GIBBS, his battered face red and perspiring, tramped the length of the room without speech; then he turned and tramped back again.

“When did you get to town?” asked Stephen, putting down the lamp he carried. He knew that Gibbs had not come on the afternoon stage for he had been in the crowd at the hotel when it arrived.

“Oh, I missed the stage, and got a man to drive me across,” said the general, pausing and moodily mopping his face. “Well, what they did to us up at Topeka ain't a little. We don't get the county seat! I don't know who gets it, but we won't—you can everlastingly make up your mind to that!”

“Is there nothing you can do?”

“Do!” cried the general in a tone of infinite disgust. “I didn't have a chance to do!”

Stephen looked his dismay.

“A little public spirit and we might have landed it, but I was left to give my time and spend my money, as if my personal influence unsupported, was all that was needed! I been made to look foolish! Well, when they ask me where those county buildings are, I'll tell 'em they can search me!” and the general shrugged his shoulders to indicate the indifference he did not feel. “It's news to sleep on, ain't it?” continued Gibbs. “Grant City's given itself county seat airs from the start, now all we got to do is to lose the railroad, and we might just as well shut up shop. Well, we ain't lost the railroad.”

“No,” said Stephen clutching at this hope. “The engineers are in camp here now.”

“It's going to give us a set back,” said the general, who was still thinking of the county seat. “But I reckon we're strong enough to stand it—annoying though, ain't it?” and he paused in his tramping which he had resumed, to stare hard at Stephen. “How do you feel about it anyhow?” he asked.

“It's a calamity,” said Landray gravely.

“It certainly is,” agreed the general. “We thought we had it sure, didn't we? Well, there is such a thing as being too sure. I tell you, Steve, we ain't the only fellows in Kansas with land to sell; there was plenty of others in the same line, and I went up against 'em hard at the capital, and they sat down pat on our little scheme. We got to go slow, things will come steady presently, but until they do we got to slack off on the building. I am sorry I got you up to tell you nothing better than this; don't worry though. How's Mrs. Landray?”

“About the same.”

“Humph! What does Arling say? I wonder if you hadn't better get away from here, Steve?” asked the general with kindly concern.

“And leave you to face the crisis?”

“It won't be the first one I've faced,” and Gibbs expanded his chest. “Maybe the climate just don't agree with her.”

“No, I sha'n'. leave you; and I doubt if Marian could make the change now.”

“Well, you know best, Landray, only don't let any sense of honour hold you here when it's to your interest to leave. I'm willing to split with you to-morrow if you say the word, and I'll think none the less of you. I ain't always been above running away myself. Just remember there's some money to divide now, and there may not be a red cent six months hence.”

“I'll chance it,” said Stephen firmly.

“Just as you like, but I want you to know that I don't consider you in any ways obligated to me. You have earned all you have had out of the business; it wouldn't set well for me to pretend otherwise.”

“Thank you, general,” said the younger man gratefully.

“Well, it's so. You sleep on what I've said.”

Then the general took his leave, and Stephen went back to his bed, but not to sleep. He had thought himself on the high road to fortune, and all at once things began to look black. In the morning he went early to the office where Gibbs soon joined him. He looked into Stephen's grave face and smiled.

“I guess my call didn't give you pleasant dreams, Landray. I've thought it over and I guess we'll just keep quiet and see what happens.”

But before the day was over, it was evident that the information

Gibbs brought from Topeka was not held by him alone. Before night there was a well-developed stampede among the owners of lots. This acted on Gibbs rather differently from what might have been expected.

“We'll show 'em,” he said, “that we got confidence; let 'em get in a panic, let 'em get rid of their lots, let 'em play the damn fool, Grant City's here to stay! It's got a future in the very nature of things. We don't need the county seat; they can locate that wherever they blame please; but we do want to get rid of these speculators, I always been opposed to speculation. I'd rather see things go back to the normal, even if we do lose; I would so, Stephen.”

But hard on the news that Grant City was not to get the county seat, came the news that neither was it to get the railroad.

“It's a lie! They can't afford to ignore us!” cried Gibbs when he heard this. “It's a trick to depress real estate! Any one who's fooled by it deserves to get skinned out of his last dollar.”

But the rumour was verified, and even Gibbs was forced to own that for the present at least they had lost the railroad.

“You ain't involved, Landray,” he told Stephen. “You stood to share only in the profits; and I can't lose much, for I hadn't five hundred dollars when I came here, and I got seventy or eighty lots that are worth something, and fifteen or twenty houses.”

Here Stephen recalled to his mind the fact that these houses were in the main unpaid for, and that his creditors might swoop down upon him at any moment.

