CHAPTER IV AT POINDEXTER'S
John Saxton trotted his pony through a broken gate into a great yard that had once been sown in blue grass, and at the center of which lay the crumbled ruins of a fountain. This was clearly no ordinary establishment, as he had been warned, and he was uncertain how to hail it. However, before he could make his presence known, a frowsy man in corduroy emerged from the great front door and came toward him.
"My name's Saxton, and you must be Snyder."
"Correct," said the man and they shook hands.
"Going to stay a while?"
"A day or two." John threw down the slicker in which he had wrapped a few articles from his bag at Great River, the nearest railway station.
"I got your letter all right," said Snyder. "Walk in and help yourself." He led the pony toward the outbuildings, while Saxton filled his pipe and viewed the pile before him with interest. He had been making a careful inspection of all the properties that had fallen to his care. This had necessitated a good deal of traveling. He had begun in Colorado and worked eastward, going slowly, and getting the best advice obtainable as to the value of his principals' holdings. Much of their property was practically worthless. Title had been gained under foreclosure to vast areas which had no value. A waterworks plant stood in the prairie where there had once been a Kansas town. The place was depopulated and the smokestack stood as a monument to blighted hopes. Ranch houses were inhabited by squatters, who had not been on his books at all, and who paid no tribute to Boston. He was viewed with suspicion by these tenants, and on inquiry at the county seats, he found generally that they were lawless men, and that it would be better for him to let them alone. It was patent that they would not pay rent, and to eject them merely in the maintenance of a principle involved useless expense and violence.
"This certainly beats them all," Saxton muttered aloud.
He had reached in his itinerary what his papers called the Poindexter property. He had found that the place was famous throughout this part of the country for the idiosyncrasies of its sometime owners, three young men who had come out of the East to show how the cattle business should be managed. They had secured an immense acreage and built a stone ranch house whose curious architecture imparted to the Platte Valley a touch of medievalism that was little appreciated by the neighboring cattlemen. One of the owners, a Philadelphian named Poindexter, who had a weakness for architecture and had studied the subject briefly at his university, contributed the buildings and his two associates bought the cattle. There were one thousand acres of rolling pasture here, much of it lying along the river, and a practical man could hardly have failed to succeed; but theft, disease in the herd and inexperience in buying and selling, had wrought the ranchmen's destruction. Before their money was exhausted, Poindexter and his associates lived in considerable state, and entertained the friends who came to see them according to the best usages of Eastern country life within, and their own mild approximation of Western life without. Tom Poindexter's preceptor in architecture, an elderly gentleman with a sense of humor, had found a pleasure which he hardly dared to express in the medieval tone of the house and buildings.