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Updated: June 22, 2025
The tide in the continent's business affairs turned soon after the new men took the helm. The long depression ended, prices rose, farmers met mortgage payments, factory chimneys smoked once more, traffic multiplied. The first result of the improved conditions was the easing of the tension in railway relations. There was no longer a life-and-death necessity for rate-cutting and traffic-stealing.
"The human bein' is vicious from original sin," says the tin-type man. "It comes out in the camery," he says. "You can't fool the camery. It tells ye the Bible truth," he says. "Nor I ain't expectin' anything from a broiled and frizzled country like this, where the continent's shaved down so narrow you could take a photograph of two oceans. And yet it's as good as anywhere else.
The Grass gripped the continent's great northern bulge, squeezed it into submission and worked its way southward to the slender tip, driving the inhabitants before it, duplicating previous acts by sending an influx from sparsely to thickly settled areas, creating despair, terror, disruption and confusion; pestilence, hysteria and famine.
When much of the money so raised had been dissipated, when Continent's quotation on the curb sank to an infinitesimal fraction, then it developed that Stella's contract was with Manton personally. Manton Pictures, Incorporated, was formed to exploit her. The stock of this company was not offered to outside investors.
Continental Governments have trained their citizens to perfection. Obedience is the Continent's first law. The story that is told of a Spanish king who was nearly drowned because the particular official whose duty it was to dive in after Spanish kings when they tumbled out of boats happened to be dead, and his successor had not yet been appointed, I can quite believe.
So, hour after hour, he swung forward, pushing his horse over the ground in a sort of running walk, common to the plains. Sunset found him climbing from the foothills into the mountains beyond. Starlight came upon him in a saddle between the peaks, still plodding up by winding paths to the higher altitudes that make the ridge of the continent's backbone.
Elmira would be a Mecca; there would be pilgrim ships at pilgrim rates, pilgrim specials on the continent's railways; libraries would be written about the monument, every tourist would kodak it, models of it would be for sale everywhere in the earth, its form would become as familiar as the figure of Napoleon.
He's King as long as the great lords like Count Lionel and Joris of Bigglersport and Alan of Northport want him to be. Count Lionel has more men and more guns and contragravity than he has, now, and that's without the help he'd get from everybody else. Everything's quiet on Gram now, even the war on Southmain Continent's stopped. Everybody wants to keep it that way.
It should be a great picture, for in its distance would stand the continent's mountainous head crowned with its shining diadem, while in the nearer view there would be every attitude of bold horsemanship, every phase of intense muscular activity, brilliancy of costumes, the charm of wild life, the beauty of freedom.
All the time there is a deafening noise, the crash of the continent's spine being rent by dynamite, the roar of trains, the shrieks of dirt shovels blowing off steam, the stab and hammer of drills. Man is making war on nature with amazing energy on a titanic scale.
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