“My creditors? Oh, hell—let 'em sweat!” and the general snapped his fingers almost gaily, and said in the same breath, “I expect you're cussing me, Steve, for fetching you here.”

“Nothing of the kind, general!” said Stephen stoutly.

“If I fooled you, I fooled myself, Steve; I knew there was some foxy gentlemen in this part of Kansas, but I thought I was the foxiest thing on two legs. I have had my ambitions too, Steve, and they ain't dead yet, a man of my calibre don't give up readily; but I'm adaptable. I don't sit down to weep over an unpropitious occasion, in some fashion I dominate it. For the present I suppose there is nothing for us to do but wait and see how things turn out.”

And through one long hot summer they watched things turn out. They saw the departure of the town-site speculators; they saw the settlement of tents and prairie schooners disappear from the waste beyond the town, until at last there was only the rolling plain, with its thousands of pegs that marked the lots of the various subdivisions, or the streets by which they were to be reached; and with this swift panoramic change came a leaden depression which ate into the very soul. There was no more poker at the Metropolitan, once a feature of the nightly gatherings there; the wilderness of signs creaked idly in the breeze; half the houses stood tenantless; the stages ceased to rumble in and out of town; the remnant of a population loafed in heavy lethargetic idleness.

Gibbs and Stephen sat through that long summer, idly for the most part, in their shirt-sleeves in the shade of their office; the only business they had was to see Gibbs's creditors, and in the end these ceased to trouble them.

At first Stephen had been somewhat sustained by Gibbs's confidence; for Gibbs had been sure things would come right, that the depression was only temporary; but in the end even his fine courage failed him. He spent less and less time in the shade of his office, and more and more time at Mr. Youtsey's bar; but at last Mr. Yout-sey announced that he was about to leave to seek fortune elsewhere.

“I've sat up with the corpse,” he told Gibbs jocosely, “and now I'm going to pull out. I leave the last words to you, for you seem to be chief mourner; I reckon you'll stay to the finish.”

“I don't know about that,” retorted Gibbs briskly. “You can't keep a squirrel on the ground; but I'm free to say I don't want to make any mistakes next time. I'm getting along to a time in life when I don't expect to make more than two or three more fortunes before I quit.”

“Well, you don't squeal none, general, that's what I admire about you; win or lose, there's a kind word still coming,” said Mr. Youtsey admiringly.

In private to Stephen, Gibbs deplored the conditions which he semed to think were largely responsible for their present situation; he was seeing deeper than the mere surface of things.

“The war was a mistake, Steve; patriotism and sentiment aside, it was a big mistake. It's knocked half the country into a cocked hat. The South is dead, and in my opinion we won't live long enough to see it come to life. If it had been just left alone, it would have been mighty interesting to have seen how it would have settled the nigger question. And what's been the result to the nation at large; we've lost over half a million of men—young men who'd a pushed out into the West here, and made this country a wonder. We wouldn't be waiting for population if they'd lived. But it wasn't to be! The country's filling up with all sorts of riff-raff from Europe, a class that never used to come; not the good English and Scotch and Irish, who came because they wanted elbow room; but greasy serfs, who ain't caring a damn for anything but wages. I tell you in twenty years an American will be a curiosity. And to think the way they were wasted, just thrown at each other by the thousands, in the greatest and crudest war of modern times.”

But Stephen could not sit there gossiping with Gibbs while Grant City sank into the prairie, or its shabbily built houses collapsed about his ears; he must do something, yet what was he to do? Gibbs came to his rescue with a suggestion.

“I been thinking of your luck, Steve,” he said one day with kindly concern. “I can hold up this building quite a while by myself just by leaning against it; I reckon it will be about a hundred years before anybody sells a lot again in Grant City, and you can't wait on that, on the chance that you will be the lucky fellow.”

“If I could go!” cried Stephen, with savage earnestness.

“But you can't! Now look here, the farmers have had a pretty good season; you can always sell a farmer improved machinery, and I understand you can secure an agency without any capital to speak of.”

“Why don't you try something of the sort?” asked Landray.

Gibbs shook his head.

“I'm too old a man, Steve, to knock about the country the way I'd have to; besides, I'm getting ready to start up in business.”

“Start up in what?” cried Stephen.

“In a small way in the licker business,” said the general with dignity.

“You mean a saloon?”

The general averted his eyes.

“Well, yes—it will have to be retail—I suppose you might almost call it a saloon,” he admitted reluctantly.

“We are coming down between us, general,” said Landray with a scornful laugh.

“Not at all, Steve, not at all. I've never claimed more than that I was up to the occasion, and Youtsey's quit here; fact is, before he left I made a dicker for what was left of his stock. His going makes an opening for a commercial enterprise of this sort—in a small way, of course.”

