Along it, here and there, like kernels of seed scattered on
fallow ground, a sprinkling of one-story houses. This the background. In
the midst of it all, covering his lawn, overflowing into the yards of
his neighbours, dense, crowding the better to see, all-surrounding, was
a solid zone of motley humanity. Old men with weather-beaten faces and
untrimmed beards were there, young men with the marks that dissipation
and passion indelibly stamp, awkward, gawky youths unconsciously aping
their elders, smooth-faced youngsters in outgrown garments; all ages and
conditions of the human frontier male were there--but in that zone not a
single woman. Ranchers there were in corduroys and denims, cowboys in
buckskin and flannel, gamblers in the glaring colours distinctive of
their kind, business men with closely cropped moustaches, idlers in
anything and everything; but amid them all not a friendly face. This the
surrounding zone, the mongrel pack that had brought the quarry to bay.
In the centre of the half circle they formed, within a couple of paces
of the now open doorway, were three people. Two of them, a rather small
brown girl and a tall wiry Indian in a new suit of ready-made clothes
and a derby hat of the model of the year before, were nearest; so near
that the door, which swung outward, all but touched them. The other, a
well-built, smooth-faced Easterner with a white skin and delicate hands,
was opposite.
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