Claim Number One

by George W. Ogden

But he couldn’t tell who went on the train, the stage, or the wagon. It was none of his business, he said. They paid their bill; that was all he knew, or cared.

“May I take a look around the tent to see if they left any written word for me there?” the doctor requested.

“Go on,” said the woman, a little softening of sympathy coming into her hard eyes.

Dr. Slavens went back to the tent, which stood as it had been left that morning when the last of the party went away. The canvas under which their table stood stretched there hospitably still, and the stove with the morning’s ashes cold upon its little hearth. Inside, the cots were all in place, but there was not a line of writing from any friendly hand to tell him where they had gone, or where his property had been left.

He walked toward the business part of the town and turned down Main Street, considering with himself what turn to make next. His head bent in meditation, he passed along lamely, his hands in the pockets of his torn trousers, where there was nothing, not even the thickness of a dime, to cramp his finger-room. Pausing 146 in the aimless way of one who has no unfinished business ahead of him, he looked around, marking the changes which had come upon the street during those few days.

The litter of broken camp was on every hand; broken barrels, piles of boxes, scattered straw, bottles sown as thickly upon the ground as if someone had planted them there in the expectation of reaping a harvest of malt liquors and ardent spirits. Here the depression of a few inches marked where a tent had stood, the earth where the walls had protected it from the beating feet showing a little higher all around; there in the soft ground was the mark of a bar, the vapors of spilled liquors rising sharply in the sun.

Bands of boys and camp-dregs, of whom he might have been one from his appearance, scraped and dug among the débris, searching for what might have been dropped from careless or drunken hands and trampled out of sight. That they were rewarded frequently was attested by the sharp exclamations and triumphant cries.

Across from where he stood was the site of a large place, its littered leavings either already worked over or not yet touched. No one scratched and peered among its trash-heaps or clawed over its reeking straw. Dr. Slavens took possession of the place, turning the loose earth and heaped accumulations with his feet as he rooted around like a swine. It must have been worked over and exhausted, he concluded, for it turned 147 no glint of silver to the sun. Persisting, he worked across the space which the tent had covered, and sat down on a box to rest.

The sun was low; the tops of two tall, round tents across the way came between it and his eyes when he sat down. That was the luck of some people, thought he, to arrive too late. The pay-dirt was all worked out; the pasturage was cropped; the dry sage was all gathered and burned.

No matter. A man had but one moment of life to call his own, wrote Marcus Aurelius. The moment just passed into the score of time’s count, the moment which the hand of the clock trembles over, a hair’s breadth yet to go–these are no man’s to claim. One is gone forever; the other may mark the passing of his soul. Only this moment, this throb of the heart, this half-drawn breath, is a living man’s to claim. The beggar has it; the monarch can command no more. Poor as he was, Dr. Slavens thought, smiling as he worked his foot, into the trampled dust, he was as rich in life’s allotment as the best.