The dark, exultant face flashed the same look of hate that greeted Philip on the _Far West_, and later gloomed through the dimly lighted trading-post on the night of the dance! With a groan Danvers realized, as he looked at his suddenly shrinking sister, that the sacrifice of his life's ambition had been in vain. [Illustration] BOOK III _THE STATE_ "_What constitutes a state?_ * * * * * _Men who their duty know._" [Illustration] Chapter I Visitors from Helena Philip Danvers, cattleman, nearing Fort Benton on his return from a round-up, found his thoughts reverting to the past. The spring day was like another that he remembered when he first caught sight of the frontier town more than a dozen years before. He noted the smoke of a railroad locomotive as it trailed into nothingness, and involuntarily he looked toward the Missouri River; but there was no boat steaming up the river, and the unfurrowed water brought a sadness to his face. He recalled the doctor's vigorous opposition a few years previous, when the question of a railroad came before the residents of Fort Benton. Perhaps the doctor had been right in thinking that the river traffic would be destroyed, and with it the future of the town. Certainly his derided prophecy had been most literally fulfilled. Instead of becoming a second St. Louis, the village lay in undisturbed tranquillity, but little larger than when the _Far West_ had brought the first recruits of the North West Mounted Police to its levees. To those who loved the place, who believed in it, the result caused by the changing conditions of Western life was well-nigh heartbreaking. Instead of the terminus of a great waterway--the port where gold was brought by the ton to be shipped East from the territorial diggings; the stage where moved explorer, trader, miner and soldier--instead of being the logical metropolis of the entire Northwest, Fort Benton lay a drowsy little village, embowered in cottonwoods and dependent upon the cattlemen who made it their headquarters for shipping. The lusty bull-whacker's yell, the mule-skinner's cry and the pop of long, biting whips were heard no more in the broad, sweeping curve of the Missouri. The levees were no longer crowded with bales of merchandise, piles of buffalo hides and boxes of gold. No steamers tied up to the rotting snubbing-posts; the bustle of the roustabouts, the oaths of the mates, the trader's activity had vanished forever, as irrevocably as the buffalo on the plains. Nothing in the prospect before him suggested to Danvers the well-remembered past except the old adobe fort on the water's edge. One bastion and a part of a wall recalled to the Anglo-American his first homesick night in the Northwest. Even the trading-posts on the river between Bismarck and Fort Benton were abandoned.