The field had gained enormously in value and importance in men's eyes these last years. The city of B---- had eaten far into the country, creating prosperous appendages in the way of modern suburbs for twenty miles and more from Alton, and there was much talk of its annexing the old town to itself, which it accomplished not long after. Those were the days of the "greater" everything, the worship of size. Alton in fact was now a city itself of no mean size, and the shallow stream of water that nominally divided it from B---- was a mere boundary line. As men had multiplied upon this spot of earth, needing land for dwelling and business, envious eyes had been cast upon the Field, the last large "undeveloped" tract anywhere near the great city. Men who were skillful in such real estate "deals," greedy and ingenious in the various ways of turning civic growth to private profit, were figuring upon the possibility of getting hold of Clark's Field, when the short leases expired, and after making the necessary "improvements" cutting it up for sale. They saw fat profits in the transaction. Men needed it for their lives; the community needed it for its growing corporate life. And yet it was "tied up" with a legal disability--left largely useless and waste. It looked as if when the legal spell was finally broken, as it must be, and the land so long unprofitable and idle should be apportioned to these human needs, it would be neither the Clarks nor the community that would derive benefit from it,--certainly not the people who would live upon it,--but some gang of skillful speculators, who knew the precise moment to take advantage of the mechanism of the law and the more uncertain mechanism of human nature so as to obtain for a small amount what they could sell to others for much. The crisis in the history of Clark's Field seemed approaching.