“‘There’s one branch o’ your business that isn’t mentioned on the card,’ I says.

“‘What’s that?’ says he.

“‘Horse-thief,’ says I.  ’You sent that feller here to steal a horse and he got caught.’

“’Well I told him if he’d get me a good horse I’d give him five hundred dollars and that I didn’t care how he got him.  The fact is I’m desperate.  I’ll give you a thousand dollars for one of your horses.’

“’You couldn’t buy one of ’em at any price,’ I said.  ’There’s two reasons.  I wouldn’t do business with a horse-thief and no money would tempt me to sell an animal to be ridden to death.’

“The two thieves had had enough of us and they got out.”

* * * * *

That night our party camped on the shore of the Kankakee and next day they met the contractors.  Lincoln joined the latter party and Harry and Samson went on alone.  Late that afternoon they crossed the nine mile prairie, beyond which they could see the shimmer of the lake and the sunlit structures of the new city.  Pink and white moccasin flowers and primroses were thick in the grass.  On the lower ground the hoofs of their horses plashed in wide stretches of shallow water.

Chicago looked very bare on the high prairie above the lake.  It was Mr. William Cullen Bryant who said that it had the look of a huckster in his shirt-sleeves.

“There it is,” said Samson.  “Four thousand, one hundred and eighty people live there.  It looks like a sturdy two-year-old.”

The houses were small and cheaply built and of many colors.  Some were unpainted.  Near the prairie they stood like people on the outer edge of a crowd, looking over one another’s shoulders and pushing in a disordered mass toward the center of interest.  Some seemed to have straggled away as if they had given up trying to see or hear.  So to one nearing it the town had a helter-skelter look.

Our travelers passed rough boarded houses with grand-looking people in their dooryards and on their small porches—­men in broadcloth and tall hats and ladies in silk dresses.  It was six o’clock and the men had come home to supper.  As the horsemen proceeded larger buildings surrounded them, mostly two stories high.  There were some stores and houses built of red brick.  Beyond the scatter of cheap, wooden structures they came to streets well laid out and crowded and busy and “very soft” to quote a phrase from the diary.  Teams were struggling in the mud, drivers shouting and lashing.  Agents for hotels and boarding-houses began to solicit the two horsemen from the plank sidewalks.  The latter were deeply impressed by a negro in scarlet clothes, riding a horse in scarlet housings.  He carried a scarlet banner and was advertising in a loud voice the hour and place of a great land sale that evening.

A sound of many hammers beating upon boards could be heard above the noises of the street and behind all was the constant droning of a big steam saw and the whir of the heavy stones in the new grist mill.  It was the beginning of that amazing diapason of industry which accompanied the building of the cities of the West.