The Palace Hotel at Fort Romper was painted a light blue, a shade that is on the legs of a kind of heron, causing the bird to declare its position against any background.
The opening line of the story immediately serves to situate the primary setting of the story as out of place. In doing so, it becomes a metaphor that foreshadows the trajectory of the narrative. This is a story in which everything seems to be slightly out of sync with everything surrounding it. In addition, the imagery of the heron using the blue of its legs as a determinant of perspective will prove ironic as all sense of perspective seems to get jumbled inside the hotel.
The cowboy, injured and rebellious, cried out blindly into this fog of mysterious theory.
It’s a long, strange road that takes readers from their first encounter with the blue hotel to the final words of the story being cried out by the cowboy: "Well, I didn't do anythin', did I?" A literal blizzard is swirling outside the hotel while a metaphorical storm rises to a crescendo inside. Crane’s story “The Open Boat” is all about the indifferent chaos that nature inflicts without intent upon humanity, but in that story men work together toward the common cause of survival. Here, Crane presents just the opposite: how a group of men all working independently along the lines of their own pursuit of selfish needs wind up actually creating the equivalent of natural chaos. That is the fog of mysterious theory referred to here.
The conceit of man was explained by this storm to be the very engine of life.
The storm outside has an effect on human behavior leading to the consequence of them coming together at that point in time under those particular circumstances. What takes place inside does not result from the chaos of the natural world over which man has little control, however. The completely non-judgmental stimuli of the natural has become an unwitting agent in explaining that man’s conceit can just as suddenly and inexplicably introduce chaos into order as nature itself. Indeed, society is driven by this agency of disorder.
…there can be little of dramatic import in environment. Any room can present a tragic front; any room can be comic. This little den was now hideous as a torture-chamber.
This quote presents the controlling philosophy of the story. It is hardly a statement capable of surprising anyone, but that’s the point. What is so horrifying about the truth of this philosophy is that we all know it to be true, but we’re all guilty of ignoring it pretty much 99% of the time. It is a random universe where tragedy can interrupt the laughter of children in a kindergarten and where the heartiest laugh you’ll ever share can take place while standing over a grave site.
