| They saw not the shadow that walked beside, They heard not the feet with silence shod. —Whittier. |
With successive seasons of good crops, combining with the time of the crest between two eras of financial depression, and with Eastern capital easy to reach, a mania of speculation known as “the boom” burst forth; a mania that swept men’s minds as prairie fires sweep along the wide lengths of the plains, changing both the face of the land and the fortunes of the land owners, and marking an epoch in the story of the West. New counties were organized out of the still unoccupied frontier. Thousands of citizens poured into these counties. Scores of towns were chartered and hundreds of miles of railroad were constructed. Colleges and universities sprouted up from the virgin soil of the prairie. Loans on real estate were easy to secure. Land, especially in town lots, took on an enormously inflated valuation and the rapid investment in real estate and the rapid transference from buyer to seller was bewildering, while voting bonds for extensive and extravagant improvements in cities-to-be was not the least phase of this brief mania of the fortune-making, fortune-breaking “boom.”
When Hans Wyker had seen his own town wane as Careyville waxed, he consigned the newer community, and all that it was, to all the purgatories ever organized and some yet to be created. 176
Wykerton was at a standstill now. The big brewery had become a flouring mill, but it was idle most of the time. The windows served as targets for the sons of the men who consumed its brewing product in other days, and the whole structure had a disconsolate, dismantled appearance.
There was neither a schoolhouse nor a church inside the corporation limits. The land along Big Wolf was not like the rich prairies west of it, and freeholds entered first with hopes in Wykerton’s prosperity had proved disappointing, if not disastrous, to their owners.
The rough ground, mortgaged now, and by the decline of the town, decreased in value, began to fall into the hands of John Jacobs, who made no effort at settlement, but turned it to grazing purposes. His holdings joined the property foreclosed by Wyker when his town failed, but inhabited still by tenants too poor to leave it. The boundary line between Wyker and Jacobs was the same ugly little creek that Doctor Carey had turned his course to avoid on that winter day when he had seen Virginia Aydelot’s distress signal and heard her singing a plaintive plea for help.
It was an ugly little stream, with much mire and some quicksand to be avoided; with deep earth-canyons and sliding avalanches of dirt on steep slopes, and now and then a stone outcrop jagged and difficult, not to say dangerous, to footways, and impossible to stock. It was called Little Wolf because it was narrower than the willow-fringed stream into which it emptied. But Big Wolf Creek could rarely boast of half the volume of water that the sluggish little tributary held. Big Wolf was shallow, with more 177 shale and sand along its bed. Little Wolf was narrow and deceivingly deep in places.
One Spring day, John Jacobs and Asher Aydelot rode out to Jacobs’ ranches together.
“You are improving your stock every year, Stewart tells me,” Asher was saying. “I may try sheep myself next year.”
“I am hoping to have only thoroughbreds some day. That’s a good horse you ride,” Jacobs replied.