"Welcome to Columbina!" cried Andy jestingly. "Some big city, I must declare. I wonder where the Waldorf-Vanderbilt Hotel is located?"
"What's the matter with going to the Ritz-Copley Square?" added his twin, with a grin.
"Perhaps we'll be thankful to get any kind of a shake-down, boys," announced Dick Rover. "This certainly is worse than I anticipated, although I knew that we couldn't expect much in one of these boom towns."
To a newcomer Columbina certainly offered no special attractions. Only a few years before it had been nothing but a point where the ranchmen had shipped their steers on the railroad, with a tiny stockyard and a small ranchmen's hotel and saloon combined. Now the boom city, if such it might be called, consisted of a long straggling main street with a much dilapidated boardwalk on one side only. In the middle of the street the mud was all of a foot deep, and through this wagons and automobiles plowed along as best they could. All of the buildings were of wood, and none of them more than three stories in height. There were half a dozen general stores, the same number of eating and drinking places, and two buildings which were designated as hotels, O'Brian's being one and Smedley's the other. There was also a long, shed-like moving picture theater advertised to be open twice a week, in the evening.
"I was advised by a man on the train to try the Smedley Hotel first," said Dick Rover. "He thought I'd find a better class of people there than at the O'Brian place. Wait till I ask the station master where the hotel is located."
"You can't miss it," said the station man, when applied to. "It's down at the end of that boardwalk. If you go any further you'll sink into mud up to your knees," and he smiled feebly.
"Any chance of our getting in there?"
"Just as good a chance as getting in anywhere. They tell me O'Brian's place is so full they're falling out of the windows," and the station master chuckled over his little joke.
"Anything in the way of a taxicab around here to take us and our baggage up there?"
"Taxicab? The last man to run a taxicab was Jim Lumpkins, and now Jim's struck oil and he's so rich he won't do nothing. If you want to get up to Smedley's I reckon you'll have to hoof it."