did not appease the long hunger of their lean years in shifting railroad camps. He was a wise man who left his money behind him when he visited Drumwell, but wise men were few in that time where vice displayed its glittering lure, as they are wanting under the same conditions in this.
At the time of these doings Drumwell was an unlovely hamlet of one street, and that not a long one, which took its beginning from the railroad station, as such towns always have their beginning at the railroad and their ending where unrealized expectations desert them and leave them empty, like an eggshell dropped by a crow when he has sucked it dry. There was always the noise of cattle in it, the smell of cattle, the drift of dust from moving herds.
Drumwell had been fulfilling its primarily useful mission as a loading point for cattle five or six years when the events to be recorded here were shaken out of the handbag of adventure. Its little houses, mainly unpainted, were beginning by this time to appear pitch-drawn, gray; their vertical planking warped by the sun. A few rods back from the railroad the town presented its front, which was assuring to a stranger, the Windsor Hotel on one hand, the Drumwell State Bank on the other.
The hotel was one of the painted exceptions in the town. To be exact, it had been primed for painting, the work stopping there, whether through lack of paint or loss of painter nobody of record ever was curious enough to inquire. This white priming had a streaked appearance where it had been absorbed in places by the softer wood, giving the effect of antiquity so much strived after in
