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The occupants of the wagons which trailed off across the prairies, the horsemen who followed them, the citizens who adjourned and went as usual to the Cottage all these departed with the more or less recognised feeling that there had happened a vague something which had given Ellisville a new dignity, which had attached to her a new significance. Really this was Magna Charta.
Our best people, however, lived at the Stone Hotel. There were twelve lawyers who resided at this hotel, likewise two ministers and their wives. Six of the lawyers would bring out their wives the following spring. Ministers, of course, usually took their wives with them. Ellisville had thirty business houses and two thousand inhabitants.
"Ladies and gintlemen," he said in tones easily distinguishable at all parts of the room, "I'm pleased to meet ye all this evenin'. Perhaps ye all know Battersleigh, and I hope ye'll all meet me friend Captain Franklin, at me side. We claim the inthroduction of this roof, me good friends, and we welcome everybody to the first dance at Ellisville. Ladies, yer very dutiful servant!
Sam Poston, the driver of the regular mail stage to the south, knew more of the condition of the settlers in that part of the country than any other man in Ellisville, and he gave an estimate which was alarming. There was no regular supply of fuel, he stated, and it was certain that the storm had found scores of families utterly unprepared.
It was three o'clock of the afternoon. The thirst of a district Judge had adjourned the district court. Franklin's heart sank. He dreaded the night. The real court, as he admitted to himself, would continue its session that night at the Cottage bar, and perhaps it might not adjourn until a verdict had been rendered. There came over the town of Ellisville that night an ominous quiet.
In the case of Ellisville, this inner corporation knew that there was to be located here a railroad-division point, where ultimately there would be car shops and a long pay roll of employees. Such a town was sure to prosper much more than one depending solely upon agriculture for its support, as was to be the later history of many or most of these far Western towns.
Money and life these two things we guard most sacredly in the older societies, the first most jealously, the latter with a lesser care. In Ellisville these were the commodities in least esteem. The philosophy of that land was either more ignorant or more profound than ours.
These vast herds deployed in turn about the town of Ellisville, the Mecca for which they had made this unprecedented pilgrimage. They trampled down every incipient field, and spread abroad over all the grazing lands, until every township held its thousands, crowded by the new thousands continually coming on.
Far out in the heart of this great gray wilderness lay the track-end of this railroad pushing across the continent. When Franklin descended from the rude train he needed no one to tell him he had come to Ellisville. He was at the limit, the edge, the boundary!
I run the mail an' carry folk acrost from Ellisville to that place. This here is just about halfway acrost. Ellisville's about twenty or twenty-five mile north of here." Sam spoke lucidly enough, but really he was much consumed with curiosity, for he had seen, behind the driver of the wagon, a face outlined in the shade.
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