g eye. They knew his ways. He was responsive
in a brusque, inquisitive, but good-humoured and sometimes very droll
way; but there were times when men said to themselves that he was to be
left alone; and he was so much master of the place that, as Osterhaut
and Jowett frequently remarked, "What he says goes!" It went even with
those whom he had passed in the race of power.

He had had his struggles to be understood in his first days in Lebanon.
He had fought intrigue and even treachery, had defeated groups which
were the forces at work before he came to Lebanon, and had compelled the
submission of others. All these had vowed to "get back at him," but when
it became a question of Lebanon against Manitou they swung over to his
side and acknowledged him as leader. The physical collision between the
rougher elements of the two towns had brought matters to a head, and
nearly every man in Lebanon felt that his honour was at stake, and was
ready "to have it out with Manitou."

As he walked along the main street after his interview with Jowett,
his eyes wandered over the buildings rising everywhere; and his mind
reviewed as in a picture the same thinly inhabited street five years ago
when he first came. Now farmers' wagons clacked and rumbled through the
prairie dust, small herds of cattle jerked and shuffled their way to
the slaughter-yard, or out to the open prairie, and caravans of settlers
with their effects moved sturdily forward to the trails which led to a
new life beckoning from three points of the compass. That point which
did not beckon was behind them. Flaxen-haired Swedes and Norwegians;
square-jawed, round-headed North Germans; square-shouldered,
loose-jointed Russians with heavy contemplative eyes and long hair,
looked curiously at each other and nodded understandingly. Jostling them
all, with a jeer and an oblique joke here and there, and crude chaff on
each other and everybody, the settler from the United States asserted
himself. He invariably obtruded himself, with quizzical inquiry, half
contempt and half respect, on the young Englishman, who gazed round with
phlegm upon his fellow adventurers, and made up to the sandy-faced
Scot or the cheerful Irishman with his hat on the back of his head, who
showed in the throng here and there. This was one of the days when the
emigrant and settlers' trains arrived both from the East and from "the
States," and Front Street in Lebanon had, from early morning, been alive
wit