"I don't suppose anybody's sorry to see him go," Morgan said. "I think it's a good sign."
"They'll bury each other, as I told him, and they'll drug each other with mullein tea, as I told him the other day," Gray said, acrimoniously. "Yes, and they'll be eatin' each other before spring! I'd like to know what they're goin' to live on, the few that's left in this town—a little cow-punchin', a little clerkin' in the courthouse and gittin' jury and witness fees. That won't keep no town alive."
"Judge Thayer's got a big colonization project going that looks good, he says. If he puts it through things will begin to pick up."
"Them Mennonites, I guess. They ain't the kind of people a man wants to see come in here—whiskers all over 'em, never sell 'em a cake of shavin' soap or a razor from Christmas to doomsday. Them fellers don't shave, they never shave; they grow up from the cradle with whiskers all over 'em."
"They'll need horse liniment, and stuff like that."
"There might be a livin' here for a drug-store if settlers begun to come in," Gray admitted, picking up a little hope. "They say this sod gives off fevers and chills when it's broke up. Something poison in it."
Tom Conboy was on the sidewalk before his door, casting his eyes up and down the street as if on the lookout for somebody that owed him a bill. He was in bed when Morgan left the hotel on his early round, and there was a look about him still of fustiness and the cobwebs of sleep.
"If a man was to take a sack of meal and empty it, and spread the sack down flat, he'd have something like this man's town's got to be," Conboy complained. "Dead, not a breath left in it. I saw a couple of buzzards sailin' around over the square a while ago. I've been lookin' to see them light on the courthouse tower."
"It is a little quiet, but they all say it will begin to pick up in a day or two," Morgan prevaricated, with a view to reeling him out, having no other diversion.