But it stood defiantly flaunting its crimson paint above the wooden platform, a hardy pioneer among the moderns.
Business had strayed from the railroad track; it had left the station, the freighthouse, the company corral, and some open sheds, to establish its enterprises one block southward.

There, fringing a wide, unpaved street that ran east and west, parallel with the gleaming steel rails, Business reared its citadels.
Willets buildings were not imposing.

One-story frames predominated, with here and there a two-storied structure, or a brick aristocrat seeming to call attention to its substantial solidity.
Willets had plenty of space in which to grow, and the location of the buildings on their sites, seemed to indicate that their builders appreciated the fact that there was no need for crowding.

Between each building was space, suggestive of the unending plains that surrounded the town.

Willets sat, serene in its space and solitude, unhurried, uncramped, sprawling over a stretch of grass level--a dingy, dirty, inglorious Willets, shamed by its fringe of tin cans, empty bottles, and other refuse--and by the clean sweep of sand and sage and grass that stretched to its very doors.