It was indeed the beginning of things.  Fortune was there for any man.  The town became a loadstone for the restless population ever crowding out upon the uttermost frontier.  The men from the farther East dropped their waistcoats and their narrow hats at Ellisville.  All the world went under wide felt and bore a jingling spur.  Every man was armed.  The pitch of life was high.  It was worth death to live a year in such a land!  The pettinesses fell away from mankind.  The horizon of life was wide.  There was no time for small exactness.  A newspaper, so called, cost a quarter of a dollar.  The postmaster gave no change when one bought a postage stamp.  A shave was worth a quarter of a dollar, or a half, or a dollar, as that might be.  The price of a single drink was never established, since that was something never called for.  For a cowman to spend one hundred dollars at the Cottage bar, and to lose ten thousand dollars at cards later in the same evening, was a feat not phenomenal.  There were more cattle, south in Texas.  The range-men, acquainted with danger and risk, loving excitement, balked at no hazard.  Knowing no settled way of life, ignorant of a roof, careless of the ways of other lands, this town was a toy to them, a jest, just as all life, homeless, womanless, had been a jest.  By day and by night, ceaseless, crude, barbaric, there went on a continuous carousal, which would have been joyless backed by a vitality less superb, an experience less young.  Money and life—­these two things we guard most sacredly in the older societies, the first most jealously, the latter with a lesser care.  In Ellisville these were the commodities in least esteem.  The philosophy of that land was either more ignorant or more profound than ours.  Over all the world, unaided by a sensational press, and as yet without even that non-resident literature which was later to discover the Ellisvilles after the Ellisvilles were gone, there spread the tame of Ellisville the Red, the lustful, the unspeakable.  Here was a riot of animal intensity of life, a mutiny of physical man, the last outbreak of the innate savagery of primitive man against the day of shackles and subjugation.  The men of that rude day lived vehemently.  They died, and they escaped.  The earth is trampled over their bold hearts, and they have gone back into the earth, the air, the sky, and the wild flowers.  Over their graves tread now those who bow the neck and bear the burden and feed the wheels, and know the despair of that civilization which grinds hope from out the heart.  The one and the other came, departed, and will depart.  The one and the other, the bond and the free, the untamed and the broken, were pawns in the iron game of destiny.

The transient population of Ellisville, the cattle sellers and cattle buyers and land seekers, outnumbered three to one the resident or permanent population, which catered to this floating trade, and which supplied its commercial or professional wants.  The resident one third was the nucleus of the real Ellisville that was to be.  The social compact was still in embryo.  Life was very simple.  It was the day of the individual, the day before the law.