The superannuated politician from other states, who had worn out the patience of all his constituents at home, was here. There were Georgia colonels, Kentucky captains, with goatees or huge mustaches, and narrow, down hanging, black, string ties. There were judges, generals, old and _passés_, a conglomeration of ambition and proud failure, looking hopefully for another chance from Fate. To dispute with any one of them that his town would not have a hundred thousand inhabitants in a year meant gun play. Food was from the usual western lunch counter. Here every one swung himself to a tall stool and ate. Food was reduced largely to beefsteak, canned tomatoes, wet, soggy bread, and black creamless coffee. Night, in the towns, with the electric lights beating down upon dry sand, was hard and cruel and white. The business streets were one frame shack after another, each shack with an enormous front built up high to make it look imposing. One town’s most popular and crowded corner, was Reece Brothers’ Gambling House. Here roulette, faro, craps, stud poker, kept the restless crowd busy throughout the night. Of the Reece Brothers, Bill was what you would call the typical gambler, an ideal movie gambler of today. Grey-eyed, thin-lipped, with a mouth like a steel trap, at the ends of which there dangled a long, pointed, limp, corn-silk, yellow mustache. He wore a poetic Lord Byron collar, a flowing tie, a hugely plaided suit, and the largest and most expensive sombrero in town. This was a dry country because it was still under government control; an Indian country. Notwithstanding this fact, however, enormous amounts of liquor were sold openly over a regular bar. Sam Reece was of a deeply religious bent. When Sunday morning came, after his night shift at the faro table, as lookout, he put on his long, black Prince Albert, tall, silk-plush hat ten years out of date, worn black kid gloves with fancy stitching along the back, and looking like an undertaker at a dry convention, he took his stately way to church. The church was an oblong tent. It was unbearably hot in summer, and in winter of course there was no heat in it. Sam had various aspirations in life. His greatest aspiration was to sing solos in the choir. It was his one genuine pleasure. With night fall, the lonely little towns began to get busy. By eight o’clock the unpaved dusty streets were packed with a crowd of men and women milling back and forth, back and forth, from one gambling house to another. Many of these people back home were not gamblers, but church deacons, conservative business men, farmers, whom the loneliness forced to seek excitement or companionship. Any one from a corn doctor to an anarchist, could have a crowd of applauding listeners about him, if he mounted the empty sugar barrel which stood upon the Public Acre, and stood up to make a speech.