"No; not many of 'em down here knows it," he responded. "But up at Meander, at the barn, they know it. It's Phogenphole." "Oh!" "But if you don't like it," added Smith, speaking with great fervor, and leaning toward her a little eagerly and earnestly, "I'll have a bill put through the Legislature down at Cheyenne and change it!" They ate supper that evening by lantern-light, with the night noise of Comanche beginning to rise around them earlier than usual. Those who were there for the reaping realized that it would be their last big night, for on the morrow the drawing would fall. After the first day's numbers had been taken from the wheel at Meander, which would run up into the thousands, the waiting crowds would melt away from Comanche as fast as trains could carry them. So those who were on the make had both hands out in Comanche that night. They all wondered how it would turn out for them, the lumberman and the insurance agent--who had not been of the party that day in Smith's coach--offering to lay bets that nobody in the mess would draw a number below five hundred. There were no takers. Then they offered to bet that all in the mess would draw under five hundred. Mrs. Reed rebuked them for their gambling spirit, which, she said, was rampant in Comanche, like a plague. CHAPTER VI THE DRAWING As has been previously said, one must go fast and far to come to a place where there is neither a Hotel Metropole nor a newspaper. Doubtless there are communities of civilized men on the North American continent where there is neither, but Comanche was not one of them. In Comanche the paper was a daily. Its editor was a single-barreled grafter who wore a green mohair coat and dyed whiskers. His office and establishment occupied an entire twelve-by-sixteen tent; the name of the paper was _The Chieftain_. _The Chieftain_ had been one of the first enterprises of Comanche. It got there ahead of the first train, arriving in a wagon, fully equipped. The editor had an old zinc cut of a two-storied brick business house on a corner, which he had run with a grocery-store advertisement when he was getting out a paper in Tulsa, Oklahoma. This he now made use of with impressive effect and inspiring display of his cheerful confidence in his own future and that of the town where, like a blowing seed of cottonwood, he had found lodgment. He ran this cut in every issue at the top of what would have been his editorial column if there had been time for him to write one, with these words: FUTURE HOME OF _THE CHIEFTAIN_ ON THE CORNER THIS PAPER NOW OCCUPIES, AS DESIGNED BY THE EDITOR AND OWNER, J. WALTER MONG