p. 34He got down to the ground, yawned again, and opened a gold cigarette case which he offered to Brainard,—“Have one?”

p. 34

Brainard took one of the monogrammed cigarettes, and they sauntered together in the sunlight.

“Yes, sir,” his new acquaintance continued, “they sure did have a lively time. The greasers were over there on the siding in their cars, and they just let go at ’em with their guns. Now and then they’d hit the station, for fun, you know. I guess maybe you can see the holes yet.”

The young man pointed up at some scars among the shingles and a broken window in the upper story. “Sure enough they left their marks!”

“What did they do to ’em?” Brainard asked naïvely, as they returned to the car when the conductor droned “all aboard.”

“Who?” the stranger asked. “The police?”

He waved a hand at the desolate stretch of sage brush backed by grim mountains and laughed. As the train moved off, he added, “Lord, I don’t know! They were still popping when my train pulled out. There weren’t many greasers fit to work in the mines. What was left after the reception must have walked home—a long ways.”

Brainard was somewhat impressed with the p. 35possibilities of a country that could offer such a scrap, en passant, so to speak. The stranger invited him into his room and gave him another cigarette.

p. 35

“From New York?” he inquired. “Not a bad sort of place,” he observed tolerantly. “Ever been on the Coast? You’ve something to see.”

“How is San Francisco since the earthquake?” Brainard inquired, thinking to come cautiously and guardedly to the topic of Krutzmacht.

“It’s all there and more than ever,” the stranger cheerily responded. “You won’t find any large cracks,” he jested.

“It’s queer that you all went straight back to the same ground and built over again.”

“Why? It was home, wasn’t it? Folks always have a feeling for the place they’ve lived in, even if it has disadvantages. It’s only human!”

Brainard reflected that this was a sentimental point of view he should hardly have expected from the practical sort of man opposite him. In the 

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