At first Major Buford rebelled at the thought of innkeeping.  His family had kept open house before the war, and he came from a land where the thoughts of hospitality and of price were not to be mentioned in the same day.  Yet all about him lay the crude conditions of a raw, new country.  At best he could get no product from the land for many months, and then but a problematical one.  He was in a region where each man did many things, and first that thing which seemed nearest at hand to be done.  It was the common sense of old Aunt Lucy which discovered the truth of the commercial proposition that what a man will pay for a given benefit is what he ought to pay.  Had Aunt Lucy asked the cow-punchers even twice her tariff for a pie they would have paid it gladly.  Had Mary Ellen asked them for their spurs and saddles, the latter would have been laid down.

From the Halfway House south to the Red River there was nothing edible.  And over this Red River there came now swarming uncounted thousands of broad-horned cattle, driven by many bodies of hardy, sunburned, beweaponed, hungry men.  At Ellisville, now rapidly becoming an important cattle market, the hotel accommodations were more pretentious than comfortable, and many a cowman who had sat at the board of the Halfway House going up the trail, would mount his horse and ride back daily twenty-five miles for dinner.  Such are the attractions of corn bread and chicken when prepared by the hands of a real genius gone astray on this much-miscooked world.

Many other guests were among those “locators,” who came out to Ellisville and drove to the south in search of “claims.”  These usually travelled over the route of Sam, the stage-driver, who carried the mail to Plum Centre during its life, and who never failed to sound the praises of the Halfway House.  Thus the little Southern family quickly found itself possessed of a definite, profitable, and growing business.  Buford was soon able to employ aid in making his improvements.  He constructed a large dugout, after the fashion of the dwelling most common in the country at that time, This manner of dwelling, practically a roofed-over cellar, its side-walls showing but a few feet above the level of the earth, had been discovered to be a very practical and comfortable form of living place by those settlers who found a region practically barren of timber, and as yet unsupplied with brick or boards.  In addition to the main dugout there was a rude barn built of sods, and towering high above the squat buildings rose the frame of the first windmill on the cattle trail, a landmark for many miles.  Seeing these things growing up about him, at the suggestion and partly through the aid of his widely scattered but kind-hearted neighbours, Major Buford began to take on heart of grace.  He foresaw for his people an independence, rude and far below their former plane of life, it was true, yet infinitely better than a proud despair.