In point of age, Gaston the strenuous was still no more than a lusty
infant among the cities of the brown plain when the boom broke and the
junto was born, though its beginnings as a halt camp ran back to the days
of the later Mormon migrations across the thirsty plain; to that day when
the advanced guard of Zophar Smith's ox-train dug wells in the damp sands
of Dry Creek and called them the Waters of Merom.
Later, one Jethro Simsby, a Mormon deserter, set up his rod and staff on
the banks of the creek, home-steaded a quarter-section of the sage-brush
plain, and in due time came to be known as the Dry Creek cattle king. And
the cow-camp was still Simsby's when the locating engineers of the Western
Pacific, searching for tank stations in a land where water was scarce and
hard to come by, drove their stakes along the north line of the
quarter-section; and having named their last station Alphonse, christened
this one Gaston.
From the stake-driving of the engineers to the spike-driving of the
track-layers was a full decade. For hard times overtook the Western
Pacific at Midland City, eighty miles to the eastward; while the State
capital, two days' bronco-jolting west of Dry Creek, had railroad outlets
in plenty and no inducements to offer a new-comer.
But, with the breaking of the cloud of financial depression, the Western
Pacific succeeded in placing its extension bonds, and a little later the
earth began to fly on the grade of the new line to the west. Within a
Sundayless month the electric lights of the night shift could be seen,
and, when the wind was right, the shriek of the locomotive whistle could
be heard at Dry Creek; and in this interval between dawn and daylight
Jethro Simsby sold his quarter-section for the nominal sum of two thousand
dollars, spot cash, to two men who buck-boarded in ahead of the
track-layers.
This purchase of the "J-lazy-S" ranch by Hawk and Guilford marked the
modest beginning of Gaston the marvelous. By the time the temporary
sidings were down and the tank well was dug in the damp sands, it was
heralded far and wide that the Western Pacific would make the city on the
banks of Dry Creek--a city consisting as yet only of the Simsby ranch
shacks--its western terminus. Thereupon followed one of the senseless
rushes that populate the waste places of the earth and give the
professional city-builder his reason for being. In a fortnight after the
driving of the silver spike the dusty plain was dotted with the
black-roofed shelters of the Argonauts; and by the following spring the
plow was furrowing the cattle ranges in ever-widening circles, and Gaston
had voted a bond loan of three hundred thousand dollars to pave its
streets.
Then under the forced draft of skilful exploitation, three years of high
pressure passed quickly; years named by the promoters the period of
development. In the Year One the very heavens smiled and the rainfall
broke the record of the oldest inhabitant. Thus the region round about
lost the word "arid" as a qualifying adjective, and the picturesque
fictions of the prospectus makers were miraculously justified. In Year Two
there was less rain, but still an abundant crop; and Jethro Simsby,
drifting in from some unnamed frontier of a newer cow-country, saw what he
had missed, took to drink, and shot himself in the lobby of the
Mid-Continent Hotel, an ornate, five-storied, brick-and-terra-cotta
structure standing precisely upon the site of the "J-lazy-S" branding
corral.
It was in this same Year Two, the fame of the latest of western Meccas for
young men having penetrated to the provincial backgrounds of New
Hampshire, that David Kent came.
By virtue of his diploma, and three years of country practice in the New
Hampshire county town where his father before him had read Blackstone and
Chitty, he had his window on the fourth floor of the Farquhar Building
lettered "Attorney and Counselor at Law"; but up to the day in the latter
part of the fateful Year Three, when the overdue crash came, he was best
known as a reckless plunger in real estate--this, mind you, at a moment
when every third man counted his gains in "front feet", and was shouting
himself hoarse at the daily brass-band lot sales.
When the bottom fell out in the autumn of Year Three, Kent fell with it,
though not altogether as far or as hard as many another. One of his
professional hold-fasts--it was the one that afterward became the
bread-tackle in the famine time--was his position as local attorney for
the railway company. By reason of this he was among the first to have a
hint of the impending cataclysm. The Western Pacific, after so long a
pause on the banks of Dry Creek, had floated its second mortgage bonds and
would presently build on to the capital, leaving Gaston to way-station
quietude. Therefore and wherefore----
Kent was not lacking in native shrewdness or energy. He foresaw, not the
pitiable bubble-burst which ensued, indeed, but the certain and inevitable
end of the speculative era. Like every one else, he had bought chiefly
with promises to pay, and his paper in the three banks aggregated a sum
equal to a frugal New Hampshire competence.
"How long have I got?" was the laconic wire which he sent to Loring, the
secretary of the Western Pacific Advisory Board in Boston, from whom his
hint had come. And when Loring replied that the grading and track-laying
contracts were already awarded, there was at least one "long" on the
Gaston real estate exchange who wrought desperately night and day to
"unload".
