nton on his return from a
round-up, found his thoughts reverting to the past. The spring day was
like another that he remembered when he first caught sight of the
frontier town more than a dozen years before. He noted the smoke of a
railroad locomotive as it trailed into nothingness, and involuntarily he
looked toward the Missouri River; but there was no boat steaming up the
river, and the unfurrowed water brought a sadness to his face.

He recalled the doctor's vigorous opposition a few years previous, when
the question of a railroad came before the residents of Fort Benton.
Perhaps the doctor had been right in thinking that the river traffic
would be destroyed, and with it the future of the town. Certainly his
derided prophecy had been most literally fulfilled. Instead of becoming
a second St. Louis, the village lay in undisturbed tranquillity, but
little larger than when the _Far West_ had brought the first recruits of
the North West Mounted Police to its levees. To those who loved the
place, who believed in it, the result caused by the changing conditions
of Western life was well-nigh heartbreaking.

Instead of the terminus of a great waterway--the port where gold was
brought by the ton to be shipped East from the territorial diggings; the
stage where moved explorer, trader, miner and soldier--instead of being
the logical metropolis of the entire Northwest, Fort Benton lay a drowsy
little village, embowered in cottonwoods and dependent upon the
cattlemen who made it their headquarters for shipping.

The lusty bull-whacker's yell, the mule-skinner's cry and the pop of
long, biting whips were heard no more in the broad, sweeping curve of
the Missouri. The levees were no longer crowded with bales of
merchandise, piles of buffalo hides and boxes of gold. No steamers tied
up to the rotting snubbing-posts; the bustle of the roustabouts, the
oaths of the mates, the trader's activity had vanished forever, as
irrevocably as the buffalo on the plains. Nothing in the prospect
before him suggested to Danvers the well-remembered past except the old
adobe fort on the water's edge. One bastion and a part of a wall
recalled to the Anglo-American his first homesick night in the
Northwest. Even the trading-posts on the river between Bismarck and Fort
Benton were abandoned.

The man had altered as well. It was evident that the shy reserve of the
Kentish youth had changed to the dignity of the reticent man. The
military bearing rem