Whenever one comes upon a town, such as Damascus was in those days, such as others of its type are even now in the less-trodden spaces beyond, let him look for the reason of it instead of vexing his imagination. For there never was a town without a reason, let both town and reason be as inconsequential as next to nothing at all. A town cannot live upon itself: there must be somebody around to come for supplies to its stores, to claim the letters in its post office, to stand horses at its swaybacked hitching-racks.
There was a reason for Damascus by the Arkansas, therefore, although it doubtless seemed remote and perplexing to those who passed by railroad train through that vast gray plain of western Kansas, tipping upward toward the sky. As you shall see in its time and place.
Damascus seemed only the seed of a town in those days, a seed blown far from its parent plant upon the straining winds which never ceased sounding in the ears day nor night; a seed that had sprouted weakly and languished for the need of rain. Here the Arkansas River came down from its mountain beginnings, as clear in the summer days as the sunlight that struck through it, revealing the ripples of its shallow bars. Flat upon the landscape it seemed to lie, as it seems yet to lie, as it will appear to the stranger who sees it for the first time as
