THE MYSTERY OF METROPOLISVILLE

BY EDWARD EGGLESTON

AUTHOR OF "THE HOOGLEE SCHOOL-MASTER," "THE END OF THE WORLD," ETC

1888




TO ONE WHO KNOWS WITH ME A LOVE-STORY, NOW MORE THAN FIFTEEN YEARS IN
LENGTH, AND BETTER A HUNDREDFOLD THAN ANY I SHALL EVER BE ABLE TO WRITE,
THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED, ON AN ANNIVERSARY.

MARCH 18TH, 1873.




PREFACE.


A novel should be the truest of books. It partakes in a certain sense of
the nature of both history and art. It needs to be true to human nature
in its permanent and essential qualities, and it should truthfully
represent some specific and temporary manifestation of human nature: that
is, some form of society. It has been objected that I have copied life
too closely, but it seems to me that the work to be done just now, is to
represent the forms and spirit of our own life, and thus free ourselves
from habitual imitation of that which is foreign. I have wished to make
my stories of value as a contribution to the history of civilization in
America. If it be urged that this is not the highest function, I reply
that it is just now the most necessary function of this kind of
literature. Of the value of these stories as works of art, others must
judge; but I shall have the satisfaction of knowing that I have at least
rendered one substantial though humble service to our literature, if I
have portrayed correctly certain forms of American life and manners.

BROOKLYN, March, 1873.




CONTENTS.

PREFACE

WORDS BEFOREHAND

CHAPTER I.  The Autocrat of the Stage-Coach

CHAPTER II.  The Sod Tavern

CHAPTER III.  Land and Love

CHAPTER IV.  Albert and Katy

CHAPTER V.  Corner Lots

CHAPTER VI.  Little Katy's Lover

CHAPTER VII.  Catching and Getting Caught

CHAPTER VIII.  Isabel Marlay

CHAPTER IX.  Lovers and Lovers

CHAPTER X.  Plausaby, Esq., takes a Fatherly Interest

CHAPTER XI.  About Several Things

CHAPTER XII.  An Adventure

CHAPTER XIII.  A Shelter

CHAPTER XIV.  The Inhabitant

CHAPTER XV.  An Episode

CHAPTER XVI.  The Return

CHAPTER XVII.  Sawney and his Old Love

CHAPTER XVIII.  A Collision

CHAPTER XIX.  Standing Guard in Vain

CHAPTER XX.  Sawney and Westcott

CHAPTER XXI.  Rowing

CHAPTER XXII.  Sailing

CHAPTER XXIII.  Sinking

CHAPTER XXIV.  Dragging

CHAPTER XXV.  Afterwards

CHAPTER XXVI.  The Mystery

CHAPTER XXVII.  The Arrest

CHAPTER XXVIII.  The Tempter

CHAPTER XXIX.  The Trial

CHAPTER XXX.  The Penitentiary

CHAPTER XXXI.  Mr. Lurton

CHAPTER XXXII.  A Confession

CHAPTER XXXIII.  Death

CHAPTER XXXIV.  Mr. Lurton's Courtship

CHAPTER XXXV.  Unbarred

CHAPTER XXXVI.  Isabel

CHAPTER XXXVII.  The Last

WORDS AFTERWARDS




ILLUSTRATIONS BY FRANK BEARD


The Superior Being

Mr. Minorkey and the Fat Gentleman

Plausaby sells Lots

"By George! He! he! he!"

Mrs. Plausaby

The Inhabitant

A Pinch of Snuff

Mrs. Ferret

One Savage Blow full in the Face

"What on Airth's the Matter?"

His Unselfish Love found a Melancholy Recompense

The Editor of "The Windmill"

"Git up and Foller!"




THE MYSTERY OF METROPOLISVILLE.




WORDS BEFOREHAND.


