ve's hand in a
warm grasp. "Now we're away. But you better play safe. Stick to your
pay cheque here until we pull the deal through. There won't be much to
do until then, anyway, and you can help more by guiding the paper along
right lines."

"It sounds like a fairy tale," Dave demurred, as though unwilling to
credit the possibilities Conward had outlined. "You're sure it can be
done?"

"Done? Why, son, it has been done in all the big centres in the
States, and at many a place that'll never be a centre at all. And it
will be done here. Dave, bigger things than you dare to dream of are
looming up right ahead."

Then Dave had a qualm. "If that section of land is worth close to a
million dollars," he said, "is it quite fair to take advantage of the
owner's absence and ignorance to buy it for a few thousand?"

"Dave," said Conward, with an arm on his shoulder, "the respectability
of the firm is safe in your hands. But--_please_ let me weigh the
coal."

CHAPTER ELEVEN

David Elden smoked his after-dinner cigar in his bachelor quarters.
The years had been good to the firm of Conward & Elden; good far beyond
the wildness of their first dreams. The transaction of the section
bought from the English absentee had been but the beginning of bigger
and more daring adventures. That section was now considered close-in
property, and lots which Conward & Elden had originally sold for two
hundred dollars each had since changed hands at more than a thousand.
The street railway ran far beyond it. Water mains, sewers, electric
lights, graded streets and concrete sidewalks had sprawled for miles
across the prairie. Conward, in that first wild prophecy of his, had
spoken of a city of a quarter of a million people; already more lots
had been sold than could be occupied by four times that population.

It had been a very marvellous development; an enthusiasm which had
grown deeper and wilder until it swept along as an insane abandon,
bearing in its current the last vestiges of conservatism and caution.
For at last the old-timers, long alluded to as the "dead ones," had
come in. For years they had held back, scoffing, predicting disaster;
and while they held back venturesome youths had become millionaires.
One can stand that only so long, and at last the old-timers were buying
and selling and debauching with the others in the lust of easy money.

Dave had often asked himself where it all would end. He traced it from