They doubled and crossed. There
was a public square hedged about with trees artificially large. For
each vanishing saloon there had come a store with its hitching rack for
teams. The Land Office was yet at Ellisville, and the rush of settlers
was continuous. The men who came out from the East wore wide hats and
carried little guns; but when they found the men of Ellisville wearing
small, dark hats and carrying no guns at all, they saw that which was
not to be believed, and which was, therefore, not so written in the
literary centres which told the world about the Ellisvilles. Strangers
asked Ellisville about the days of the cattle drive, and Ellisville
raised its eminently respectable eyebrows. There was a faint memory of
such a time, but it was long, long ago. Two years ago! All the world
had changed since then. There had perhaps been a Cottage Hotel. There
was perhaps a Mrs. Daly, who conducted a boarding-house, on a back
street. Our best people, however, lived at the Stone Hotel. There
were twelve lawyers who resided at this hotel, likewise two ministers
and their wives. Six of the lawyers would bring out their wives the
following spring. Ministers, of course, usually took their wives with
them.

Ellisville had thirty business houses and two thousand inhabitants. It
had large railway shops and the division offices of the road. It had
two schoolhouses (always the schoolhouse grew quickly on the Western
soil), six buildings of two stories, two buildings of three stories and
built of brick. Business lots were worth $1,800 to $2,500 each. The
First National Bank paid $4,000 for its corner. The Kansas City and
New England Loan, Trust, and Investment Company had expended $30,000 in
cash on its lot, building, and office fixtures. It had loaned three
quarters of a million of dollars in and about Ellisville.

Always the land offered something to the settler. The buffalo being
gone, and their bones being also gone, some farmers fell to trapping
and poisoning the great gray wolves, bringing in large bales of the
hides. One farmer bought half a section of land with wolf skins. He
had money enough left to buy a few head of cattle and to build a line
of fence. This fence cut at right angles a strange, wide, dusty
pathway. The farmer did not know what he had done. He had put
restraint on that which in its day knew no pause and brooked no
hindrance. He had set metes and bounds across the track where once