The Trail Horde

by Charles Alden Seltzer

But there was a small river near the water tank—the headwaters of the Wolf—or there had been no tank. And a prophet of Business, noting certain natural advantages, had influenced the railroad company to build a corral and a station.

From that day Willets became assured of a future. Cattlemen in the Wolf River section began to ship stock from the new station, rather than drive to Red Rock—another shipping point five hundred miles east.

From the first it became evident that Willets would not be a boom town. It grew slowly and steadily until its fame began to trickle through to the outside world—though it was a cattle town in the beginning, and a cattle town it would remain all its days.

Therefore, because of its slow growth, there were old buildings in Willets. The frame station had an ancient appearance. Its roof sagged in the center, its walls were bulging with weakness. But it stood defiantly flaunting its crimson paint above the wooden platform, a hardy pioneer among the moderns.

Business had strayed from the railroad track; it had left the station, the freighthouse, the company corral, and some open sheds, to establish its enterprises one block southward. There, fringing a wide, unpaved street that ran east and west, parallel with the gleaming steel rails, Business reared its citadels.

Willets buildings were not imposing. One-story frames predominated, with here and there a two-storied structure, or a brick aristocrat seeming to call attention to its substantial solidity.

Willets had plenty of space in which to grow, and the location of the buildings on their sites, seemed to indicate that their builders appreciated the fact that there was no need for crowding. Between each building was space, suggestive of the unending plains that surrounded the town. Willets sat, serene in its space and solitude, unhurried, uncramped, sprawling over a stretch of grass level—a dingy, dirty, inglorious Willets, shamed by its fringe of tin cans, empty bottles, and other refuse—and by the clean sweep of sand and sage and grass that stretched to its very doors. For Willets was man-made.

From the second story of a brick building that stood on the southern side of the street, facing the station, Gary Warden could look past the red station into the empty corrals beside the railroad track. Jim Lefingwell, Warden's predecessor, had usually smiled when he saw the corral comfortably filled with steers. But Gary Warden smiled because the corral was empty.

Warden was standing beside a flat-topped desk at one of his office windows. Warden was big, though not massive. He seemed to have the frame of a tall, slender man, and had he stayed slender he might have carried his flesh gracefully. But Warden had lived well, denying himself nothing, and the flesh which had been added had formed in flabby bunches, drooping his shoulders, sagging his jaws, swelling the back of his neck.

And yet Warden was not old; he had told some new-made friends in Willets that he was thirty-five. But he looked older, for a certain blasé sophistication that shone from his eyes and sat on the curves of his lips, did much to create the impression of past maturity.