Metropolisville is nothing but a memory now. If Jonah's gourd had not
been a little too much used already, it would serve an excellent turn
just here in the way of an apt figure of speech illustrating the growth,
the wilting, and the withering of Metropolisville. The last time I saw
the place the grass grew green where once stood the City Hall, the
corn-stalks waved their banners on the very site of the old store--I ask
pardon, the "Emporium"--of Jackson, Jones & Co., and what had been the
square, staring white court-house--not a Temple but a Barn of
Justice--had long since fallen to base uses. The walls which had echoed
with forensic grandiloquence were now forced to hear only the bleating of
silly sheep. The church, the school-house, and the City Hotel had been
moved away bodily. The village grew, as hundreds of other frontier
villages had grown, in the flush times; it died, as so many others died,
of the financial crash which was the inevitable sequel and retribution
of speculative madness. Its history resembles the history of other
Western towns of the sort so strongly, that I should not take the trouble
to write about it, nor ask you to take the trouble to read about it, if
the history of the town did not involve also the history of certain human
lives--of a tragedy that touched deeply more than one soul. And what is
history worth but for its human interest? The history of Athens is not of
value on account of its temples and statues, but on account of its men
and women. And though the "Main street" of Metropolisville is now a
country road where the dog-fennel blooms almost undisturbed by comers and
goers, though the plowshare remorselessly turns over the earth in places
where corner lots were once sold for a hundred dollars the front foot,
and though the lot once sacredly set apart (on the map) as "Depot Ground"
is now nothing but a potato-patch, yet there are hearts on which the
brief history of Metropolisville has left traces ineffaceable by sunshine
or storm, in time or eternity.




CHAPTER I.

THE AUTOCRAT OF THE STAGECOACH.


"Git up!"

No leader of a cavalry charge ever put more authority into his tones than
did Whisky Jim, as he drew the lines over his four bay horses in the
streets of Red Owl Landing, a village two years old, boasting three
thousand inhabitants, and a certain prospect of having four thousand a
month later.

Even ministers, poets, and writers of unworldly romances are sometimes
influenced by mercenary considerations. But stage-drivers are entirely
consecrated to their high calling. Here was Whisky Jim, in the very
streets of Red Owl, in the spring of the year 1856, when money was worth
five and six per cent a month on bond and mortgage, when corner lots
doubled in value over night, when everybody was frantically trying to
swindle everybody else--here was Whisky Jim, with the infatuation of a
life-long devotion to horse-flesh, utterly oblivious to the chances of
robbing green emigrants which a season of speculation affords. He was
secure from the infection. You might have shown him a gold-mine under the
very feet of his wheel-horses, and he could not have worked it
twenty-four hours. He had an itching palm, which could be satisfied with
nothing but the "ribbons" drawn over the backs of a four-in-hand.

"_Git_ up!"

The coach moved away--slowly at first--from the front door of the large,
rectangular, unpainted Red Owl Hotel, dragging its wheels heavily through
the soft turf of a Main street from which the cotton-wood trees had been
cut down, but in which the stumps were still standing, and which remained
as innocent of all pavement as when, three years before, the chief whose
name it bore, loaded his worldly goods upon the back of his oldest and
ugliest wife, slung his gun over his shoulder, and started mournfully
away from the home of his fathers, which he, shiftless fellow, had
bargained away to the white man for an annuity of powder and blankets,
and a little money, to be quickly spent for whisky. And yet, I might add
digressively, there is comfort in the saddest situations. Even the
venerable Red Owl bidding adieu to the home of his ancestors found solace
in the sweet hope of returning under favorable circumstances to scalp the
white man's wife and children.

"Git up, thair! G'lang!" The long whip swung round and cracked
threateningly over the haunches of the leaders, making them start
suddenly as the coach went round a corner and dipped into a hole at the
same instant, nearly throwing the driver, and the passenger who was
enjoying the outride with him, from their seats.

"What a hole!" said the passenger, a studious-looking young man, with an
entomologist's tin collecting-box slung over his shoulders.

The driver drew a long breath, moistened his lips, and said in a cool and
aggravatingly deliberate fashion:

"That air blamed pollywog puddle sold las' week fer tew thaousand."

[Illustration: THE SUPERIOR BEING.]

"Dollars?" asked the young man.

Jim gave him an annihilating look, and queried: "Didn' think I meant tew
thaousand acorns, did ye?"

"It's an awful price," said the abashed passenger, speaking as one might
in the presence of a superior being.

Jim was silent awhile, and then resumed in the same slow tone, but with
something of condescension mixed with it:

"Think so, do ye? Mebbe so, stranger. Fool what bought that tadpole lake
done middlin' well in disposin' of it, how-sumdever."

Here the Superior Being came to a dead pause, and waited to be
questioned.

"How's that?" asked the young man.

After a proper interval of meditation, Jim said: "Sol' it this week. Tuck
jest twice what he invested in his frog-fishery."

