ring, while voting bonds for
extensive and extravagant improvements in cities-to-be was not the least
phase of this brief mania of the fortune-making, fortune-breaking "boom."

When Hans Wyker had seen his own town wane as Careyville waxed, he
consigned the newer community, and all that it was, to all the purgatories
ever organized and some yet to be created.

Wykerton was at a standstill now. The big brewery had become a flouring
mill, but it was idle most of the time. The windows served as targets for
the sons of the men who consumed its brewing product in other days, and
the whole structure had a disconsolate, dismantled appearance.

There was neither a schoolhouse nor a church inside the corporation
limits. The land along Big Wolf was not like the rich prairies west of it,
and freeholds entered first with hopes in Wykerton's prosperity had proved
disappointing, if not disastrous, to their owners.

The rough ground, mortgaged now, and by the decline of the town, decreased
in value, began to fall into the hands of John Jacobs, who made no effort
at settlement, but turned it to grazing purposes. His holdings joined the
property foreclosed by Wyker when his town failed, but inhabited still by
tenants too poor to leave it. The boundary line between Wyker and Jacobs
was the same ugly little creek that Doctor Carey had turned his course to
avoid on that winter day when he had seen Virginia Aydelot's distress
signal and heard her singing a plaintive plea for help.

It was an ugly little stream, with much mire and some quicksand to be
avoided; with deep earth-canyons and sliding avalanches of dirt on steep
slopes, and now and then a stone outcrop jagged and difficult, not to say
dangerous, to footways, and impossible to stock. It was called Little Wolf
because it was narrower than the willow-fringed stream into which it
emptied. But Big Wolf Creek could rarely boast of half the volume of water
that the sluggish little tributary held. Big Wolf was shallow, with more
shale and sand along its bed. Little Wolf was narrow and deceivingly deep
in places.

One Spring day, John Jacobs and Asher Aydelot rode out to Jacobs' ranches
together.

"You are improving your stock every year, Stewart tells me," Asher was
saying. "I may try sheep myself next year."

"I am hoping to have only thoroughbreds some day. That's a good horse you
ride," Jacobs replied.

"Yes, he has a strain of Kentucky blue-blood. My wife owned a thoroughbred