of the raw plains.  He bought the grim product of others who were ready to sell and go out the earlier again.  He betimes had out more than one wagon of his own; and Battersleigh, cavalryman, became Batty, scouter for bones, while Franklin remained at the market.  It was Franklin who, bethinking himself of the commercial difference between hard black horn and soft, spongy bone, began the earliest shipments of the tips of the buffalo horns, which he employed a man to saw off and pack into sacks ready for the far-off button factories.  Many tons of these tips alone he came to ship, such had been the incredible abundance and the incredible waste; and thus thriving upon an industry whose cause and whose possibility he deplored, he came to realize considerable sums and saw the question of subsistence pass rapidly into unconcern.  Thus he had gone to work in his new and untried world with a direct and effective force.  He dropped from him as a garment the customs and standards of the world he had left behind, and at once took his place as a factor in a new order of things.

Meantime the little town added building after building along its straggling street, each of these houses of a single story, with a large square of board front which projected deceptively high and wide, serving to cover from direct view the rather humiliating lack of importance in the actual building.  These new edifices were for the most part used as business places, the sorts of commerce being but two—­“general merchandise,” which meant chiefly saddles and firearms, and that other industry of new lands which flaunts under such signboards as the Lone Star, the Happy Home, the Quiet Place, the Cowboy’s Dream, and such descriptive nomenclature.  Of fourteen business houses, nine were saloons, and all these were prosperous.  Money was in the hands of all.  The times had not yet come when a dollar seemed a valuable thing.  Men were busy living, busy at exercising this vast opportunity of being prehistoric.

One by one, then in a body, as though struck by panic, the white tents of the railroad labourers vanished, passing on yet farther to the West, only the engineers remaining at Ellisville and prosecuting from the haven of the stone hotel the work of continuing the line.  The place of the tents was taken by vast white-topped wagons, the creaking cook carts of the cattle trail, and the van of the less nomadic man.  It was the beginning of the great cattle drive from the Southern to the Northern ranges, a strange, wild movement in American life which carried in its train a set of conditions as vivid and peculiar as they were transient.  At Ellisville there was no ordered way of living.  The frontier was yet but one vast camp.  It was, as Battersleigh had said, the beginning of things.