skin-hunters, some of the railroad men, some of the cowmen, some of the
home-seekers, remained in the eddy at Ellisville, this womanless
beginning of a permanent society. Not sinless was this society at its
incipiency. In any social atmosphere good and evil are necessary
concomitants. Sinless men would form a community at best but
perishable. Tolerance, submission, patriotism so called, brotherly
love so named--all these things were to come later, as they have ever
done in the development of communities, builded mainly upon the
foundation of individual aggressiveness and individual centrifugence.
Having arrived, we wave scented kerchiefs between us and the thought of
such a beginning of our prosperity. Having become slaves, we scoff at
the thought of a primitive, grand, and happy world, where each man was
a master. Having lost touch of the earth, having lost sight of the
sky, we opine there could have been small augur in a land where each
man found joy in an earth and sky which to him seemed his own. There
were those who knew that joy and who foresaw its passing, yet they were
happy. Edward Franklin saw afar off the dim star of his ambition; yet
for him, as for many another man in those days, it was enough to own
this earthy this sky, to lie down under his own roof at night to
untroubled dreams, to awake each morning to a day of hopeful toil.




CHAPTER IX

THE NEW MOVERS

Far away, across the wide gray plain, appeared a tiny dot, apparently
an unimportant fixture of the landscape. An hour earlier it might not