“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.