a colony of restless and ambitious life.  From the East there came a minister with his wife, both fresh from college.  They remained a week.  The Cottage Hotel had long since lost its key, and day and night there went on vast revelry among the men of the wild, wide West, then seeing for the first time what seemed to them the joy and glory of life.  Little parties of men continually came up from the South, in search of opportunity to sell their cattle.  Little parties of men came from the East, seeking to buy cattle and land.  They met at the Cottage, and made merry in large fashion, seeing that this was a large land, and new, and unrestrained.

Land and cattle, cattle and land.  These themes were upon the lips of all, and in those days were topics of peace and harmony.  The cattleman still stood for the nomadic and untrammelled West, the West of wild and glorious tradition.  The man who sought for land was not yet recognised as the homesteader, the man of anchored craft, of settled convictions, of adventures ended.  For one brief, glorious season the nomad and the home dweller shook hands in amity, not pausing to consider wherein their interests might differ.  For both, this was the West, the free, unbounded, illimitable, exhaustless West—­Homeric, Titanic, scornful to metes and bounds, having no scale of little things.

Here and there small, low houses, built of the soil and clinging grimly to the soil, made indistinct dots upon the wide gray plains.  Small corrals raised their ragged arms.  Each man claimed his herd of kine.  Slowly, swinging up from the far Southwest, whose settlement, slower and still more crude, had gone on scores of years ago when the Spaniards and the horse Indians of the lower plains were finally beaten back from the rancherias, there came on the great herds of the gaunt, broad-horned cattle, footsore and slow and weary with their march of more than a thousand miles.  These vast herds deployed in turn about the town of Ellisville, the Mecca for which they had made this unprecedented pilgrimage.  They trampled down every incipient field, and spread abroad over all the grazing lands, until every township held its thousands, crowded by the new thousands continually coming on.  Long train loads of these cattle, wild and fierce, fresh from the chutes into which they were driven after their march across the untracked empire of the range, rolled eastward day after day.  Herd after herd pressed still farther north, past Ellisville, going on wearily another thousand miles, to found the Ellisvilles of the upper range, to take the place of the buffalo driven from the ancient feeding grounds.  Scattered into hundreds and scores and tens, the local market of the Ellisville settlers took its share also of the cheap cattle from the South, and sent them out over the cheap lands.