"Four thousand?" said the passenger with an inquisitive and surprised
rising inflection.

"Hey?" said Jim, looking at him solemnly. "Tew times tew use to be four
when I larnt the rewl of three in old Varmount. Mebbe 'taint so in the
country you come from, where they call a pail a bucket."

The passenger kept still awhile. The manner of the Superior Being chilled
him a little. But Whisky Jim graciously broke the silence himself.

"Sell nex' week fer six."

The young man's mind had already left the subject under discussion, and
it took some little effort of recollection to bring it back.

"How long will it keep on going up?" he asked.

"Tell it teches the top. Come daown then like a spile-driver in a hurry.
Higher it goes, the wuss it'll mash anybody what happens to stan'
percisely under it."

"When will it reach the top?"

The Superior Being turned his eyes full upon the student, who blushed a
little under the half-sneer of his look.

"Yaou tell! Thunder, stranger, that's jest what everybody'd pay money tew
find out. Everybody means to git aout in time, but--thunder!--every piece
of perrary in this territory's a deadfall. Somebody'll git catched in
every one of them air traps. Gee up! G'lang! _Git_ up, won't you? Hey?"
And this last sentence was ornamented with another magnificent
writing-master flourish of the whip-lash, and emphasized by an explosive
crack at the end, which started the four horses off in a swinging gallop,
from which Jim did not allow them to settle back into a walk until they
had reached the high prairie land in the rear of the town.

"What are those people living in tents for?" asked the student as he
pointed back to Red Owl, now considerably below them, and which presented
a panorama of balloon-frame houses, mostly innocent of paint, with a
sprinkling of tents pitched here and there among the trees; on lots not
yet redeemed from virgin wildness, but which possessed the remarkable
quality of "fetching" prices that would have done honor to well-located
land in Philadelphia.

"What they live that a-way fer? Hey? Mos'ly 'cause they can't live no
other." Then, after a long pause, the Superior Being resumed in a tone of
half-soliloquy: "A'n't a bed nur a board in the hull city of Red Owl to
be had for payin' nur coaxin'. Beds is aces. Houses is trumps. Landlords
is got high, low, Jack, and the game in ther hands. Looky there! A
bran-new lot of fools fresh from the factory." And he pointed to the old
steamboat "Ben Bolt," which was just coming up to the landing with deck
and guards black with eager immigrants of all classes.

But Albert Charlton, the student, did not look back any longer. It marks
an epoch in a man's life when he first catches sight of a prairie
landscape, especially if that landscape be one of those great rolling
ones to be seen nowhere so well as in Minnesota. Charlton had crossed
Illinois from Chicago to Dunleith in the night-time, and so had missed
the flat prairies. His sense of sublimity was keen, and, besides his
natural love for such scenes, he had a hobbyist passion for virgin nature
superadded.

"What a magnificent country!" he cried.

"Talkin' sense!" muttered Jim. "Never seed so good a place fer stagin'
in my day."

For every man sees through his own eyes. To the emigrants whose white-top
"prairie schooners" wound slowly along the road, these grass-grown hills
and those far-away meadowy valleys were only so many places where good
farms could be opened without the trouble of cutting off the trees. It
was not landscape, but simply land where one might raise thirty or forty
bushels of spring wheat to the acre, without any danger of "fevernager;"
to the keen-witted speculator looking sharply after corner stakes, at a
little distance from the road, it was just so many quarter sections,
"eighties," and "forties," to be bought low and sold high whenever
opportunity offered; to Jim it was a good country for staging, except a
few "blamed sloughs where the bottom had fell out." But the enthusiastic
eyes of young Albert Charlton despised all sordid and "culinary uses" of
the earth; to him this limitless vista of waving wild grass, these green
meadows and treeless hills dotted everywhere with purple and yellow
flowers, was a sight of Nature in her noblest mood. Such rolling hills
behind hills! If those _rolls_ could be called hills! After an hour the
coach had gradually ascended to the summit of the "divide" between Purple
River on the one side and Big Gun River on the other, and the rows of
willows and cotton-woods that hung over the water's edge--the only trees
under the whole sky--marked distinctly the meandering lines of the two
streams. Albert Charlton shouted and laughed; he stood up beside Jim, and
cried out that it was a paradise.

"Mebbe 'tis," sneered Jim, "Anyway, it's got more'n one devil into it.
_Gil_--lang!"