“Very small, I should say.”

“No, Steve, you must own there are a few people left; not many, but a few; and they are not going to be any less thirsty in the future than they have been in the past. I'm not counting on riches, but merely enough to tide me over until I see an opening. Maybe the venture might justify a partnership; if you think it will, I'm ready to whack up,” concluded Gibbs generously.

“Excuse me, general,” said the young man haughtily, “but we'll reserve that until the last.” He saw that Gibbs was hurt by his words and manner, and hastened to add, “I think your first suggestion was the best, do you know where I should write?”

“There are all sorts of catalogues in the office. I'd write to half a dozen different firms. I merely suggested this as a temporary makeshift; you might add insurance and lightning-rods.”

“We'll stop with the farm implements, more than that would only be funny; and I'm in desperate need.”

“I really shouldn't wonder if you didn't do quite well, Landray, after you get started,” Gibbs said, with ready faith in this new enterprise. “The farmers farm the land, you'll farm the farmers;” and Stephen's letters not appearing sufficiently hopeful in tone to his critical mind, he ended by drafting them for him. “Now I reckon they'll get you consideration,” said he, when their labours came to an end. “What! You ain't got any stamps? Why didn't you tell me you were that hard put? I ain't got much myself, but I always put down a little nest-egg. I hoped you'd done the same—why didn't you tell me?”

He brought from an inner pocket an old leathern wallet; it was limp enough, but it contained two twenty dollar bills, one of which he forced Stephen to accept.

“I never give up quite all; and if I'd known about the county seat a week earlier, there'd a been a few more gone broke here, but it wouldn't been you or me, Steve?”

A week later Stephen was present at the formal opening of the Golden West Saloon in their former office, Gibbs presiding with typical versatility.

There still lingered in Grant City those who either could not get away or were too indifferent to try, whose imagination had utterly failed them; and occasionally, though rarely, the wagons of emigrants paused for repairs at the blacksmith's; thus there was still the semblance of life, though half the houses in the town stood vacant; these seemed to fade away, to disappear in the rank grass that had come back to flourish in the small trampled lots, and in the midst of this universal decay, this final phase of the small tragedy of settlement, Stephen waited and organized the business Gibbs had suggested, but with no large measure of faith in it.

If Marian's condition would only improve sufficiently so that they might quit Grant City, he was almost certain that by some tremendous effort the money he would then require would be forthcoming.

However when he finally got to work the effect on him was that of a tonic; and through that fall, and the ensuing winter, over desperately bad roads, he travelled far and wide; and by spring when he began to reap the benefits of his winter's work, he saw that he was not only clear of debt but that he had actually made some money.

And while he toiled for her, Marian was left alone with a slatternly unattached female, who was both housekeeper and nurse; and for medical attendant there was Dr. Arling, who found Grant City entirely congenial. Drunk and sodden, he was not unskillful; and when he was needed he could always be found at the Golden West Saloon, where he loafed tirelessly, and where he played countless games of checkers with Gibbs.

It never occurred to Stephen that Marian might not recover. To him it seemed only a question of time until her strength would return; but he was the only one who was really ignorant of her condition. Arling had no doubts as to what the end would be, nor had Mrs. Bassett, the sick woman's attendant.

The end, when it came, came when he was least prepared to meet it. It was fall again, and he had driven in from the country to be with Marian over Sunday. He had stabled his horse, and had come up from the barn, lantern in hand, cold and stiff from his drive home from a farm far out on the plains.

Mrs. Bassett was in the little kitchen fussing over his supper when he entered the house by the back door. She had seen his light in the stable.

“I'll have your supper ready for you in just a minute, Mr. Landray,” she said. “You've got time to run up and see Mis' Landray. She knows you're back, I called up and told her you'd come.”

“How is she?” asked Stephen.

“Well, she seems to be about the same, I don't see no difference,” answered Mrs. Bassett guardedly. She turned and followed him with her eyes as he went through the sitting-room and entered the narrow front hall from which the stairs led to the floor above.

He was gone but a moment, then he came quickly into the kitchen, his face very white.

“She is worse!” he said in a husky whisper. “Why didn't you tell me so?” but he did not wait for an answer. “Where is the child?” he demanded.

“I carried him across the back lots to Mis' Gibbs a spell ago. I couldn't tend him and her, too, he was real fretful.”

“I must go for the doctor,” said Stephen.

“You needn't, Mr. Landray, Mis' Gibbs said she'd go to the saloon for him; I seen her lantern just a moment ago. You'd best have something to eat,” she urged.

