"All you need, Tom," he said, "to make the thing complete, is a drawbridge and a moat. The possibilities are great in the light of modern improvements in such things. An electric drawbridge, operated solely by switches and buttons, would be worth while." The folly of man seems to express itself naturally in the habitations which he builds for himself; the folly of Tom Poindexter had been of huge dimensions and he had built a fairly permanent monument to it. He and his associates began with an ambition to give tone to the cattle business, and if novel ideas could have saved them, they would not have failed. One of their happy notions was to use Poindexter's coat of arms as a brand, and this was only abandoned when their foreman declared that no calf so elaborately marked could live. They finally devised an insignium consisting of the Greek Omega in a circle of stars.
"There's a remnant of the Poindexter herd out there somewhere," Wheaton had said to Saxton. "The fellow Snyder, that I put in as a caretaker, ought to have gathered up the loose cattle by this time; that's what I told him to do when I put him there."
Saxton turned and looked out over the rolling plain. A few rods away lay the river, and where it curved nearest the house stood a group of cottonwoods, like sentinels drawn together for colloquy. Scattered here and there over the plain were straggling herds. On a far crest of the rolling pastures a lonely horseman paused, sharply outlined for a moment against the sky; in another direction, a blur drew his eyes to where a group of the black Polled Angus cattle grazed, giving the one blot of deep color to the plain.
Snyder reappeared, and Saxton followed him into the house.
"It isn't haunted or anything like that?" John asked, glancing over the long hall.
"No. They have a joke about that at Great River. They say the only reason is that there ain't any idiot ghosts."
There was much in the place to appeal to Saxton's quiet humor. The house was two stories high and there was a great hall, with an immense fireplace at one end. The sleeping rooms opened on a gallery above the hall. An effort had been made to give the house the appearance of Western wildness by introducing a great abundance of skins of wild beasts,—a highly dishonest bit of decorating, for they had been bought in Chicago. How else, indeed, would skins of German boars and Polar bears be found in a ranch house on the Platte River! Under one wing of the stairway, which divided to left and right at the center of the hall, was the dining-room; under the other was the ranch office.
"Those fellows thought a good deal of their stomachs," said Snyder, as Saxton opened and shut the empty drawers of the sideboard, which had been built into one end of the western wall of the room, in such a manner that a pane of glass, instead of a mirror, filled the center. The intention of this was obviously to utilize the sunset for decorative purposes, and Saxton chuckled as he comprehended the idea.
"I suppose our mortgage covers the sunset, too," he said. Nearly every portable thing of value had been removed, and evidently in haste; but the heavy oak chairs and the table remained. Snyder did his own modest cooking in the kitchen, which was in great disorder. The floor of the office was littered with scraps of paper. The original tenants had evidently made a quick settlement of their business affairs before leaving. Snyder slept here; his blanket lay in a heap on the long bench that was built into one side of the room, and a battered valise otherwise marked it as his lodging place. Saxton viewed the room with disgust; it was more like a kennel than a bedroom. His foot struck something on the floor; it was a silver letter-seal bearing the peculiar Poindexter brand, and he thrust it into his pocket with a laugh.