And under the inspiration of the scenery, Albert, with the impulsiveness
of a young man, unfolded to Whisky Jim all the beauties of his own
theories: how a man should live naturally and let other creatures live;
how much better a man was without flesh-eating; how wrong it was to
speculate, and that a speculator gave nothing in return; and that it was
not best to wear flannels, seeing one should harden his body to endure
cold and all that; and how a man should let his beard grow, not use
tobacco nor coffee nor whisky, should get up at four o'clock in the
morning and go to bed early.

"Looky here, mister!" said the Superior Being, after a while. "I wouldn't
naow, ef I was you!"

"Wouldn't what?"

"Wouldn't fetch no sich notions into this ked'ntry. Can't afford tew.
'Taint no land of idees. It's the ked'ntry of corner lots. Idees is in
the way--don't pay no interest. Haint had time to build a 'sylum fer
people with idees yet, in this territory. Ef you must have 'em, why let
me _rec_-ommend Bost'n. Drove hack there wunst, myself." Then after a
pause he proceeded with the deliberation of a judge: "It's the best
village I ever lay eyes on fer idees, is Bost'n. Thicker'n hops! Grow
single and in bunches. Have s'cieties there fer idees. Used to make money
outen the fellows with idees, cartin 'em round to anniversaries and sich.
Ef you only wear a nice slick plug-hat there, you kin believe anything
you choose or not, and be a gentleman all the same. The more you believe
or don't believe in Bost'n, the more gentleman you be. The
don't-believers is just as good as the believers. Idees inside the head,
and plug-hats outside. But idees out here! I tell you, here it's nothin'
but per-cent." The Superior Being puckered his lips and whistled. "_Git_
up, will you! G'lang! Better try Bost'n."

Perhaps Albert Charlton, the student passenger, was a little offended
with the liberty the driver had taken in rebuking his theories. He was
full of "idees," and his fundamental idea was of course his belief in
the equality and universal brotherhood of men. In theory he recognized
no social distinctions. But the most democratic of democrats in theory
is just a little bit of an aristocrat in feeling--he doesn't like to be
patted on the back by the hostler; much less does he like to be
reprimanded by a stage-driver. And Charlton was all the more sensitive
from a certain vague consciousness that he himself had let down the bars
of his dignity by unfolding his theories so gushingly to Whisky Jim.
What did Jim know--what _could_ a man who said "idees" know--about the
great world-reforming thoughts that engaged his attention? But when
dignity is once fallen, all the king's oxen and all the king's men can't
stand it on its legs again. In such a strait, one must flee from him who
saw the fall.

Albert Charlton therefore determined that he would change to the inside
of the coach when an opportunity should offer, and leave the Superior
Being to sit "wrapped in the solitude of his own originality."




CHAPTER II.

THE SOD TAVERN.


Here and there Charlton noticed the little claim-shanties, built in every
sort of fashion, mere excuses for pre-emption. Some were even constructed
of brush. What was lacking in the house was amply atoned for by the
perjury of the claimant who, in pre-empting, would swear to any necessary
number of good qualities in his habitation. On a little knoll ahead of
the stage he saw what seemed to be a heap of earth. There must have been
some inspiration in this mound, for, as soon as it came in sight, Whisky
Jim began to chirrup and swear at his horses, and to crack his long whip
threateningly until he had sent them off up the hill at a splendid pace.
Just by this mound of earth he reined up with an air that said the
forenoon route was finished. For this was nothing less than the "Sod
Tavern," a house built of cakes of the tenacious prairiesod. No other
material was used except the popple-poles, which served for supports to
the sod-roof. The tavern was not over ten feet high at the apex of the
roof; it had been built for two or three years, and the grass was now
growing on top. A red-shirted publican sallied out of this artificial
grotto, and invited the ladies and gentlemen to dinner.

It appeared, from a beautifully-engraved map hanging on the walls of the
Sod Tavern, that this earthly tabernacle stood in the midst of an ideal
town. The map had probably been constructed by a poet, for it was quite
superior to the limitations of sense and matter-of-fact. According to the
map, this solitary burrow was surrounded by Seminary, Depot, Court-House,
Woolen Factory, and a variety of other potential institutions, which
composed the flourishing city of New Cincinnati. But the map was meant
chiefly for Eastern circulation.

