But in the roar of the land-boom he did not hear her, and she went away
leaving him only a tenderness akin to weakness for all new towns, and a
desire, mercifully limited by lack of money, to gamble in every one of
them. Of all the excitements that life offers there are few to be
compared with the whirl of a red-hot boom; also it is strictly moral,
because you _do_ fairly earn your 'unearned increment' by labour and
perspiration and sitting up far into the night--by working like a fiend,
as all pioneers must do. And consider all that is in it! The headlong
stampede to the new place; the money dashed down like counters for
merest daily bread; the arrival of the piled cars whence the raw
material of a city--men, lumber, and shingle--are shot on to the not yet
nailed platform; the slashing out and pegging down of roads across the
blank face of the wilderness; the heaving up amid shouts and yells of
the city's one electric light--a raw sizzling arc atop of an unbarked
pine pole; the sweating, jostling mob at the sale of town-lots; the roar
of 'Let the woman have it!' that stops all bidding when the one other
woman in the place puts her price on a plot; the packed real-estate
offices; the real-estate agents themselves, lost novelists of prodigious
imagination; the gorgeous pink and blue map of the town, hung up in the
bar-room, with every railroad from Portland to Portland meeting in its
heart; the misspelled curse against 'this dam hole in the ground'
scrawled on the flank of a strayed freight-car by some man who had lost
his money and gone away; the conferences at street corners of syndicates
six hours established by men not twenty-five years old; the outspoken
contempt for the next town, also 'on the boom,' and, therefore, utterly
vile; the unceasing tramp of heavy feet on the board pavement, where
stranger sometimes turns on stranger in an agony of conviction, and,
shaking him by the shoulder, shouts in his ear, 'By G--d! Isn't it
grand? Isn't it glorious? 'and last, the sleep of utterly worn-out men,
three in each room of the shanty hotel: 'All meals two dollars. All