ch had
conceived this road across the desert. Franklin put out a wagon at
this industry, hauling in the fuel and the merchandise of the raw
plains. He bought the grim product of others who were ready to sell
and go out the earlier again. He betimes had out more than one wagon
of his own; and Battersleigh, cavalryman, became Batty, scouter for
bones, while Franklin remained at the market. It was Franklin who,
bethinking himself of the commercial difference between hard black horn
and soft, spongy bone, began the earliest shipments of the tips of the
buffalo horns, which he employed a man to saw off and pack into sacks
ready for the far-off button factories. Many tons of these tips alone
he came to ship, such had been the incredible abundance and the
incredible waste; and thus thriving upon an industry whose cause and
whose possibility he deplored, he came to realize considerable sums and
saw the question of subsistence pass rapidly into unconcern. Thus he
had gone to work in his new and untried world with a direct and
effective force. He dropped from him as a garment the customs and
standards of the world he had left behind, and at once took his place
as a factor in a new order of things.

Meantime the little town added building after building along its
straggling street, each of these houses of a single story, with a large
square of board front which projected deceptively high and wide,
serving to cover from direct view the rather humiliating lack of
importance in the actual building. These new edifices were for the
most part used as business places, the sorts of commerce being but
two--"general merchandise," which meant chiefly saddles and firearms,
and that other industry of new lands which flaunts under such
signboards as the Lone Star, the Happy Home, the Quiet Place, the
Cowboy's Dream, and such descriptive nomenclature. Of fourteen
business houses, nine were saloons, and all these were prosperous.
Money was in the hands of all. The times had not yet come when a
dollar seemed a valuable thing. Men were busy living, busy at
exercising this vast opportunity of being prehistoric.

One by one, then in a body, as though struck by panic, the white tents
of the railroad labourers vanished, passing on yet farther to the West,
only the engineers remaining at Ellisville and prosecuting from the
haven of the stone hotel the work of continuing the line. The place of
the tents was taken by vast white-topped wagons