As it turned out, the race against time was both a victory and a defeat.
On the morning when the _Daily Clarion_ sounded the first note of public
alarm, David Kent took up the last of his bank promises-to-pay, and
transferred his final mortgaged holding in Gaston realty. When it was done
he locked himself in his office in the Farquhar Building and balanced the
account. On leaving the New Hampshire country town to try the new cast for
fortune in the golden West, he had turned his small patrimony into
cash--some ten thousand dollars of it. To set over against the bill of
exchange for this amount, which he had brought to Gaston a year earlier,
there were a clean name, a few hundred dollars in bank, six lots, bought
and paid for, in one of the Gaston suburbs, and a vast deal of experience.
Kent ran his hands through his hair, opened the check-book and hastily
filled out a check payable to himself for the remaining few hundreds. When
he reached the Apache National on the corner of Colorado and Texas
Streets, he was the one hundred and twenty-seventh man in the queue, which
extended around the corner and doubled back and forth in the cross-street
to the stoppage of all traffic. The announcement in the _Clarion_ had done
its work, and the baleful flower of panic, which is a juggler's rose for
quick-growing possibilities, was filling the very air of the street with
its acrid perfume--the scent of all others that soonest drives men mad.
Major James Guilford, the president of the Apache National, was in the
cage with the sweating paying tellers, and it was to him that Kent
presented his check when his turn came.
"What! You, too, Kent?" said the president, reproachfully. "I thought you
had more backbone."
Kent shook his head.
"Gaston has absorbed nine-tenths of the money I brought here; I'll absorb
the remaining tenth myself, if it's just the same to you, Major. Thank
you." And the hundred and twenty-seventh man pocketed his salvage from the
wreck and fought his way out through the jam at the doors. Two hours
farther along in the forenoon the Apache National suspended payment, and
the bank examiner was wired for.
For suddenness and thoroughgoing completeness the Gaston bubble-bursting
was a record-breaker. For a week and a day there was a frantic struggle
for enlargement, and by the expiration of a fortnight the life was pretty
well trampled out of the civic corpse and the stench began to arise.
Flight upon any terms then became the order of the day, and if the place
had been suddenly plague-smitten the panicky exodus could scarcely have
been more headlong. None the less, in any such disorderly up-anchoring
there are stragglers perforce: some left like stranded hulks by the ebbing
tide; others riding by mooring chains which may be neither slipped nor
capstaned. When all was over there were deserted streets and empty suburbs
in ruthless profusion; but there was also a hungry minority of the crews
of the stranded and anchored hulks left behind to live or die as they
might, and presently to fall into cannibalism, preying one upon another
between whiles, or waiting like their prototypes of the Spanish Main for
the stray spoils of any luckless argosy that might drift within grappling
distance.
Kent stayed partly because a local attorney for the railroad was as
necessary in Gaston the bereaved as in Gaston the strenuous; partly, also,
because he was a student of his kind, and the broken city gave him
laboratory opportunities for the study of human nature at its worst.
He marked the raising of the black flag as the Gaston castaways, getting
sorrily afloat one by one, cleared their decks for action. Some Bluebeard
admiral there will always be for such stressful occasions, and David Kent,
standing aside and growing cynical day by day, laid even chances on Hawk,
the ex-district attorney, on Major Guilford, and on one Jasper G. Bucks,
sometime mayor of Gaston the iridescent.
Afterward he was to learn that he had underrated the gifts of the former
mayor. For when the famine time was fully come, and there were no more
argosies drifting Gastonward for the bucaneers to sack and scuttle, it was
Jasper G. Bucks who called a conference of his fellow werwolves, set forth
his new cast for fortune, and brought the junto, the child of sheer
desperation fiercely at bay, into being.
It was in the autumn of that first cataclysmic year that Secretary Loring,
traveling from Boston to the State capital on a mission for the Western
Pacific, stopped over a train with Kent. After a rather dispiriting dinner
in the deserted Mid-Continent café, and some plowing of the field of
recollection in Kent's rooms in the Farquhar Building, they took the
deserted street in the golden twilight to walk to the railway station.
"It was a decent thing for you to do--stopping over a train with me,
Grantham," said the host, when the five squares intervening had been half
measured. "I have had all kinds of a time out here in this God-forsaken
desert, but never until to-day anything approaching a chummy hour with a
man I know and care for."
Kent had not spoken since they had felt their way out of the dark lower
hall of the Farquhar Building. Up to this point the talk had been
pointedly reminiscent; of the men of their university year, of mutual
friends in the far-away "God's country" to the eastward, of the Gastonian
epic, of all things save only two--the exile's cast for fortune in the
untamed West, and one other.
