Just to be on a horse out in it over the prairie swells was to taste the flavour of adventure. But no such thing for me. I had to take care of the office. A thermometer inside that office marked one hundred and fourteen degrees. Had it been inside of me it would have marked three hundred and fourteen degrees. I shall not tell the series of injustices that obliged me to stay in that hencoop, while the rest of the force went gleefully up the line to attend a ball game. I didn't count for much, while the decision in regard to the one who stayed rested in the hands of Fate. It was the manager's own pack of cards I cut. I can recall the look of sophisticated astonishment those rascals wore at my persistent bad luck. I found out afterwards that every mother's son of them had bought his ticket the day before. They had faith in that pack of cards. Most of the town had gone with them; this accounted for the deserted village effect. Several days before this I sat up all night reading H. Rider Haggard's "She." The desire to figure in remarkable events had not yet worn off, but a more unlikely theatre of adventure than that Main Street could not be conceived. I looked up and down the length of it. Hark! What sound is that? 'T is the rattle of wheels, and the "plunkety-plunk" of a farm-horse's trot. Around the corner comes an ancient Studebaker waggon drawn by an old horse, and in it two small boys are seated on a bushel basket--hardly a crisis. I fell to envying the small boys, for all that. They could go and come as they pleased; they were their own masters, free to do as they liked in the world.