I. The Last To See Them Alive
The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area
that other Kansans call "out there." Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the
countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather
more Far West than Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-
hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and
high-heeled boots with pointed toes. The land is flat, and the views are awesomely
extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as
Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them.
Holcomb, too, can be seen from great distances. Not that there's much to see - simply an
aimless congregation of buildings divided in the center by the main-line tracks of the Santa
Fe Rail-road, a haphazard hamlet bounded on the south by a brown stretch of the Arkansas
(pronounced "Ar-kan-sas") River, on the north by a highway, Route 50, and on the east and
west by prairie lands and wheat fields. After rain, or when snowfalls thaw, the streets,
unnamed, unshaded, unpaved, turn from the thickest dust into the direst mud. At one end
of the town stands a stark old stucco structure, the roof of which supports an electric sign -
dance - but the dancing has ceased and the advertisement has been dark for several years.
Nearby is another building with an irrelevant sign, this one in flaking gold on a dirty
window - Holcomb bank. The bank closed in 1933, and its former counting rooms have
been converted into apartments. It is one of the town's two "apartment houses," the second
being a ramshackle mansion known, because a good part of the local school's faculty lives
there, as the Teacherage. But the majority of Holcomb's homes are one-story frame affairs,
with front porches.
Down by the depot, the postmistress, a gaunt woman who wears a rawhide jacket and
denims and cowboy boots, presides over a falling-apart post office. The depot itself, with its
peeling sulphur-colored paint, is equally melancholy; the Chief, the Super-Chief, the El
Capitan go by every day, but these celebrated expresses never pause there. No passenger
trains do - only an occasional freight. Up on the highway, there are two filling stations, one
of which doubles as a meagerly supplied grocery store, while the other does extra duty as a
cafe - Hartman's Cafe, where Mrs. Hartman, the proprietress, dispenses sandwiches, coffee,
soft drinks, and 3.2 beer. (Holcomb, like all the rest of Kansas, is "dry.")
And that, really, is all. Unless you include, as one must, the Holcomb School, a good-
looking establishment, which reveals a circumstance that the appearance of the community
otherwise camouflages: that the parents who send their children to this modern and ably
staffed "consolidated" school - the grades go from kindergarten through senior high, and a
fleet of buses transport the students, of which there are usually around three hundred and
sixty, from as far as sixteen miles away - are, in general, a prosperous people. Farm
