URSULA prided itself on its progressiveness. It was a pretty town, the best in the valley, perhaps in the state. It had paved streets, a park, a great stone school house, even a Zoo, (Tom McNair had roped and brought in the two, bear cubs in their cage.) It had a flour mill, a beet sugar factory, and a hospital.
Its streets bustled with activity. Twenty-one, going North, disgorged traveling salesmen with sample cases, and twenty-two South picked them up again. The outlying ranches fed it and in their turn were fed by it. It even had a social life of no mean order, and in the winter twenty-one South or twenty-two North picked up the wealthier of its inhabitants and stowed them in lowers or drawing rooms and carried them away from the bitter cold.
The conductors on the railroad knew them all.
"I see it's Pasadena this year this time!"
"Yep. Tried New York last year but didn't like it much. Too crowded."
But Ursula was like the smaller towns along the track. It had no environs. Where it ended the back country began. One could leave its paved streets, its comfortable houses with their gardens, climb a hill, descend again and, as Bessie would certainly not have put it, be alone with God.
On the second day following the Fair Clare Hamel stood behind a counter in Dicer's Emporium. She was near the door. Across the street the setting sun shone brilliantly into the one broad window of the Martin House, with its five worn leather chairs behind it and the old brass bar-rail now fastened beneath it, to keep—hopefully—the sitters' feet from the window sill. Beside it was the National Drug Store, once her father's professional stand and known then as the Last Chance saloon; and beyond that again the Zenith barber shop.
