Corkscrew wouldn’t have been impressive at any time. It especially wasn’t this white-hot Sunday afternoon. One sandy street following the crooked edge of the Tirabuzon Canyon, from which, by translation, the town took its name. A town, it was called, but village would have been flattery: fifteen or eighteen shabby buildings slumped along the irregular street, with tumbledown shacks leaning against them, squatting close to them, and trying to sneak away from them.
That was Corkscrew. One look at it, and I believed all I had heard about it!
In the street, four dusty automobiles cooked. Between two buildings I could see a corral where half a dozen horses bunched their dejection under a shed. No person was in sight. Even the stage driver, carrying a limp and apparently empty mail sack, had vanished into a building labelled “Adderly’s Emporium.”
Gathering up my two grey-powdered bags, I climbed out and crossed the road to where a weather-washed sign, on which Canyon House was barely visible, hung over the door of a two-story, iron-roofed, adobe house.
I crossed the wide, unpainted and unpeopled porch, and pushed a door open with my foot, going into a dining-room, where a dozen men and a woman sat eating at oilcloth-covered tables. In one corner of the room, was a cashier’s desk; and, on the wall behind it, a key-rack. Between rack and desk, a pudgy man whose few remaining hairs were the exact shade of his sallow skin, sat on a stool, and pretended he didn’t see me.
“A room and a lot of water,” I said, dropping my bags, and reaching for the glass that sat on top of a cooler in the corner.
“You can have your room,” the sallow man growled, “but water won’t do you no good. You won’t no sooner drink and wash, than you’ll be thirsty and dirty all over again. Where in hell is that register?”