I'm passing Shafter's on the way to my own shack." There was a chorus of friendly "Good-nights" from the other miners as they passed from the platform.

Before ever he had set foot in it, McMurdo the turbulent had become a character in Vermissa.
The country had been a place of terror; but the town was in its way even more depressing.

Down that long valley there was at least a certain gloomy grandeur in the huge fires and the clouds of drifting smoke, while the strength and industry of man found fitting monuments in the hills which he had spilled by the side of his monstrous excavations.
But the town showed a dead level of mean ugliness and squalor.

The broad street was churned up by the traffic into a horrible rutted paste of muddy snow.

The sidewalks were narrow and uneven.