There were two breakfasts served in the Occidental Hotel, which, dilapidated and weather-scarred, stands at the foot of the unpaved street of a desolate little town beside the railroad track. Most men commence their work early in the prairie country, so the first meal was laid at six; but there was another from eight to nine when a train came in. This was a somewhat unusual concession to the needs of the few passengers who alighted there, because throughout most of the Northwest no self-respecting hotel cook would prepare a meal out of the fixed hours, not even for a cabinet minister or a railroad director. Nor would the proprietor vary a dish, for in his estimation what suffices the plainsman is quite good enough for anybody else. The table had just been cleared when a small and select company of men who had nothing in particular to do pulled their chairs up to the stove, on which as many of them as could find room put their feet. It had not been lighted that morning, or black-leaded for many days, but habit was strong in them. There are, even in countries where most men are hard workers, a few who spend their lives lounging on hotel verandahs and sitting round the stove. Nobody unused to it would, in all probability, have cared to linger there, for there are few places of entertainment so wholly desolate and uninviting as the general room of the average prairie hotel. Its walls were obviously made of dressed boards, and had even borne a coat of paint at one time; but they were bare and dirty now. Two lonely German oleographs of more than usually barbaric type hung on rusty nails. Cigar-ends and burnt matches littered the uncarpeted floor. Benches without backs to them ran along either side of the uncovered table. The rest of the furniture consisted of the rusty stove and a few chairs, which the loungers monopolised. Two of the group wore store-clothing, with trousers so tight that one wondered how they ever got them on, and two wore blue jean in sad need of patching. They had rough, dark faces, relieved by no sign of amiability or unusual intelligence; but they could talk. Loafers and tramps usually can. Outside the open window, bright sunshine flooded the verandah, and fell upon the bare frame-houses across the way. A couple of light waggons, with the mire of the spring thawing not yet washed off them, passed clattering and jolting among the ruts. The streets of a prairie town usually resemble a morass when the frost breaks up. When they had gone, a police trooper swung by on a spume-flecked horse, with the dust of several leagues' journey thick on his trim uniform. Then there was silence again until one of the loungers looked up from the greasy paper he was reading. "Wheat still going down," he said. "There's no bottom to the market, or, if it had one, it's dropped out. Our boss farmers are going to feel it if things go on like this; but nobody's going to be sorry for them. They figure they own the country already."