was to be the later history of many or most of these far
Western towns. Franklin, given a hint by a friendly official, invested
as he was able in town property in the village of Ellisville, in which
truly it required the eye of faith to see any prospect of great
enhancement. Betimes he became owner of a quarter-section of land here
and there, in course of commissions on sales. He was careful to take
only such land as he had personally seen and thought fit for farming,
and always he secured land as near to the railroad as was possible.
Thus he was in the ranks of those foreseeing men who quietly and
rapidly were making plans which were later to place them among those
high in the control of affairs. All around were others, less shrewd,
who were content to meet matters as they should turn up, forgetting that

"The hypocritic days
Bring diadems and fagots in their hands;
To each they offer gifts after his will."

Everywhere was shown the Anglo-Saxon love of land. Each man had his
quarter-section or more. Even Nora, the waitress at the hotel, had
"filed on a quarter," and once in perhaps a month or so would "reside"
there overnight, a few faint furrows in the soil (done by her devoted
admirer, Sam) passing as those legal "improvements" which should later
give her title to a portion of the earth. The land was passing into
severalty, coming into the hands of the people who had subdued it, who
had driven out those who once had been its occupants. The Indians were
now cleared away, not only about Ellisville but far to the north and
west. The skin-hunters had wiped out the last of the great herds of
the buffalo. The face of Nature was changing. The tremendous drama of
the West was going on in all its giant action. This torrent of rude
life, against which the hands of the law were still so weak and
unavailing, had set for it in the ways of things a limit for its flood
and a time for its receding.

The West was a noble country, and it asked of each man what nobility
there was in his soul. Franklin began to grow. Freed from the
dwarfing influences of army life, as well as from the repressing
monotony of an old and limited community, he found in the broad horizon
of his new surroundings a demand that he also should expand. As he
looked beyond the day of cattle and foresaw the time of the plough, so
also he gazed far forward into the avenues of his own life, now opening
more clearly before him. He r