Jonesville proved to be a typical Texas town of the modern variety, and altogether different to the pictured frontier village.  There were no one-storied square fronts, no rows of saloons with well-gnawed hitching-rails, no rioting cowboys.  On the contrary, the larger buildings were of artificial stone, the sidewalks of concrete, and the store fronts of plate-glass.  Arc-lights shed a bluishwhite glare over the wide street-crossings, and all in all the effect was much like that of a prosperous, orderly Northern farming town.

Not that Jonesville would have filled an eye for beauty.  It was too new and crude and awkward for that.  It fitted loosely into its clothes, for its citizens had patterned it with regard for the future, and it sprawled over twice its legitimate area.  But to its happy founder it seemed well-nigh perfect, and its destiny roused his maddest enthusiasm.  He showed Dave the little red frame railroad station, distinguished in some mysterious way above the hundred thousand other little red frame railroad stations of the identical size and style; he pointed out the Odd Fellows Hall, the Palace Picture Theater, with its glaring orange lights and discordant electric piano; he conducted Law to the First National Bank, of which Blaze was a proud but somewhat ornamental director; then to the sugar-mill, the ice-plant, and other points of equally novel interest.

Everywhere he went, Jones was hailed by friends, for everybody seemed to know him and to want to shake his hand.

“Some town and some body of men, eh?” he inquired, finally, and Dave agreed: 

“Yes.  She’s got a grand framework, Blaze.  She’ll be most as big as Fort Worth when you fatten her up.”

Jones waved his buggy-whip in a wide circle that took in the miles of level prairie on all sides.  “We’ve got the whole blamed state to grow in.  And, Dave, I haven’t got an enemy in the place!  It wasn’t many years ago that certain people allowed I’d never live to raise this town.  Why, it used to be that nobody dared to ride with me—­except Paloma, and she used to sleep with a shot-gun at her bedside.”

“You sure have been a responsibility to her.”

“But I’m as safe now as if I was in church.”

Law ventured to remark that none of Blaze’s enemies had grown fat in prosecuting their feuds, but this was subject which the elder man invariably found embarrassing, and now he said: 

“Pshaw!  I never was the blood-letter people think.  I’m as gentle as a sheep.”  Then to escape further curiosity on that point he suggested that they round out their riotous evening with a game of pool.

Law boasted a liberal education, but he was no match for the father of Jonesville, who wielded a cue with a dexterity born of years of devotion to the game.  In consequence, Blaze’s enjoyment was in a fair way to languish when the proprietor of the Elite Billiard Parlor returned from supper to say: