“You all know crops was poor last year and only moderately promisin’ this year,” Champers continued. “But this is temporary and you are stayers, as I can testify. The Champers Town Company is ready to locate a townsite and start a town right here at the deep bend of Grass River. We propose to plat the prairie into town lots with a public square for the courthouse and sites for the railroad station and grain elevators, a big hotel, an opera house, and factories and foundries that’s bound to come.”
The speaker paused a moment. Then the inspiration of the evening came to him.
“When you first came here, Aydelot, there wasn’t nothing but imagination to make this a farming community. And it looked lots more impossible then than this looks to me now. What’s to prevent a metropolis risin’ right here where a decade and a half ago there wasn’t nothing but bare prairie?”
The appeal was forceful, and the very men who had stood like heroes against hardships and had fought poverty with a grim, unyielding will-power, the same men fell now before Darley Champers’ smooth advances. 198
“Our company’s chartered with no end of stock for sale now that in six months will be out of sight above par and can’t be bought for no price. It’s your time to invest now. You can easy mortgage your farms to raise the money, seein’ you can knock the mortgage off so quick and have abundance left over, if you use your heads ’stead of your tired legs to make money out of your land.”
Cyrus Bennington and Todd Stewart and Jim Shirley, with others, were sitting upright with alert faces now. Booms were making men rich all over Kansas. Why should prosperity not come to this valley as well? It was not impossible, surely. Only the unpleasant memory of Champers’ holding back the supplies in the days when the grasshopper was a burden would intrude on the minds of the company tonight. Champers was shrewd to remember also, and he played his game daringly as well as cautiously.
“Maybe some of you fellows haven’t felt right toward me sometimes,” he said. “I hate to tell it now, but justice is justice. The truth is, it was a friend of yours who advised me not to let any supplies come your way, time of the grasshopper raid. I listened to him then and didn’t know no better’n to be run by him till I see his scheme to kill Wykerton an’ build a town for hisself. He’ll deny it now, declare he never done it, and he’ll not do a thing for your town down here. See if he does. But it’s Gawd’s truth, he held me back so’s he could run you his way. It’s your turn to listen to me now and believe me, too.”
And well they listened, especially the men who still owed John Jacobs for the loan of 1874.
“You can have a boom right here that’ll make you all rich men inside of a year. Why not turn capitalists 199 yourselves for a while, you hard-working farmers. Money is easy and credit long, now. Take your chance at it and make five hundred per cent on your investments. I’m ready to take subscriptions for stock in this new town right now. Why not stop this snail’s pace of earnin’ and go to livin’ like gentlemen—like some Careyville men I know who own hundreds of acres they never earned and they won’t improve so’s to help others?”
“You’re right there,” a farmer sitting beside Asher Aydelot called out. “We all know how Careyville got her start. It’s kept some of us poor doing it. I’ll invest in Town Company stock right now.”