And into Clark’s Ford one July evening Rock Holloway rode alone, on the same sorrel horse, one of his own private mounts, that had stepped light-footedly in the dust of a Fort Worth street that spring. For weeks he had faced the dip and roll and flatness of plains as bare as the seas Columbus faced when he crossed the Western ocean. Ride, eat, sleep, and ride again, in the dust of eight thousand hoofs, on that pilgrimage from the Rio Grande to the forty-ninth parallel, across silent leagues of grass, from which the bison had but lately vanished, and where the Indian had not yet forgotten how to take a white man’s scalp.
So Rock, who had nothing much on his mind but a Stetson hat, rode into Clark’s Ford. Little sinks of iniquity like this were not new in his experience. He was too sensible to take a moral attitude. They were not, with their gaudy activities, much to his taste, but they supplied a want. He didn’t drink much at any time, preferring poker for pastime, and he had been known to wander about for hours in the midst of cow-town hilarity doing nothing but watch his fellows make merry.
Clark’s Ford numbered scarcely a dozen buildings. One general store, one blacksmith shop, one combined saloon and dance hall. A gaunt boarding house purveyed food and sleeping quarters to clerks, gamblers, bartenders, and transients. Clark’s Ford was little more than a camp, a mushroom growth with neither a past nor a future.
It was not a place that Ben Clark would have been proud to bear his name. If it catered in some measure to the legitimate necessities of these Argonauts of the plains, it likewise battened on their weaknesses. Cattlemen and their riders had few illusions about such places, except in moments of alcoholic exaltation. They were tolerant of them, that was all, because they were centers of human contact, in the midst of an unpeopled wilderness.
It was a dreary place in the glare of day. Sagebrush flowed to the very doors—gray—monotonously gray. A river, with a dozen channels plowed by the spring floods in its yellow sands, slunk at the feet of Clark’s Ford. For a mile about no green thing flourished. Only the tough sagebrush defied obliteration under the trampling hoofs that passed in myriads. That valley had yet to become verdant under irrigation canals. Even the red brother shunned it in bygone days except when the buffalo herds passed that way. The cattleman would have shunned it if he could. But the herds focused at this point, but, once across, they radiated like the spokes of a wheel to pleasanter ranges farther north, where grass waved like fields of ripe wheat; where clear streams flowed in gravelly beds, and now and then a man’s eye would be gladdened by a tree.
But at night Clark’s Ford shook off its daytime somnolence, shrouded itself in the dusky mantle of night and decked itself with yellow jewels. Night and lamps! There is magic in those two. A pianist and a fiddler strummed in the dance hall. The women glowed in silk and satin and smiled their mechanical smiles. Within, the light softened hard faces, struck glints from glass, and spread over green-topped tables, the racked silver and gold behind the games, and the multicolored poker chips. A man could get action there. Seldom any one paused outside those doors, behind which the piano tinkled, and the fiddle wailed, and the voices of men and women were pitched a little above the normal key.
Rock paused now, after he had swung down from his horse. He stared up at the sky, the inverted bowl of the Persian poet, studded with stars. He looked absently upward, the fingers of one hand tangled in Sangre’s mane. Perhaps he studied the stars in their courses. Perhaps he saw something invisible save to the imaginative eye, off in that calm, obscuring night. And then he shrugged his shoulders, gave his gun belt a hitch, and walked into the Odeon. Why the exploiter of Clark’s Ford bestowed on a tin-pot dance hall a name that derived from ancient Greek through modern French, Heaven only knows. Perhaps that was what made Rock smile, as he noted the name painted in white on a door illuminated by a hung lantern. He had a way of noting such things.
A bar ranged along one side of the Odeon. A low platform lifted against the opposite wall, where the two musicians played, and now and then a woman sang the sentimental ballads of the period. A clear space in the middle was left for dancing. One side was set with pine tables and chairs. The other wall made a backstop for gambling paraphernalia, operated by bored men with impassive faces, who dealt for the house and watched winning or losing with equal indifference.