boom town with material reasons for
substantial growth. Behind it were the resources of a railroad company
which would anticipate the development of a section of country bigger than
a dozen Old-world states, and men with brains keen enough to realize the
commercial possibilities it held. It had Corrigan for an advance
agent--big, confident, magnetic, energetic, suave, smooth.

Manti had awaited his coming; he was the magic force, the fulfillment of
the rumored promise. He had stayed away for three weeks, following his
departure on the special car after bringing Judge Lindman, and when he
stepped off the car again at the end of that time Manti was "humming," as
he had predicted. During the three weeks of his absence, the switch at
Manti had never been unoccupied. Trains had been coming in regularly
bearing merchandise, men, tools, machines, supplies. Engineers had
arrived; the basin near Manti, choked by a narrow gorge at its westerly
end (where the dam was to be built) was dotted with tents, wagons, digging
implements, a miscellany of material whose hauling had worn a rutted trail
over the plains and on the slope of the basin, continually active with
wagon-train and pack horse, and articulate with sweating, cursing
drivers.

"She's a pippin!" gleefully confided a sleek-looking individual who might
have been mistaken for a western "parson" had it not been for a certain
sophisticated cynicism that was prominent about him, and which imparted a
distasteful taint of his profession. "Give me a year of this and I'll open
a joint in Frisco! I cleaned out a brace of bull-whackers in the _Plaza_
last night--their first pay. Afterward I stung a couple of cattlemen for a
hundred each. Look at her hum!"

Notwithstanding that it was midday, Manti was teeming with life and
action. Since the day that Miss Benham had viewed the town from the window
of the private car, Manti had added more than a hundred buildings to its
total. They were not attractive; they were ludicrous in their pitiful
masquerade of substantial types. Here and there a three-story structure
reared aloft, sheathed with galvanized iron, a garish aristocrat seemingly
conscious of its superiority, brazen, in its bid for attention; more
modest buildings seemed dwarfed, humiliated, squatting sullenly and
enviously. There were hotels, rooming-houses, boarding-houses, stores,
dwellings, saloons--and others which for many reasons need not be
mentioned. But they were pulsati