hummed, brawny cow-men, booted and spurred, lounged about, talking in
that odd but not unpleasant Western English that could almost be called
a dialect.

But it was not the Benton of the cow-men that I felt about me. It was
still for me the Benton of the fur trade and the steamboats and the gold
rush--my boyhood's Benton half-way to the moon--the ghost of a dead
town.

At Goodale I had sought a substantial town and found a visionary one. At
Benton I had sought a visionary town and found a substantial one.
Philosophy was plainly indicated as the proper thing. And, after all, a
steaming plate of lamp chops in a Chinese chuck-house of a substantial
though disappointing town, is more acceptable to even a dreamer than the
visionary beefsteak I ate out there in that latent restaurant of a
potential village.

This was a comfortable thought; and for a quarter of an hour, the far
weird cry of things that are no more, was of no avail. The rapid music
of knife and fork drowned out the asthmatic snoring of the ghostly
packets that buck the stream no more. How grub does win against
sentiment!

Swallowing the last of the chops, "Where will I find the ruins of the
old fort?" I asked of my bronze-faced neighbor across the wreck of
supper. He looked bored and stiffened a horny practical thumb in the
general direction of the ruins. "Over there," he said laconically.

I caught myself wondering if a modern Athenian would thus carelessly
direct you to the Acropolis. Is the comparison faulty? Surely a ruin is