Greek nodded.

“It’s devilish the way my luck’s gone lately,” grumbled Roger.  “I don’t know when I can ever pay—­”

Greek put up his hand swiftly.

“You don’t pay at all,” he said, emphatically.  “This is my treat.  It was mighty decent of you to drop everything and come along with me into this d——­d exile.  And,” he finished, easily, “I’ll have more money than I’ll know what to do with when the old man gets soft-hearted again.”

“He’s d——­d hard on you, Greek.  He’s got more—­”

“Oh, I don’t know.”  Greek laughed again.  “He’s a good sort, and we get along first rate together.  Only he’s got some infernally uncomfortable ideas about a man going to work and doing something for himself in this little old vale of tears.  He shaves himself five times out of six, and I’ve seen him black his own boots!” He chuckled amusedly.  “Just to show people he can, you know.”

Roger shook his head and applied himself to his glass, failing to see the humor of the thing.  And while the bigger man continued to muse with twinkling eyes over the idiosyncrasies of an enormously wealthy but at the same time enormously hard-headed father, with old-fashioned ideas of the dignity of labor, Roger sat frowning into his glass.

The silence, into which the click of the rails below had entered so persistently as to become a part of it rather than to disturb it, was broken at last by the clamorous screaming of the engine.  The train was slackening its speed.  Greek flipped up the shade and looked out.

“Another one of those toy villages,” he called over his shoulder.  “Who in the devil would want to get off here?”

Roger sank a trifle deeper into his chair, indicating no interest.  The fat man had dropped his newspaper to the floor and was leaning out the window.

“Great country, ain’t it?” he called to Greek.

“Yes, it certainly ain’t!  What gets me is, why do people live in a place like this?  Are they all crazy?”

The train now was jerking and bumping to a standstill.  Sixty yards away was a little, bluish-gray frame building, by far the most pretentious of the clutter of shacks, flaunting the legend, “Prairie City.”  Beyond the station was the to-be-expected general store and post-office.  A bit farther on a saloon.  Beyond that another, and then straggling at intervals a dozen rough, rambling, one-storied board houses.  For miles in all directions the desert stretched dry and barren.  The faces of women and children peered out of windows, the forms of roughly garbed men lounged in the doorways of the store and the saloons.  All the denizens of Prairie City manifested a mild interest in the arrival of Number 1.

“I guess you called the turn,” sputtered the fat man.  “Here come the crazy folks now!”

A cloud of dust swirling higher and higher in the still air, the clatter of hoofs, and two horses swept around the farthest house, carrying their riders at breakneck speed into the one and only street.  At first Greek took it to be a race, and then he thought it a runaway.  As it was the first interesting incident since Grand Central Station had dropped out of sight four days ago, he craned his neck to watch.