Starting early the next morning, they reached Sweetwater after an uneventful journey, and found it by no means an attractive place. South of it, rolling prairie ran back, grayish white with withered grass, to the skyline; to the north, straggling poplar bluffs and scattered Jack-pines crowned the summits of the ridges. A lake gleamed in a hollow, a slow creek wound across the foreground in a deep ravine, and here and there in the distance was an outlying farm. A row of houses followed the crest of the ravine, some built of small logs, and some of shiplap lumber which had cracked with exposure to the sun, but all having a neglected and poverty-stricken air. The land was poor and the settlement was located too far from a market. With leaden thunderclouds hanging over it, the place looked as desolate as the sad-colored waste.
Following the deeply rutted street, which had a narrow, plank sidewalk, they reached the Imperial Hotel—a somewhat pretentious, double-storied building of unpainted wood, with a veranda across the front. Here Gardner took the pony from them and gave them a room which had no furniture except a chair and two rickety iron beds. Before he left them he indicated a printed list of the things they were not allowed to do. Harding studied it with a sardonic smile.
"I don't see much use in prohibiting people from washing their clothes in the bedrooms when they don't give you any water," he remarked. "This place must be about the limit in the way of cheap hotels."
"It isn't cheap," responded Blake; "I've seen the tariff."
They found their supper better than they had reason to expect, and afterward sat out on the veranda with the proprietor and one or two of the settlers who boarded at the hotel. The sun had set, and now and then a heavy shower beat upon the shingled roof, but the western sky was clear and flushed with vivid crimson, toward which the prairie rolled away in varying tones of blue. Lights shone in the windows behind the veranda, and from one which stood open a hoarse voice drifted out, singing in a maudlin fashion snatches of an old music-hall ditty.
"It's that fool Benson—Clarke's Englishman," Gardner explained. "Found he'd got into my bed with his boots on, after falling down in a muskeg. It's not the first time he's played that trick; when he gets worse than usual he makes straight for my room."
"Why do you give him the liquor?" Harding inquired.
"I don't. He's a pretty regular customer, but he never gets too much at this hotel."
"And there isn't another."
"That's so," Gardner assented, but he offered no explanation and Blake changed the subject.