"Beats all!" Jed Simpson exclaimed.
"Sure does!" Pete seconded.
Instead of a town or village, they looked down upon a city. True, for
the most part it was a city of tents. But there were some wooden
buildings, well-planned streets, streams of wagons going in and coming
out, and more people than any of them had ever before seen in one place.
The sounds were those of hammering, sawing, shouting, creaking,
everything that could possibly be connected with a city in the making.
A little overwhelmed because they'd expected a baby and found a giant,
they rode slowly into the city. A man on a running mule careened crazily
among the wagons, and a man driving a four-horse span hitched to a heavy
wagon spoke to him in terms that are never heard in polite company.
"Cover your ears, Cindy," Alec ordered.
"I didn't hear a thing," Cindy said sweetly.
Her eyes were big and growing bigger. A wagon piled high with lumber
picked up at the railroad swerved to where some men were working
frantically on a wooden building. Two of the workers, Cindy saw, were
the carefree young men who had camped close to the Simpson wagon on the
border and had taken little interest in anything except fun. They'd
probably thought that getting land in Oklahoma was a huge joke too, and
as a result they hadn't got any. Cindy supposed that most of the people
who had no claims would either go back home or work for someone else.
Next to the building was a tent with "Poast Ofise" written on it in red
paint. At least two hundred people who hoped to get mail stood in a long
line outside it. Next was another tent with a sign, "J. C. Summers,
Wholesale and Retail Grocer," and next to that a wooden building whose
sign proclaimed that it belonged to Caldwell and Hunter, dry-goods
merchants.
Everybody, including those who stood in various lines, for there was
much pushing and shoving, seemed in a great hurry.
"What are they all doing?" Alec inquired.
"They are," his father said happily, "building Plains City." He called
to a man standing beside a building, "Where's the livery stable?"
"Straight down!" The man waved his hand down the street.
"We'll leave our horses and walk around awhile," Mr. Simpson said. "It's
worth seeing."
The livery stable, when they finally reached it, was merely a series of
posts with ropes stretched between them. There were so many horses,
mules, and ponies already tied to the ropes that there couldn't possibly
be room for more. But just as they rode up, four horsemen rode away.
"Any room?" Mr. Simpson asked the lank, tobacco-chewing man in charge of
the livery.
"Yup."
"How much?"
"Fifty cents a head."
"That include hay and water?"
"Yup."
"I looked from the top of a knoll," said Mr. Simpson. "I thought that
town sites could be no more than three hundred and twenty acres. Plains
City seems almost three times that."
"Plains City," the livery man said, "is igzactly three hun'ert an'
twenty acres."