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Updated: June 7, 2025
Now, in the time of Man, men worked twenty-four hours a day, or not at all; and they did no man's bidding. The streets of Ellisville were many. They doubled and crossed. There was a public square hedged about with trees artificially large. For each vanishing saloon there had come a store with its hitching rack for teams.
Twelve new mounds on the hillside back of the Cottage Hotel showed how faithfully he had executed his duties as judge and jury since he had taken up his office at the beginning of the "cow boom" of Ellisville. His right hand had found somewhat to do, and he had done it with his might. Ellisville was near the zenith of its bad eminence. The entire country had gone broad-horn.
These interested spectators were for the most part dark, sunburned men, wearing wide hats and narrow boots with spurs. They all were armed. Leaning against the sides of the mangers, or resting a hand upon the shoulders of another, they gazed calmly at the bar of justice. The attitude of Ellisville was one of sardonic calm. As a function, as a show, this trial might go on.
The Land Office was yet at Ellisville, and the rush of settlers was continuous.
The flesh of the buffalo was now a marketable commodity at any point along the railway; but the settler who owned a team and a rifle was much more apt to go out and kill his own meat than to buy it of another. There were many wagons which went out that fall from Ellisville besides those of the party with which Franklin, Battersleigh, and Curly set out.
Curly was gone gone up the Trail into a far and mysterious country, though he, too, promised to remember Ellisville, and had given hostage for his promise. His friends of the Halfway House were gone, for though he heard of them and knew them to be prosperous, he felt himself, by reason of Mary Ellen's decision, in propriety practically withdrawn from their personal acquaintance.
Though the chutes at the railway were busy, yet other herds of cattle passed Ellisville and wandered on north, crowding at the heels of the passing Indians, who now began to see their own cattle to be doomed. The main herd of the buffalo was now reported to be three or four days' drive from Ellisville, and the men who killed for the railroad camps uttered loud complaints.
"Well, friend," said the fireman, who was oiling the engine as he passed, and who grinned amiably as he spoke, "you're sure at the front now." Franklin had not advised his friend Battersleigh of his intended arrival, but as he looked about him he saw that he had little need for any guide. Ellisville as an actual town did not yet exist.
The long street spun out still longer its string of toylike wooden houses. It broke and doubled back upon itself, giving Ellisville title to unique distinction among all the cities of the plains, which rarely boasted more than a single street. The big hotel at the depot sheltered a colony of restless and ambitious life. From the East there came a minister with his wife, both fresh from college.
It was said, however, that these new men wanted to buy cows, so cows were taken to them. Many young men of Mother Daly's family went on up the Trail, never to come back to Ellisville, and it was said that they were paid much gold, and that they stole many cows from the men who had silver-mounted guns, and who wore strange, long knives, with which it was difficult to open a tin can.
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