Charlton's dietetic theories were put to the severest test at the table.
He had a good appetite. A ride in the open air in Minnesota is apt to
make one hungry. But the first thing that disgusted Mr. Charlton was the
coffee, already poured out, and steaming under his nose. He hated coffee
because he liked it; and the look of disgust with which he shoved it away
was the exact measure of his physical craving for it. The solid food on
the table consisted of waterlogged potatoes, half-baked salt-rising
bread, and salt-pork. Now, young Charlton was a reader of the _Water-Cure
Journal_ of that day, and despised meat of all things, and of all meat
despised swine's flesh, as not even fit for Jews; and of all forms of
hog, hated fat salt-pork as poisonously indigestible. So with a dyspeptic
self-consciousness he rejected the pork, picked off the periphery of the
bread near the crust, cautiously avoiding the dough-bogs in the middle;
but then he revenged himself by falling furiously upon the aquatic
potatoes, out of which most of the nutriment had been soaked.

Jim, who sat alongside him, doing cordial justice to the badness of the
meal, muttered that it wouldn't do to eat by idees in Minnesoty. And with
the freedom that belongs to the frontier, the company begun to discuss
dietetics, the fat gentleman roundly abusing the food for the express
purpose, as Charlton thought, of diverting attention from his voracious
eating of it.

"Simply despicable," grunted the fat man, as he took a third slice of the
greasy pork. "I do despise such food."

"Eats it _like_ he was mad at it," said Driver Jim in an undertone.

But as Charlton's vegetarianism was noticed, all fell to denouncing it.
Couldn't live in a cold climate without meat. Cadaverous Mr. Minorkey,
the broad-shouldered, sad-looking man with side-whiskers, who complained
incessantly of a complication of disorders, which included dyspepsia,
consumption, liver-disease, organic disease of the heart, rheumatism,
neuralgia, and entire nervous prostration, and who was never entirely
happy except in telling over the oft-repeated catalogue of his disgusting
symptoms--Mr. Minorkey, as he sat by his daughter, inveighed, in an
earnest crab-apple voice, against Grahamism. He would have been in his
grave twenty years ago if it hadn't been for good meat. And then he
recited in detail the many desperate attacks from which he had been saved
by beefsteak. But this pork he felt sure would make him sick. It might
kill him. And he evidently meant to sell his life as dearly as possible,
for, as Jim muttered to Charlton, he was "goin' the whole hog anyhow."

"Miss Minorkey," said the fat gentleman checking a piece of pork in the
middle of its mad career toward his lips, "Miss Minorkey, we _should_
like to hear from you on this subject." In truth, the fat gentleman was
very weary of Mr. Minorkey's pitiful succession of diagnoses of the awful
symptoms and fatal complications of which he had been cured by very
allopathic doses of animal food. So he appealed to Miss Minorkey for
relief at a moment when her father had checked and choked his utterance
with coffee.

Miss Minorkey was quite a different affair from her father. She was
thoroughly but not obtrusively healthy. She had a high, white forehead, a
fresh complexion, and a mouth which, if it was deficient in sweetness and
warmth of expression, was also free from all bitterness and
aggressiveness. Miss Minorkey was an eminently well-educated young lady
as education goes. She was more--she was a young lady of reading and of
ideas. She did not exactly defend Charlton's theory in her reply, but she
presented both sides of the controversy, and quoted some scientific
authorities in such a way as to make it apparent that there _were_ two
sides. This unexpected and rather judicial assistance called forth from
Charlton a warm acknowledgment, his pale face flushed with modest
pleasure, and as he noted the intellectuality of Miss Minorkey's forehead
he inwardly comforted himself that the only person of ideas in the whole
company was not wholly against him.

Albert Charlton was far from being a "ladies' man;" indeed, nothing was
more despicable in his eyes than men who frittered away life in ladies'
company. But this did not at all prevent him from being very human
himself in his regard for ladies. All the more that he had lived out of
society all his life, did his heart flutter when he took his seat in the
stage after dinner. For Miss Minorkey's father and the fat gentleman felt
that they must have the back seat; there were two other gentlemen on the
middle seat; and Albert Charlton, all unused to the presence of ladies,
must needs sit on the front seat, alongside the gray traveling-dress of
the intellectual Miss Minorkey, who, for her part, was not in the least
bit nervous. Young Charlton might have liked her better if she had been.

