CHAPTER XVII ELLISVILLE THE RED

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      Gourdlike, Ellisville grew up in a night. It was not, and lo! it was. Many smokes arose, not moving from crest to crest of the hills as in the past, when savage bands of men signalled the one to the other, but rising steadily, in combined volume, a beacon of civilization set far out in the plains, assuring, beckoning. Silently, steadily, the people came to this rallying place, dropping in from every corner of the stars. 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. They remained a week. The Cottage Hotel had long since lost its key, and day and night there went on vast revelry among the men of the wild, wide West, then seeing for the first time what seemed to them the joy and glory of life. Little parties of men continually came up from the South, in search of opportunity to sell their cattle. Little parties of men came from the East, seeking to buy cattle and land. They met at the Cottage, and made merry in large fashion, seeing that this was a large land, and new, and unrestrained.

      Land and cattle, cattle and land. These themes were upon the lips of all, and in those days were topics of peace and harmony. The cattleman still stood for the nomadic and untrammelled West, the West of wild and glorious tradition. The man who sought for land was not yet recognised as the homesteader, the man of anchored craft, of settled convictions, of adventures ended. For one brief, glorious season the nomad and the home dweller shook hands in amity, not pausing to consider wherein their interests might differ. For both, this was the West, the free, unbounded, illimitable, exhaustless West — Homeric, Titanic, scornful to metes and bounds, having no scale of little things.

      Here and there small, low houses, built of the soil and clinging grimly to the soil, made indistinct dots upon the wide gray plains. Small corrals raised their ragged arms. Each man claimed his herd of kine. Slowly, swinging up from the far Southwest, whose settlement, slower and still more crude, had gone on scores of years ago when the Spaniards and the horse Indians of the lower plains were finally beaten back from the rancherias, there came on the great herds of the gaunt, broad-horned cattle, footsore and slow and weary with their march of more than a thousand miles. These vast herds deployed in turn about the town of Ellisville, the Mecca for which they had made this unprecedented pilgrimage. They trampled down every incipient field, and spread abroad over all the grazing lands, until every township held its thousands, crowded by the new thousands continually coming on. Long train loads of these cattle, wild and fierce, fresh from the chutes into which they were driven after their march across the untracked empire of the range, rolled eastward day after day. Herd after herd pressed still farther north, past Ellisville, going on wearily another thousand miles, to found the Ellisvilles of the upper range, to take the place of the buffalo driven from the ancient feeding grounds. Scattered into hundreds and scores and tens, the local market of the Ellisville settlers took its share also of the cheap cattle from the South, and sent them out over the cheap lands.

      It was indeed the beginning of things. Fortune was there for any man. The town became a loadstone for the restless population ever crowding out upon the uttermost frontier. 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. A newspaper, so called, cost a quarter of a dollar. The postmaster gave no change when one bought a postage stamp. A shave was worth a quarter of a dollar, or a half, or a dollar, as that might be. The price of a single drink was never established, since that was something never called for. For a cowman to spend one hundred dollars at the Cottage bar, and to lose ten thousand dollars at cards later in the same evening, was a feat not phenomenal. There were more cattle, south in Texas. The range-men, acquainted with danger and risk, loving excitement, balked at no hazard. Knowing no settled way of life, ignorant of a roof, careless of the ways of other lands, this town was a toy to them, a jest, just as all life, homeless, womanless, had been a jest. By day and by night, ceaseless, crude, barbaric, there went on a continuous carousal, which would have been joyless backed by a vitality less superb, an experience less young. Money and life — these two things we guard most sacredly in the older societies, the first most jealously, the latter with a lesser care. In Ellisville these were the commodities in least esteem. The philosophy of that land was either more ignorant or more profound than ours. Over all the world, unaided by a sensational press, and as yet without even that non-resident literature which was later to discover the Ellisvilles after the Ellisvilles were gone, there spread the tame of Ellisville the Red, the lustful, the unspeakable. Here was a riot of animal intensity of life, a mutiny of physical man, the last outbreak of the innate savagery of primitive man against the day of shackles and subjugation. The men of that rude day lived vehemently. They died, and they escaped. The earth is trampled over their bold hearts, and they have gone back into the earth, the air, the sky, and the wild flowers. Over their graves tread now those who bow the neck and bear the burden and feed the wheels, and know the despair of that civilization which grinds hope from out the heart. The one and the other came, departed, and will depart. The one and the other, the bond and the free, the untamed and the broken, were pawns in the iron game of destiny.

      The transient population of Ellisville, the cattle sellers and cattle buyers and land seekers, outnumbered three to one the resident or permanent population, which catered to this floating trade, and which supplied its commercial or professional wants. The resident one third was the nucleus of the real Ellisville that was to be. The social compact was still in embryo. Life was very simple. It was the day of the individual, the day before the law.

      With this rude setting there was to be enacted a rapid drama of material progress such as the world has never elsewhere seen; but first there must be played the wild prologue of the West, never at any time to have a more lurid scene than here at the Halfway House of a continent, at the intersection of the grand transcontinental trails, the bloody angle of the plains. Eight men in a day, a score in a week, met death by violence. The street in the cemetery doubled before that of the town. There were more graves than houses. This superbly wasteful day, how could it presage that which was to come? 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.