He regarded the letter a little wistfully, and the next moment tore it to bits, flung it to the winds, and went about his business.
CHAPTER VI
THE PRAIRIE FIRE
"MY MOTHER grabbed me, kissed and hugged me time and again when I returned," Jean Baptiste read in the letter he received from his wife-to-be a few days after she had returned to the windy city, and he was satisfied. "She had been so worried, you see, because she had written father nothing about it, and this was the first time in her married life that she has dared do anything without a long consultation with him. But she is glad I went now, and thinks you are a very sensible fellow therefor. Papa sent a telegram advising that he had been reappointed Presiding Elder over the same district, and would come into Chicago for a few days before entering into another year of the work.
"I am deluged with questions regarding the West, and it gives me a great deal of pleasure to explain everything, and of the wonderful work you are doing. Now, papa will be home in a few days, and, knowing how hard he is to explain anything to, I am preparing myself for quite a task. I will close now. With love and kisses to you, believe me to be,
"Your own,
"Orlean."
Jean now went about his duties. His sister and grandmother were with him, and he had planned to put them on their claims at once, so as to enable them to prove up as soon as possible. Therefore to their places he hauled lumber, coal and provisions. Their claims lay some forty-five miles to the northwest beyond the railroad which now had its terminus at Dallas. And, referring to that, we have not found occasion to mention what had taken place in the country in the two years passed.
When the railroad had missed Dallas and struck Gregory and the other two government townsites, Dallas was apparently doomed, and in a few months most of the business men had gone, and the business buildings, etc., had been moved to Gregory. This town, because of the fact that it was only five miles from the next county line—the county that had been opened and which contained the land that Jean Baptiste had secured for his relatives and bride—was, for a time, expected to become the terminus. And to this end considerable activity had transpired with a view to getting the heavy trade that would naturally come with the opening and settlement of the county west, which had twice the area of the county in which Gregory lay.
Now, it was shortly after the railroad was under course of construction that one, the chief promoter of the townsite, called on the "town Dad's" of Gregory with a proposition. The proposition was, in short, to move Dallas to Gregory, and thereupon combine in making Gregory a real city.
Unfortunately for Gregory, her leaders were men who had grown up in a part of the country where the people did not know all they might have known. They consisted in a large measure of rustic mountebanks, who, because, and only because, Gregory happened to have been in the direct line of the railroad survey, and had thereby secured the road, took unto themselves the credit of it all. So, instead of entertaining the offer in a logical, business and appreciative manner, gave the promoter the big haw! haw! and turned their backs to him.
There was a spell of inactivity for a time on the part of the said promoter. But in the fall, when the ground had frozen hard, and the corn was being gathered, all that was left in the little town of Dallas, laying beside the claim of Jean Baptiste, was suddenly hauled five miles west of the town of Gregory. And still before the Gregory illogics had time even to think clearly, business was going on in what they then chose to call New Dallas—and the same lay directly on the line of the two counties, and where the railroad survey ended.