The court record showed six quarter sections of land west of town had recently been transferred; the name of the receiver was unknown to anyone in Megory, but such prices, forty to fifty dollars per acre. The people who had sold, brought the money to the Megory banks, and deposited it. All they seemed to know was that someone drove up to their house and asked if they wanted to sell. Some did not, while others said they were only five miles from Megory, and if they sold they would have to have a big price, because Megory was the "Town of the Little Crow" and the gateway to acres of the finest land in the world, to be opened soon. "What is your price?" he would ask, and whether it was forty, forty-five or fifty per acre, he bought it. This must have gone on for sixty days with everybody wondering "what it was all about", until it got on the nerves of the Megoryites; and even the town dads began to get a little fearful. When Ernest was approached he would wink wisely, hand out a cigar or buy a drink, but he never made anybody the wiser. A lady came out from Des Moines, bought a lot, and let a contract for a hotel building 24 × 140, and work was begun on it immediately. This was getting ahead of Megory, where a hotel had just been completed 25 × 100 feet, said by the Megoryites to be the "best" west of a town of six thousand population, one hundred fifty miles down the road. Whenever anything like a real building goes up in a little town on the prairie, with their collection of shacks, it is always called "the best building" between there and somewhere else. I shall not soon forget the anxiety with which the people watched the building which continued to go up west of Megory, and still no one there seemed willing to admit that Nicholson Brothers were "live," but spent their argument in trying to convince someone that they were only wind jammers and manipulators of knavish plots, to immesh the credulous. What actually happened was this, and Ernest told me about it afterwards in about the following words: