This purchase of the “J-lazy-S” ranch by Hawk and Guilford marked the modest beginning of Gaston the marvelous.  By the time the temporary sidings were down and the tank well was dug in the damp sands, it was heralded far and wide that the Western Pacific would make the city on the banks of Dry Creek—­a city consisting as yet only of the Simsby ranch shacks—­its western terminus.  Thereupon followed one of the senseless rushes that populate the waste places of the earth and give the professional city-builder his reason for being.  In a fortnight after the driving of the silver spike the dusty plain was dotted with the black-roofed shelters of the Argonauts; and by the following spring the plow was furrowing the cattle ranges in ever-widening circles, and Gaston had voted a bond loan of three hundred thousand dollars to pave its streets.

Then under the forced draft of skilful exploitation, three years of high pressure passed quickly; years named by the promoters the period of development.  In the Year One the very heavens smiled and the rainfall broke the record of the oldest inhabitant.  Thus the region round about lost the word “arid” as a qualifying adjective, and the picturesque fictions of the prospectus makers were miraculously justified.  In Year Two there was less rain, but still an abundant crop; and Jethro Simsby, drifting in from some unnamed frontier of a newer cow-country, saw what he had missed, took to drink, and shot himself in the lobby of the Mid-Continent Hotel, an ornate, five-storied, brick-and-terra-cotta structure standing precisely upon the site of the “J-lazy-S” branding corral.

It was in this same Year Two, the fame of the latest of western Meccas for young men having penetrated to the provincial backgrounds of New Hampshire, that David Kent came.

By virtue of his diploma, and three years of country practice in the New Hampshire county town where his father before him had read Blackstone and Chitty, he had his window on the fourth floor of the Farquhar Building lettered “Attorney and Counselor at Law”; but up to the day in the latter part of the fateful Year Three, when the overdue crash came, he was best known as a reckless plunger in real estate—­this, mind you, at a moment when every third man counted his gains in “front feet”, and was shouting himself hoarse at the daily brass-band lot sales.

When the bottom fell out in the autumn of Year Three, Kent fell with it, though not altogether as far or as hard as many another.  One of his professional hold-fasts—­it was the one that afterward became the bread-tackle in the famine time—­was his position as local attorney for the railway company.  By reason of this he was among the first to have a hint of the impending cataclysm.  The Western Pacific, after so long a pause on the banks of Dry Creek, had floated its second mortgage bonds and would presently build on to the capital, leaving Gaston to way-station quietude.  Therefore and wherefore——­