the joke in his way, with his unavoidable vulgarisms, taking credit for it as originating out of his own cogitations and profound horse sense.
As Hall rode through town, heading into the sunset, groups of lesser humorists whose standing in the community was not sufficient to give them any credence for originality, were smoking their after-supper pipes and having their laugh over this funniest thing that ever happened in that famously funny town. These waved friendly greetings as Hall trotted by. The women and children had caught the point of the tremendous joke; trills of laughter sounded from groups of them as they stood talking over fences, many of them looking up to flip little greetings as the railroad doctor rode by, his horse's feet plopping up little spurts of dust.
Hall rode on, passing the gray sod house with its blinded windows, a gust of sadness, a pang of loneliness, bending down his spirits like snow upon a bough. He stopped at the crest of a hill, miles beyond Damascus, when dusk was deepening. The sun had gone down in clouds; there was a range of them, standing across the background of that shadowy, gray land, the rosy afterglow on their summits, cold, deep canyons on their nearer side, where lightning leaped, so far away across the sweep of unobstructed plain their thunder was not even a murmur in the silence of sinking day.
Back there the town lights were twinkling from the windows. There were so many more of them, he reflected, than when he came to the country west of Dodge only a little while ago. It seemed as if the seed of light must have been blown up by the southwest wind, and sown on the naked prairie. Those people had been