"That brings us a little nearer to the things that be--and to your
prospects, David," said the guest. "How are you fixed here?"
Kent shrugged.
"Gaston is dead, as you see; too dead to bury."
"Why don't you get out of it, then?"
"I shall some day, perhaps. Up to date there has been no place to go to,
and no good way to arrive. Like some thousands of others, I've made an ass
of myself here, Loring."
"By coming, you mean? Oh, I don't know about that. You have had some hard
knocks, I take it, but if you are the same David Kent I used to know, they
have made a bigger man of you."
"Think so?"
"I'd bet on it. We have had the Gaston epic done out for us in the
newspapers. No man could live through such an experience as you must have
had without growing a few inches. Hello! What's this?"
A turned corner had brought them in front of a lighted building in Texas
Street with a straggling crowd gathered about the porticoed entrance. As
Loring spoke, there was a rattle of snare drums followed by the _dum-dum_
of the bass, and a brass band ramped out the opening measures of a
campaign march.
"It is a rally," said Kent, when they had passed far enough beyond the
zone of brass-throated clamorings to make the reply audible. "I told you
that the Gaston wolf-pack had gone into politics. We are in the throes of
a State election, and there is to be a political speech-making at the
Opera House to-night, with Bucks in the title rôle. And there is a fair
measure of the deadness of the town! When you see people flock together
like that to hear a brass band play, it means one of two things: that the
town hasn't outgrown the country village stage, or else it has passed that
and all other stages and is well on its way to the cemetery."
"That is one way of putting it," Loring rejoined. "If things are as bad as
that, it's time you were moving on, don't you think?"
"I guess so," was the lack-luster response. "Only I don't know where to
go, or what to do when I get there."
They were crossing the open square in front of the wide-eaved passenger
station. A thunderous tremolo, dominating the distant band music, thrilled
on the still air, and the extended arm of the station semaphore with its
two dangling lanterns wagged twice.
"My train," said Loring, quickening his step.
"No," Kent corrected. "It is a special from the west, bringing a Bucks
crowd to the political rally. Number Three isn't due for fifteen minutes
yet, and she is always late."
They mounted the steps to the station platform in good time to meet the
three-car special as it came clattering in over the switches, and
presently found themselves in the thick of the crowd of debarking
ralliers.
It was a mixed masculine multitude, fairly typical of time, place and
occasion; stalwart men of the soil for the greater part, bearded and
bronzed and rough-clothed, with here and there a range-rider in
picturesque leathern shaps, sagging pistols and wide-flapped sombrero.
Loring stood aside and put up his eye-glasses. It was his first sight near
at hand of the untrammeled West _in puris naturalibus_, and he was finding
the spectacle both instructive and diverting. Looking to Kent for
fellowship he saw that his companion was holding himself stiffly aloof;
also, he remarked that none of the boisterous partizans flung a word of
recognition in Kent's direction.
"Don't you know any of them?" he asked.
Kent's reply was lost in the deep-chested bull-bellow of a cattleman from
the Rio Blanco.
"Hold on a minute, boys, before you scatter! Line up here, and let's give
three cheers and a tail-twister for next-Governor Bucks! Now,
then--_everybody_! Hip, hip----"
The ripping crash of the cheer jarred Loring's eye-glasses from their
hold, and he replaced them with a smile. Four times the ear-splitting
shout went up, and as the echoes of the "tiger" trailed off into silence
the stentorian voice was lifted again.
"Good enough! Now, then; three groans for the land syndicates, alien
mortgagees, and the Western Pacific Railroad, by grabs! and to hell with
'em!"
The responsive clamor was a thing to be acutely remembered--sustained,
long-drawn, vindictive; a nerve-wrenching pandemonium of groans, yelpings
and cat-calls, in the midst of which the partizans shuffled into loose
marching order and tramped away townward.
"That answers your question, doesn't it?" said Kent, smiling sourly. "If
not, I can set it out for you in words. The Western Pacific is the
best-hated corporation this side of the Mississippi, and I am its local
attorney."
"I don't envy you," said Loring. "I had no idea the opposition
crystallized itself in any such concrete ill will. You must have the whole
weight of public sentiment against you in any railroad litigation."
"I do," said Kent, simply. "If every complainant against us had the right
to pack his own jury, we couldn't fare worse."
"What is at the bottom of it? Is it our pricking of the Gaston bubble by
building on to the capital?"
"Oh, no; it's much more personal to these shouters. As you may, or may
not, know, our line--like every other western railroad with no
competition--has for its motto, 'All the tariff the traffic will stand,'
and it bleeds the country accordingly. But we are forgetting your train.
Shall we go and see how late it is?"