But if she was not shy, neither was she obtrusive. When Mr. Charlton had
grown weary of hearing Mr. Minorkey pity himself, and of hearing the fat
gentleman boast of the excellence of the Minnesota climate, the dryness
of the air, and the wonderful excess of its oxygen, and the entire
absence of wintry winds, and the rapid development of the country, and
when he had grown weary of discussions of investments at five per cent a
month, he ventured to interrupt Miss Minorkey's reverie by a remark to
which she responded. And he was soon in a current of delightful talk. The
young gentleman spoke with great enthusiasm; the young woman without
warmth, but with a clear intellectual interest in literary subjects, that
charmed her interlocutor. I say literary subjects, though the range of
the conversation was not very wide. It was a great surprise to Charlton,
however, to find in a new country a young woman so well informed.

Did he fall in love? Gentle reader, be patient. You want a love-story,
and I don't blame you. For my part, I should not take the trouble to
record this history if there were no love in it. Love is the universal
bond of human sympathy. But you must give people time. What we call
falling in love is not half so simple an affair as you think, though it
often looks simple enough to the spectator. Albert Charlton was pleased,
he was full of enthusiasm, and I will not deny that he several times
reflected in a general way that so clear a talker and so fine a thinker
would make a charming wife for some man--some intellectual man--some man
like himself, for instance. He admired Miss Minorkey. He liked her. With
an enthusiastic young man, admiring and liking are, to say the least,
steps that lead easily to something else. But you must remember how
complex a thing love is. Charlton--I have to confess it--was a little
conceited, as every young man is at twenty. He flattered himself that the
most intelligent woman he could find would be a good match for him. He
loved ideas, and a woman of ideas pleased his fancy. Add to this that he
had come to a time of life when he was very liable to fall in love with
somebody, and that he was in the best of spirits from the influence of
air and scenery and motion and novelty, and you render it quite probable
that he could not be tossed for half a day on the same seat in a coach
with such a girl as Helen Minorkey was--that, above all, he could not
discuss Hugh Miller and the "Vestiges of Creation" with her, without
imminent peril of experiencing an admiration for her and an admiration
for himself, and a liking and a palpitating and a castle-building that
under favorable conditions might somehow grow into that complex and
inexplicable feeling which we call love.

In fact, Jim, who drove both routes on this day, and who peeped into the
coach whenever he stopped to water, soliloquized that two fools with
idees would make a quare span ef they had a neck-yoke on.




CHAPTER III.

LAND AND LOVE.


Mr. Minorkey and the fat gentleman found much to interest them as the
coach rolled over the smooth prairie road, now and then crossing a
slough. Not that Mr. Minorkey or his fat friend had any particular
interest in the beautiful outline of the grassy knolls, the gracefulness
of the water-willows that grew along the river edge, and whose paler
green was the prominent feature of the landscape, or in the sweet
contrast at the horizon where grass-green earth met the light blue
northern sky. But the scenery none the less suggested fruitful themes for
talk to the two gentlemen on the back-seat.

"I've got money loaned on that quarter at three per cent a month and five
after due. The mortgage has a waiver in it too. You see, the security was
unusually good, and that was why I let him have it so low." This was what
Mr. Minorkey said at intervals and with some variations, generally adding
something like this: "The day I went to look at that claim, to see
whether the security was good or not, I got caught in the rain. I
expected it would kill me. Well, sir, I was taken that night with a
pain--just here--and it ran through the lung to the point of the
shoulder-blade--here. I had to get my feet into a tub of water and take
some brandy. I'd a had pleurisy if I'd been in any other country but
this. I tell you, nothing saved me but the oxygen in this air. There!
there's a forty that I lent a hundred dollars on at five per cent a month
and six per cent after maturity, with a waiver in the mortgage. The day I
came here to see this I was nearly dead. I had a--"

Just here the fat gentleman would get desperate, and, by way of
preventing the completion of the dolorous account, would break out with:
"That's Sokaska, the new town laid out by Johnson--that hill over there,
where you see those stakes. I bought a corner-lot fronting the public
square, and a block opposite where they hope to get a factory. There's a
brook runs through the town, and they think it has water enough and fall
enough to furnish a water-power part of the day, during part of the year,
and they hope to get a factory located there. There'll be a territorial
road run through from St. Paul next spring if they can get a bill through
the legislature this winter. You'd best buy there."

"I never buy town lots," said Minorkey, coughing despairingly, "never! I
run no risks. I take my interest at three and five per cent a month on a
good mortgage, with a waiver, and let other folks take risks."