conversation. The talk was desultory and for the
most part led nowhere. But the little, brown, wizened old man,
contemplatively chewing his tobacco like a gentle cow ruminating over
her cud, answered what scattering questions Conniston put to him. The
young man learned that the town took its name from the stream which
crept rather than ran through it to spread out on the thirsty sands a few
miles to the north, where it was absorbed by them. That the creek came
from the hills to the south, and from the mountains beyond them. When
one crossed the brown hills he came to the Half Moon country and into
a land of many wide-reaching cattle-ranges.

"I saw a team drive out that way after the train came in," said
Conniston, carelessly. "Headed for one of the cattle-ranges, I suppose?"
The old man spat and nodded, wiping his scanty gray beard with his
hand.
"That was Joe from the Half Moon. Took the ol' man's girl out."
"I did see a young lady with him. She lives out there?"
"Uh-uh." The old man got up to wait upon a customer, a cowboy, from
the loose, shaggy black "chaps," the knotted neck handkerchief, the
clanking spurs and heavy, black-handled Colt revolver at his hip. He
bought large quantities of smoking-tobacco and brown cigarette-papers,
"swapped the news" with the storekeeper, and clanked his way across
to the saloon. He did not appear to have seen Conniston.
"The girl's father run a cattle-range out there?"
"Uh-uh. The Half Moon an' three or four smaller ranges. He's old man
Crawford--p'r'aps you've heard on him?"
Conniston shook his head, suppressing a smile.
"I don't think I have. Far out to his place?"
"Oh, it ain't bad. Let's see. It's fifty mile to the hills, an' he's about forty
mile fu'ther on." He stopped for a brief mental calculation. "That makes
it about ninety mile, huh?"
"How does a man get out there? A narrow-gauge running from
somewhere along the main line?"
"Darn narrow, stranger. You can walk if you're strong for that kind of
exercise. Mos' folks rides. Goin' out?"
"It's rather a long walk," Conniston evaded. And shortly afterward,
hearing a clanging bell up the street in the direction of the hotel, he
strolled away to his dinner.

He found Hapgood scowling into his high-ball glass and dragged him
away to the little dining-room. Both the tables were set. At one of them
the cowboy whom he had seen at the store was already eating with two
of his companions. Conniston and Hapgood were shown to