ry-book treasure-ships that
would have made old Captain Kidd's men mad with delight.

As I lay dreaming in the bunch-grass, it all grew up so real that I had
to get up and take my first look, half expecting to find it all there
just as in the old days.

We stood at the rim of the bluff and looked down into a cup-like valley
upon a quiet little village, winking with scattered lights in the
gloaming. Past it swept the river--glazed with the twilight and
silver-splotted with early stars.

This was Benton--it could have been almost any other town as well. And
yet, once upon a time, it had filled my day-dreams with wonders--this
place that seemed half-way to the moon.

The shrill shriek of a Great Northern locomotive, trundling freight cars
through the gloom, gave the death-stroke to the old boy-dream. It was
the cry of modernity. This boisterous, bustling, smoke-breathing thing,
plunging through the night with flame in its throat, had made the
change, dragged old Benton out of the far-off lunar regions and set
what is left of it right down in the back yard of the world. Even a very
little boy could get there now.

"And yet," thought I, as we set out rapidly for the village in the
valley, "the difference between the poetry of mackinaws and Great
Northern locomotives is merely a matter of perspective. If those old
cordelle men could only come back for a while from their Walhalla, how
they would crowd about that wind-splitting, fire-eating, iron beast,
panting from its long run, and catching its breath for another plunge
into the waste places and the night! And I? I would be gazing
wide-mouthed at the cordelle men. It's only the human curiosity about
the other side of the moon. How perfect the nights would be if we could
only see that lost Pleiad!"

Ankle-deep in the powdery sand, we entered the little town with its
business row facing the water front. One glance at the empty levees told
you of the town's dead glory. Not a steamboat's stacks, blackening in
the gloom, broke the peaceful glitter of the river under the stars. But
along the sidewalk where the electric-lighted bar-rooms buzzed and
hummed, brawny cow-men, booted and spurred, lounged about, talking in
that odd but not unpleasant Western English that could almost be called
a dialect.

But it was not the Benton of the cow-men that I felt about me. It was
still for me the Benton of the fur trade and the steamboats and the gold
rush--my boyhood's Benton half-way