In Cold Blood

In Part I, the reader is introduced to the village of Holcomb, a small yet prosperous farming settlement in western Kansas.

The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call "out there."

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.