In the town of Ellisville the great heap of buffalo bones was gone from the side of the railroad track.  There were many wagons now, but none brought in bones to pile up by the railway; for even the bones of the buffalo were now gone forever.

Mother Daly looked out upon the Cottage corral one day, and saw it sound and strong.  Again she looked, and the bars were gone.  Yet another day she looked, and there was no corral!  Along the street, at the edge of the sidewalks of boards, there stood a long line of hitching rails.  Back of these board sidewalks were merchants who lived in houses with green blinds, and they pronounced that word “korrawl!”

The livery barn of Samuel Poston grew a story in stature, and there was such a thing as hay—­hay not imported in wired bales.  In the little city there were three buildings with bells above them.  There was a courthouse of many rooms; for Ellisville had stolen the county records from Strong City, and had held them through Armageddon.  There were large chutes now at the railway, not for cattle, but for coal.  Strange things appeared.  There was a wide, low, round, red house, full of car tracks, and smoke, and hammer blows, and dirt, and confusion; and from these shops came and went men who did an unheard-of thing.  They worked eight hours a day, no more, no less!  Now, in the time of Man, men worked twenty-four hours a day, or not at all; and they did no man’s bidding.

The streets of Ellisville were many.  They doubled and crossed.  There was a public square hedged about with trees artificially large.  For each vanishing saloon there had come a store with its hitching rack for teams.  The Land Office was yet at Ellisville, and the rush of settlers was continuous.  The men who came out from the East wore wide hats and carried little guns; but when they found the men of Ellisville wearing small, dark hats and carrying no guns at all, they saw that which was not to be believed, and which was, therefore, not so written in the literary centres which told the world about the Ellisvilles.  Strangers asked Ellisville about the days of the cattle drive, and Ellisville raised its eminently respectable eyebrows.  There was a faint memory of such a time, but it was long, long ago.  Two years ago!  All the world had changed since then.  There had perhaps been a Cottage Hotel.  There was perhaps a Mrs. Daly, who conducted a boarding-house, on a back street.  Our best people, however, lived at the Stone Hotel.  There were twelve lawyers who resided at this hotel, likewise two ministers and their wives.  Six of the lawyers would bring out their wives the following spring.  Ministers, of course, usually took their wives with them.

Ellisville had thirty business houses and two thousand inhabitants.  It had large railway shops and the division offices of the road.  It had two schoolhouses (always the schoolhouse grew quickly on the Western soil), six buildings of two stories, two buildings of three stories and built of brick.  Business lots were worth $1,800 to $2,500 each.  The First National Bank paid $4,000 for its corner.  The Kansas City and New England Loan, Trust, and Investment Company had expended $30,000 in cash on its lot, building, and office fixtures.  It had loaned three quarters of a million of dollars in and about Ellisville.