Everybody in Comanche who owned a tent was on the make, and the making was good. Many of the home-seekers and adventure-expectant young men and women had been on the ground two weeks. They had been paying out good money for dusty stage-rides over the promising lands which had been allotted to the Indians already by the government. The stage people didn't tell them anything about that, which was just as well. It looked like land where stuff might be grown with irrigation, inspiration, intensity of application, and undying hope. And the locaters and town-site boomers led their customers around to the hydrant and pointed to the sprouting oats. "Spill a little water on this land and it's got Egypt skinned," they said. So the mild adventurers stayed on for the drawing of claims, their ideals and notions taking on fresh color, their canned tomatoes (see the proper literature for the uses of canned tomatoes in desert countries frequented by cowboys) safely packed away in their trunks against a day of emergency. Every one of them expected to draw Claim Number One, and every one of them was under the spell of dreams. For the long summer days of Wyoming were as white as diamonds, and the soft blue mountains stood along the distant west beyond the bright river as if to fend the land from hardships and inclemencies, and nurture in its breast the hopes of men. Every train brought several hundred more to add to the throng already in Comanche--most of them from beyond the Mississippi, many of them schemers, most of them dreamers ready to sacrifice all the endearments of civilization for the romance of pioneering in the West, beyond the limits of the world as defined by the map of the railroad-line over which they had come. CHAPTER II GUESTS FOR THE METROPOLE To Comanche there came that August afternoon, when it was wearing down to long shadows, a mixed company, drawn from the far places and the middle distances east of Wyoming. This company had assembled in the course of the day's acquaintance on the last long, dusty run into the land of expectations. At dawn these people had left their comfortable sleeping-cars at Chadron, in the Nebraska desert, to change to the train of archaic coaches which transported the land-seekers across the last stretch of their journey. Before that morning the company had been pursuing its way as individual parts--all, that is, with the exception of the miller's wife, from near Boston; the sister of the miller's wife, who was a widow and the mother of June; and June, who was pasty and off-color, due to much fudge and polishing in a young ladies' school. These three traveled together, as three of such close relationship naturally should travel. The widow was taking June to Wyoming to see if she could put some marketable color in her cheeks, and the miller's wife was going along for a belated realization, at least partially, of youthful yearnings.