em to and
from their palatial residences, and what do the sun-baked human mud
turtles do but all jump off the log into the water and hide from them
cars like they were chariots of fire? What this town needs is not
factories, nor railroads, nor modern improvements--Old Alphabetical can
get them--but the next great scheme I go into is to go down to the
river, get some good red mud, and make a few thousand men who will build
up a town."

It has been fifteen years and over since Colonel Morrison put on his
long coat and high hat and started for the money markets of the East,
seeking whom he might devour. At the close of the eighties the Colonel
and all his tribe found that the stock of Eastern capitalists who were
ready to pay good prices for the fine shimmering blue sky and bracing
ozone of the West was running low. It was said in town that the Colonel
had come to the end of his string, for not only were the doors of
capital closed to him in the East, but newcomers had stopped looking for
farms at home. There was nothing to do but to sit down and swap
jack-knives with other land agents, and as they had taken most of the
agencies for the best insurance companies while the Colonel was on
dress parade, there was nothing left for him to do but to run for
justice of the peace, and, being elected, do what he could to make his
tenure for life.

Though he was elected, more out of gratitude for what he had tried to do
for the town than because people thought he would make a fair judge, he
got no further than his office in popular esteem. He did not seem to
wear well with the people in the daily run and jostle of life. During
the forty years he has been in our town, he has lived most of the time
apart from the people--transacting his business in the East, or locating
strangers on new lands. He has not been one of us, and there were
stories afloat that his shrewdness had sometimes caused him to thrust a
toe over the dead-line of exact honesty. In the town he never helped us
to fight for those things of which the town is really proud: our
schools, the college, the municipal ownership of electric lights and
waterworks, the public library, the abolition of the saloon, and all of
the dozen small matters of public interest in which good citizens take a
pride. Colonel Morrison was living his grand life, in his tailor-made
clothes, while his townsmen were out with their coats off making our
town the substantial place it is. So in his latt