Claim Number One

by George W. Ogden

It was due to Sergeant Jake Schaefer that the company organized to mess together. The hotel representative fell in with the idea with great warmth. There was a large tent on the corner, just off Main Street, which the company could rent, said he. A partition would be put in it for the privacy of the ladies, and the hotel would supply the guests with a stove and utensils. June’s mother liked the notion. It relieved her of a great worry, for with a stove of her own she could still contrive those dainties so necessary to the continued existence of the delicate child.

So the bargain was struck, the sergeant was placed in charge of the conduct and supply of the camp, and everybody breathed easier. They had anticipated difficulty over the matter of lodging and food in Comanche, for wild tales of extortion and crowding, and undesirable conditions generally, had been traveling through the train all day.

Comanche was quiet when the train arrived, for that was the part of the day when the lull between the 19 afternoon’s activities and the night’s frantic reaping fell. Everyone who had arrived the day previous accounted himself an old-timer, and all such, together with all the arrivals of all the days since the registration began, came down to see the tenderfeet swallow their first impressions of the coming Eden.

The Hotel Metropole was the only public house in Comanche that maintained a conveyance to meet travelers at the station, and that was for the transportation of their baggage only. For a man will follow his belongings and stick to them in one place as well as another, and the proprietor of the Metropole was philosopher enough to know that. So his men with the wagon grabbed all the baggage they could wrench from, lift from under, or pry out of the grasp of travelers when they stepped off the train.

The June party saw their possessions loaded into the wagon, under the loud supervision of Sergeant Schaefer, who had been in that country before and could be neither intimidated, out-sounded, nor bluffed. Then, following their traveling agent-guide, they pushed through the crowds to their quarters.

Fortunate, indeed, they considered themselves when they saw how matters stood in Comanche. There seemed to be two men for every cot in the place. Of women there were few, and June’s mother shuddered when she thought of what they would have been obliged to face if they hadn’t been so lucky as to get a tent to themselves.

“I never would have got off that train!” she declared. “No, I never would have brought my daughter into any such unprotected place as this!”

Mrs. Reed looked around her severely, for life was starting to lift its head again in Comanche after the oppression of the afternoon’s heat.

Mrs. Mann smiled. She was beginning to take a comprehensive account of the distance between Wyoming and the town near Boston where the miller toiled in the gloom of his mill.

“I think it’s perfectly lovely and romantic!” said she.