“Busted by the boom. Lived at the public crib ever since. Held every little county office possible to get, asking now for your votes this fall for County Treasurer. Will end his days seeking an election and go at last to be with the elected,” Cyrus Bennington frankly described himself.
“Not so bad yet as Todd Stewart,” Todd declared. “He lost everything in the boom except his old Scotch Presbyterian faith. Now head clerk in J. Jacobs’ dry goods and general merchandise store. Had the good sense, though, this old Todd did, to send his son back to the land and make a farmer out of him, and the second generation of Stewarts in this valley promises to make it yet. Why don’t you revert to the soil, too, Bennington?”
“Todd is doing well with his leases,” Asher Aydelot declared. “He’ll be a landowner yet.”
“My family, especially the girls, object to living on a farm,” Cyrus Bennington said gravely. “They have notions of city life I can’t overcome. Jo especially dislikes the country and Jo runs things round the Bennington place.”
“James Shirley, Esquire,” Jim announced and added quickly:
“The biggest sucker in the booming gang. Lost his farm to the Champers Company. Holds a garden patch and homestead only, where once the Cloverdale Ranch 221 smiled. All under mortgage also to other capitalists. Boys, I’d be ready to give up if it wasn’t for my little girl. What’s the use in a man as big as I am, with no lung power, keeping at it?” There was a sad hopelessness in Shirley’s tone.
“No, no!” the men chorused in one voice. “Go on, Jim, go on!”
“Asher Aydelot.” Jim pretended it was the rollcall they demanded.
“Gentlemen,” John Jacobs began seriously. But at that moment Leigh Shirley, followed by Rosie Gimpke, came from the side door with a tray of glasses and a pitcher of lemonade.
“Gentlemen, a toast to the man who stuck to the soil and couldn’t be blasted to financial ruin by a boom, the wheat king of these prairies. Our host, Asher Aydelot.”