The West saw many “boom” towns. They followed in the wake of “gold strikes;” they grew, mushroom-like, overnight—garish husks of squalor, palpitating, hardy, a-tingle with extravagant hopes. A few, it is true, lived to become substantial cities buzzing with the American spirit, panting, fighting for progress with an energy that shamed the Old World, lethargic in its smug and self-sufficient superiority. But many towns died in their gangling youth, tragic monuments to hopes; but monuments also to effort, and to the pioneer courage and the dreams of an empire-building people.
Manti was destined to live. It was a boom town with material reasons for substantial growth. Behind it were the resources of a railroad company which would anticipate the development of a section of country bigger than a dozen Old-world states, and men with brains keen enough to realize the commercial possibilities it held. It had Corrigan for an advance agent—big, confident, magnetic, energetic, suave, smooth.
Manti had awaited his coming; he was the magic force, the fulfillment of the rumored promise. He had stayed away for three weeks, following his departure on the special car after bringing Judge Lindman, and when he stepped off the car again at the end of that time Manti was “humming,” as he had predicted. During the three weeks of his absence, the switch at Manti had never been unoccupied. Trains had been coming in regularly bearing merchandise, men, tools, machines, supplies. Engineers had arrived; the basin near Manti, choked by a narrow gorge at its westerly end (where the dam was to be built) was dotted with tents, wagons, digging implements, a miscellany of material whose hauling had worn a rutted trail over the plains and on the slope of the basin, continually active with wagon-train and pack horse, and articulate with sweating, cursing drivers.
“She’s a pippin!” gleefully confided a sleek-looking individual who might have been mistaken for a western “parson” had it not been for a certain sophisticated cynicism that was prominent about him, and which imparted a distasteful taint of his profession. “Give me a year of this and I’ll open a joint in Frisco! I cleaned out a brace of bull-whackers in the Plaza last night—their first pay. Afterward I stung a couple of cattlemen for a hundred each. Look at her hum!”
Notwithstanding that it was midday, Manti was teeming with life and action. Since the day that Miss Benham had viewed the town from the window of the private car, Manti had added more than a hundred buildings to its total. They were not attractive; they were ludicrous in their pitiful masquerade of substantial types. Here and there a three-story structure reared aloft, sheathed with galvanized iron, a garish aristocrat seemingly conscious of its superiority, brazen, in its bid for attention; more modest buildings seemed dwarfed, humiliated, squatting sullenly and enviously. There were hotels, rooming-houses, boarding-houses, stores, dwellings, saloons—and others which for many reasons need not be mentioned. But they were pulsating with life, electric, eager, expectant. Taking advantage of the scarcity of buildings, an enterprising citizen had erected tents in rows on the street line, for whose shelter he charged enormously—and did a capacity business.
“A hundred came in on the last train,” complained the over-worked station agent. “God knows what they all expect to do here!”
Corrigan had kept his promise to build Judge Lindman a courthouse. It was a flat-roofed structure, one story high, wedged between a saloon and Braman’s bank building. A sign in the front window of Braman’s bank announced that Jefferson Corrigan, agent of the Land & Improvement Company, of New York, had office space within, but on the morning of the day following his return to Manti, Corrigan was seated at one side of a flat-top desk in the courthouse, talking with Judge Lindman, who sat at the other side.
“Got them all transcribed?” asked Corrigan.
The Judge drew a thin ledger from his desk and passed it over to Corrigan. As Corrigan turned the pages and his face lighted, the Judge’s grew correspondingly troubled.
“All right,” exulted Corrigan. “This purports to be an accurate and true record of all the land transactions in this section from the special grant to the Midland Company, down to date. It shows no intermediate owners from the Midland Company to the present claimants. As a document arraigning carelessness on the part of land buyers it cannot be excelled. There isn’t a present owner that has a legal leg to stand on!”