risk, loving excitement, balked at no
hazard. Knowing no settled way of life, ignorant of a roof, careless
of the ways of other lands, this town was a toy to them, a jest, just
as all life, homeless, womanless, had been a jest. By day and by
night, ceaseless, crude, barbaric, there went on a continuous carousal,
which would have been joyless backed by a vitality less superb, an
experience less young. Money and life--these two things we guard most
sacredly in the older societies, the first most jealously, the latter
with a lesser care. In Ellisville these were the commodities in least
esteem. The philosophy of that land was either more ignorant or more
profound than ours. Over all the world, unaided by a sensational
press, and as yet without even that non-resident literature which was
later to discover the Ellisvilles after the Ellisvilles were gone,
there spread the tame of Ellisville the Red, the lustful, the
unspeakable. Here was a riot of animal intensity of life, a mutiny of
physical man, the last outbreak of the innate savagery of primitive man
against the day of shackles and subjugation. The men of that rude day
lived vehemently. They died, and they escaped. The earth is trampled
over their bold hearts, and they have gone back into the earth, the
air, the sky, and the wild flowers. Over their graves tread now those
who bow the neck and bear the burden and feed the wheels, and know the
despair of that civilization which grinds hope from out the heart. The
one and the other came, departed, and will depart. The one and the
other, the bond and the free, the untamed and the broken, were pawns in
the iron game of destiny.

The transient population of Ellisville, the cattle sellers and cattle
buyers and land seekers, outnumbered three to one the resident or
permanent population, which catered to this floating trade, and which
supplied its commercial or professional wants. The resident one third
was the nucleus of the real Ellisville that was to be. The social
compact was still in embryo. Life was very simple. It was the day of
the individual, the day before the law.

With this rude setting there was to be enacted a rapid drama of
material progress such as the world has never elsewhere seen; but first
there must be played the wild prologue of the West, never at any time
to have a more lurid scene than here at the Halfway House of a
continent, at the intersection of the grand transcontinental trails,
the