.

Introducing Doctor Fairbain.
Headed as they were, and having no other special objective point in view, it was only natural for the two fugitives to drift into Sheridan.
This was at that time the human cesspool of the plains country, a seething, boiling maelstrom of all that was rough, evil, and brazen along the entire frontier.

Customarily quiet enough during the hours of daylight, the town became a mad saturnalia with the approach of darkness, its ceaseless orgies being noisily continued until dawn.

But at this period all track work on the Kansas Pacific being temporarily suspended by Indian outbreaks, the graders made both night and day alike hideous, and the single dirty street which composed Sheridan, lined with shacks, crowded with saloons, the dull dead prairie stretching away on every side to the horizon, was congested with humanity during every hour of the twenty-four.
It was a grim picture of depravity and desolation, the environment dull, gloomy, forlorn; all that was worthy the eye or thought being the pulsing human element.

All about extended the barren plains, except where on one side a ravine cut through an overhanging ridge.