He turned away impatiently.

“I'm not hungry. Have the doctor come up-stairs as soon as he gets here.”

But when Arling arrived a few moments later, accompanied by Gibbs, and joined Stephen in the chamber above where he sat holding his wife's hand in both his own, he merely shook his head. It was as he had expected, only the end had been longer deferred than he had thought possible. He stole from the room and rejoined Gibbs in the kitchen.

“You tell him, Gibbs—I can't,” he said.

Gibbs rubbed his straggling unkempt beard with a tremulous hand.

“Maybe he don't need to be told,” he suggested. “But if you think he should be, I'll do it;” and he stood erect, with something of his old air.

He mounted the creaking stairs. Stephen must have heard him coming, for he opened the door and stepped out into the narrow hall, that was barely large enough to hold the two men and the small stand, where Mrs. Bassett had placed a smoky lamp with a dirty chimney.

“Where's the doctor—why don't he come back?” Landray demanded in a fierce whisper. “Is the drunken fool going to do nothing?”

“Steve,” began the general, with white shaking lips, “Steve, bear up, Arling says there ain't anything he can do.”

Stephen looked at him, scarce comprehending what it was he said.

“He don't know what he's talking about—the fool's drunk!” he said roughly.

“I reckon he is,” lamented Gibbs weakly. “I'd'a had him under the pump if there'd been time, but my Julia said for him to hurry, and I closed up and brought him along just as he was, he wasn't fit to come by himself.”

“Send him up here again,” said Stephen with stern insistence. “There is something he can do—my God—” and he broke off abruptly and re-entered his wife's room.

“Come!” said Gibbs, when he had returned to the kitchen. “Come, stir around!” he ordered, laying a hand on Arling's shoulder. “Come, there's something you can do, and you've got to do it.” He was in a panic of haste. He snatched up his dingy medicine case and thrust it into Arling's shaking hands. “He's waiting for you, go up and do what you can.”

“Haven't you told him, Gibbs? She is dying, all he's got to do is to look at her to see that.”

“You're the one to tell him then—poor Steve—you go to him. I must go fetch my Julia and the baby;” and he stumbled out into the darkness with neither hat nor lantern, and fled across the back lots toward the light that burned in his own window.

He soon returned with Julia, who went at once to the room above. In the narrow hall she encountered Arling, who had just come from Marian's bedside, where he had administered to her some simple restorative. She brushed past him without a word.

“Thank you for coming, it's good to have a woman about,” murmured Stephen, glancing toward the door as she entered.

Marian lay on the bed without speech or movement, but her eyes, now brilliant and filled with a strange light, followed every movement of the two. Julia, with Stephen's help, made her more comfortable; they smoothed her pillows and raised her higher on them, for Mrs. Gibbs had been quick to see that her breath came with difficulty.

She had never liked Marian, and Marian had never liked her—but she had forgotten all this—which, after all, was only that chance which determines who shall love and who shall hate. Now she was all tenderness, this brisk energetic woman, with the lines of a shrewish temper already stamped upon her face; and her glance always softened when she looked at Stephen.

There was little either could do but wait; and Marian, save for the look in her eyes and their restless turning, gave no sign that she knew what was passing about her.

Presently Julia stole down-stairs to the kitchen. She found Mrs. Bassett, the general, and Arling still there; the boy fast asleep in her husband's arms.

“Law!” she cried. “Haven't any of you had sense enough to put that child to bed?” and she whisked him out of Gibbs's arms and carried him into the adjoining room.

After that the four fell to watching the clock as if the slow moving hands would tell them when all was over; and as they watched, the row of ragged lights in the uncurtained windows that looked out upon Grant City's Main Street, disappeared one by one, and it was midnight and very still.

At last Julia rose from her chair and without a word went up-stairs; she seemed to know that all was over. She noiselessly pushed open the door and entered the room.

Stephen's face was buried in the pillow beside his wife's. A glance told her what had happened during her absence from the room. She stepped to the bedside and placed her hand gently on the man's shoulder; she felt him shrink from the sudden touch.

“Come,” she said kindly. “You mustn't stay here any longer, Mr. Landray. You go on down-stairs and ask Mrs. Bassett to come up here to me.”

“Is she—” he gasped chokingly.

He had risen to his feet, and she urged him away from the bedside with gentle but determined force.

“You must go down-stairs, Mr. Landray,” she insisted.

“She never spoke—never once,” he cried, turning his bloodshot eyes on her.

“But she knew you; do go down-stairs, Mr. Landray, indeed, you mustn't stay here any longer.”

She had pushed him from the room as she spoke, and he crossed the hall and went slowly and heavily down the narrow steps.