d the die was cast!

CHAPTER VII.

We make our Landing.

Had I known how cordially our neighbors would greet our return, or how
many of them would view our departure with apparently sincere regret, I
might have been slower in giving Jim my promise. I proceeded, however,
to carry it out; but it was nearly six months before I could pull myself
and my little fortune out of the place into which we had grown.

Mr. Elkins kept me well informed regarding Lattimore affairs; and the
_Herald_ followed me home. Jim's letters were long typewritten
communications, dictated at speed, and mailed, sometimes one a day, at
other times at intervals of weeks.

"This is a sure-enough 'winter of our discontent,'" one of these letters
runs, "but the scope of our operations will widen as the frost comes out
of the ground. We're now confined to the psychical field. Subjectively
speaking, though, the plot thickens. Captain Tolliver is in the
secondary stages of real-estate dementia, and spreads the contagion
daily. There's no quarantine regulation to cover the case, and Lattimore
seems doomed to the acme of prosperity. This is the age of great cities,
saith the Captain, and that Lattimore is not already a town of 150,000
people is one of the strangest, one of the most inexplicable things in
the world, in view of the distance we are lag of the country about us,
so far as development is concerned. And as our beginning has been tardy,
so will our progress be rapid, even as waters long dammed up rush out to
devour the plains, etc., etc.

"In this we are all agreed. We want a good, steady, natural growth--and
no boom.

"When a boom recognizes itself as such, it's all over, and the stuff
off. The time for letting go of a great wheel is when it starts down
hill. But our wheels are all going up--even if they are all in our
heads, as yet.

"You will remember the railway connection of which I spoke to you? Well,
that thing has assumed, all of a sudden, a concreteness as welcome as it
is unexpected. Ballard showed me a telegram yesterday from lower
Broadway (the heart of Darkest N. Y.) which tends to prove that people
there are ready to finance the deal. It would have amused you to see the
horizontality of the coat-tails of the management of the Lattimore &
Great Western, as they flaxed round getting up a directors' meeting, so
as to have a real, live directorate of this great transcontinental line
for the wolves of Wall Street to do busi