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Updated: June 7, 2025


The tank at the railway, the big hotel, the station-house, were gone wiped quite away. The Plains were back again! "Don't git off the main street," gasped Sam as they turned their faces down wind to catch their breath. "Touch the houses all along. Lord! ain't it cold!" Ellisville was safe, or all of it that they could stumblingly discover. The town did not sleep.

"I 'low we won't sleep much to-night, Cap," said Sam quietly. "Come on; let's go git some coffee, an' see if anybody here in town is needin' help. We'll pull out soon as we kin see in the mornin'." They went out into the cold, staggering as the icy sheet drove full against them. Ellisville was blotted out. There was no street, but only a howling lane of white. Not half a dozen lights were visible.

Upon the little dresser lay a faded photograph, fallen forward also upon its face, lying unnoticed and apparently forgot. The sheriff of Ellisville sat in his office oiling the machinery of the law; which is to say, cleaning his revolver. There was not yet any courthouse. The sheriff was the law.

Theft was unknown, nor was murder recognised by that name, always being referred to as a "killing." Of these "killings" there were very many. The sheriff of Ellisville looked thoughtful as he tested the machinery of the law.

The men from the farther East dropped their waistcoats and their narrow hats at Ellisville. All the world went under wide felt and bore a jingling spur. Every man was armed. The pitch of life was high. It was worth death to live a year in such a land! The pettinesses fell away from mankind. The horizon of life was wide. There was no time for small exactness.

In this riotous army of invasion, who could have foreseen the population which was to follow, adventurous yet tenacious, resolved first upon independence, and next upon knowledge, and then upon the fruits of knowledge? Nay, perhaps, after all, the prescience of this coming time lay over Ellisville the Red, so that it roared the more tempestuously on through its brief, brazen day.

"Your Honour," said Franklin to the Court, "I appear to defend this man." The opening sentence of the young advocate might have been uttered in burlesque. To call this a court of justice might have seemed sheer libel. There was not the first suggestion of the dignity and solemnity of the law. Ellisville had no hall of justice, and the court sat at one place or another, as convenience dictated.

And Franklin, dazed and missing all the light which had recently made glad the earth, was vaguely conscious that he had promised to visit the home of the girl who had certainly given him no invitation to come further into her life, but for whose word of welcome he knew that he should always long. Gourdlike, Ellisville grew up in a night. It was not, and lo! it was.

One by one, then in a body, as though struck by panic, the white tents of the railroad labourers vanished, passing on yet farther to the West, only the engineers remaining at Ellisville and prosecuting from the haven of the stone hotel the work of continuing the line.

Much of this, no doubt, was exaggeration, this talk of a graveyard, of a doubled street, of murders, of the legal killings which served as arrests, of the lynchings which once passed as justice. There was a crude story of the first court ever held in Ellisville, but of course it was mere libel to say that it was held in the livery barn.

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