Nearby is another building with an irrelevant sign, this one in flaking gold on a dirty window-“ holcomb bank.” The bank failed in 1933, and its former counting rooms have been converted into apartments. 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. After rain, or when snowfalls thaw, the streets, unnamed, unshaded, unpaved, turn from the thickest dust into the direst mud. Not that there is much to see-simply an aimless congregation of buildings divided in the center by the main-line tracks of the Santa Fe Railway, 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. Holcomb, too, can be seen from great distances. 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 traveller reaches them. 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 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.

( Editor’s note: All quotations in this article are taken either from official records or from conversations, transcribed verbatim, between the author and the principals.) THE LAST TO SEE THEM ALIVE This is the first part of a four-part series.

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