was buying cars and
locomotives right and left. Also, to keep pace with the ever-increasing
procession of trains, a doubled construction force wrought night and day
installing new side tracks and passing points.

Under the fructifying influence of such a golden shower of prosperity,
land values began to rise again, slowly at first, as buyers distrusted the
continuance of the golden shower; more rapidly a little later, as the
Guilford policy defined itself in terms of apparent permanence.

Towns along the line--hamlets long since fallen into the way-station rut
of desuetude--awoke with a start, bestirring themselves joyfully to meet
the inspiriting conditions. At Midland City, Stephen Hawk, the new
right-of-way agent, ventured to ask municipal help to construct a ten-mile
branch to Lavabee: it was forthcoming promptly; and the mass meeting, at
which the bond loan was anticipated by public subscription shouted itself
hoarse in enthusiasm.

At Gaston, where Hawk asked for a donation of land whereon the company
might build the long-promised division repair-shops, people fought with
one another to be first among the donors. And at Juniberg, where the
company proposed to establish the first of a series of grain
subtreasuries--warehouses in which the farmers of the surrounding country
could store their products and borrow money on them from the railroad
company at the rate of three per cent, per annum--at Juniberg enough money
was subscribed to erect three such depots as the heaviest tributary crop
could possibly fill.

It was while the pendulum of prosperity was in full swing that David Kent
took a day off from sweating over his problem of ousting the receiver and
ran down to Gaston. Single-eyed as he was in the pursuit of justice, he
was not unmindful of the six lots standing in his name in the Gaston
suburb, and from all accounts the time was come to dispose of them.

He made the journey in daylight, with his eyes wide open and the mental
pencil busy at work noting the changes upon which the State press had been
dilating daily, but which he was now seeing for the first time. They were
incontestable--and wonderful. He admitted the fact without prejudice to a
settled conviction that the sun-burst of prosperity was merely another
brief period of bubble-blowing. Towns whose streets had been grass-grown
since the day when each in turn had surrendered its right to be called the
terminus of the westward-building railroad, wer