This magnanimous offer occurred right in front of my own house.  My wife overheard it, and also my reply.

As I rode away, he called out that he wanted to explain, but I was thoroughly disgusted.

“I have no time to listen to you,” I shouted over my shoulder.

I was bound out on a buffalo hunt to get meat for the graders twenty miles away on the railroad, and I kept right on going.  Three days afterward I rode back over the ridge above the town of Rome and looked down on it.

I took several more looks.  The town was being torn down and carted away.  The balloon-frame buildings were coming apart section by section.  I could see at least a hundred teams and wagons carting lumber, furniture, and everything that made up the town over the prairies to the eastward.

My pupil at buffalo hunting was Dr. Webb, president of the town-site company of the Kansas Pacific.  After I had ridden away without listening to his explanations he had invited the citizens of Rome to come over and see where the new railroad division town of Hays City was to be built.  He supplied them with wagons for the journey from a number of rock wagons that had been lent him by the Government to assist him in the location of a new town.  The distance was only a mile, and he got a crowd.  At the town site of Hays City he made a speech, telling the people who he was and what he proposed to do.  He said the railroad would build its repair-shops at the new town, and there would be employment for many men, and that Hays City was destined soon to be the most important place on the Plains.  He had already put surveyors to work on the site.  Lots, he said, were then on the market, and could be had far more reasonably than the lots in Rome.

My fellow-citizens straightway began to pick out their lots in the new town.  Webb loaned them the six-mule Government wagons to bring over their goods and chattels, together with the timbers of their houses.  When I galloped into Rome that day there was hardly a house left standing save my little home, our general store, and a few sod-houses and dugouts.

Mrs. Cody and the baby were sitting on a drygoods box when I rode up to the store.  My partner, Rose, stood near by, whistling and whittling.

“My word, Rose!  What has become of our town!” I cried.  Rose could make no answer.  Mrs. Cody said: 

“You wrote me you were worth $250,000.”

“We’ve got no time to talk about that now,” I said.  “What made this town move away?”

“You ought to have taken Mr. Webb’s offer,” was her answer.

“Who the dickens is Webb?” I stormed.  Rose looked up from his whittling.  “Bill,” he said, “that little flapper-jack was the president of the town-site company for the K.P.  Railroad, and he’s run such a bluff on our citizens about a new town site that is going to be a division-point that they’ve all moved over there.”

“Yes,” commented Mrs. Cody, “and where is your $250,000?”