There was no pretence at order or regularity in the shacks that served as dwellings and business houses. It seemed as though they had been built wherever the traveler had dropped his pack. There was one main street, a long, straggling, crooked thoroughfare, from which a number of smaller streets branched off here and there at irregular intervals. The houses were of the rudest description. Two or three men and one day would have sufficed to build most of them. Many of them were of the one-story type with one or two rooms and earth floors. Others, more pretentious, had two stories, the lower part occupied for business purposes and the upper floor as a residence. Let the mere tail-end of a Texas norther come along and they would all have been leveled to the ground like a pack of cards.
Most of the “business” houses were saloons and dance halls. The prohibition law was largely a dead letter as far as Copperhead was concerned. From almost every door the young men passed came the rattle of dice and the clink of bottle against glass, the wheeze of an old accordion or raucous jazz music from a phonograph.
Through the main street passed an almost endless column of wide-wheeled trucks with tugging horses straining in the harness, the trucks themselves loaded with iron casings, and, some of them, with red flags at the back, carrying enough nitro-glycerine to blow the town sky-high in the event of a collision. Weaving in and out of these were dusty automobiles, mule carts driven by negroes, “buggies,” every kind of conveyance, some of them looking as though they dated back to Revolutionary times. Other vehicles were parked in rows about saloons, on the front porches of which loungers sat in tipped-back chairs.
And derricks! There were derricks everywhere, some of them in the town itself, in back yards where the precious fluid had been discovered. Some of the buildings were plastered with oil that had spattered against them in a black flood when a strike had been made. And all about the town for as far as the eye could reach rose a multitude of derricks in a perfect forest, towering, some of them, to the height of eighty or a hundred feet.
Through the roughly dressed multitudes that thronged the principal street, Tom and Ned threaded their way. Airplanes had become common in that locality, and no one paid any especial attention to the aviator suits in which the youths were clad. There was little choice as to restaurants. None of them was good, and it was only a question of which was the least bad. Even this could not be determined at a glance, and the lads finally entered one that seemed to be at least no worse than the others.
Nor was there much choice as to food. The rough-looking waiter in a dirty apron told them they could have corned beef and cabbage or ham and eggs. They ordered the latter, which soon made their appearance, accompanied by cups of weak, muddy coffee. Then, while they ate, they looked curiously about them.
The restaurant, like all others in the town, was only an adjunct to a saloon, and the sale of drinks was much more profitable than that of food. Before the bar a long line of the thirsty stood.
Suddenly Ned nudged Tom.
“Look who’s here,” he whispered.