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Each evening these forlorn remnants were wont to forsake their stolid-faced wives and yammering offspring and pick their way through the solitary stump-dotted street, past windowless, deserted buildings which were the saloons and dance-halls of better days, to foregather around the huge stove in the rear of Hod Burrage's general store, which was decrepit Hilarity's sole remaining enterprise, and there to brag and maunder over the dead town's former glory.
On another occasion the historian's enthusiasm was too expansive to be confined to plain prose, and he inflated it in lyric verse: "Brave was the banquet, the red red juice, Hilarity's gift sublime, Invoking the heart to kindred use, And bright'ning halo of time."
All day he had tramped northward, guided through the maze of abandoned roads by the frozen ruts of Moncrossen's tote wagons, and it was long after dark when he camped in the northernmost of the old shacks with civilization, as represented by Hilarity's deserted buildings and the jug-tilting, barrel-head conclave of Hod Burrage's store, forty miles to the southward.
These were the days of Hilarity's prosperity, when twenty train-loads of logs were jerked from her spurs by day, and the nights rang loud with false laughter. A vanished prosperity for now the little town stood all but deserted in its clearing, with the encircling hills denuded of all vegetation save a tangle of underbrush and a straggling growth of stunted jack pine.
It was broad daylight when Creed pulled the team up before a tumbled-down stable in the rear of one of the outstraggling cabins at the end of Hilarity's single street. Hastily he unhitched and led the horses through the door.
But that was in the days of Hilarity's prosperity in the days when the little town was the chief loading point for two thousand square miles of timber. It had been a live town then work and wages and the spirit to spend quick, hot life, and quick, cold death danced hand in hand to the clink of glasses.
"Too damned upity to suit me!" vociferated Creed, Hilarity's self-alleged bad man, with a fierce exhalation that dislodged a thin volley of cracker-crumbs from his overhanging mustache. "A heap too damned upity for this camp, says I." He shook a hairy fist menacingly toward the door through which the man had departed.
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