CHAPTER VIII

THE SKELETON WITHIN THE CLOSET

Comparatively few men of cheerful outlook and social inclination attain the age of five and fifty without contracting superfluous avoirdupois and distinctive mannerism.  That Colonel William Landor was no exception to the first rule was proven by the wheezing effort with which he made his descent from the two-seated canvas-covered surrey in front of Bob Manning’s store, and, with a deftness born of experience, converted the free ends of the lines into hitch straps.  That the second premise held true was demonstrated ten seconds later in the unconscious grunt of soliloquy with which he greeted the sight of a wisp of black rag tacked above the knob of the door before him.

“Mourning, eh,” he commented to his listening ego.  “Looks like a strip of old Bob’s prayer-meeting trousers.”  He tried the entrance, found it locked, and in lieu of entering tested the badge of sorrow between thumb and finger.  “Pant stuff, sure enough,” he corroborated.  “It can’t be Bob himself, or they’d have needed these garments to lay him out in.  Now what in thunder, I wonder—­”

He glanced across the street at Slim Simpson’s eating house.  Like the general store, the door was closed, and just above the catch, flapping languidly in a rising prairie breeze, was the mate to the black rag dangling at his back.  The spectator’s shaggy eyebrows tightened in genuine surprise, and with near-sighted effort he inspected the fronts of the short row of other buildings along the street.

“Civilisation’s struck Coyote Centre good and proper, at last, evidently,” he commented.  “They’ll be having a bevel plate hearse with carved wood tassels and a coon driver next!” He halted, indecisive, and for the first time became conscious that not a human being was in sight.  In the street before him a pair of half-grown cockerels with ludicrously long legs and abbreviated tails were scratching a precarious living from amid the litter.  On the sunny expanse of sidewalk before Buck Walker’s meat market a long-eared mongrel lay stretched out luxuriously in the physical contentment of the subservient unmolested; but from one end of the single street to the other not a human being was in sight; save the present spectator, not a single disturber of the all-pervading quiet.  Landor had seen the spot where the town now stood when it was virgin prairie, had watched every building it boasted rise from the earth, had hitherto observed it through the gamut of its every mood from nocturnal recklessness to profoundest daybreak remorse; but as it was now with the sun nearing the meridian, deserted, dead—.