“It's a lie! They can't afford to ignore us!” cried Gibbs when he heard this. “It's a trick to depress real estate! Any one who's fooled by it deserves to get skinned out of his last dollar.” But the rumour was verified, and even Gibbs was forced to own that for the present at least they had lost the railroad. “You ain't involved, Landray,” he told Stephen. “You stood to share only in the profits; and I can't lose much, for I hadn't five hundred dollars when I came here, and I got seventy or eighty lots that are worth something, and fifteen or twenty houses.” Here Stephen recalled to his mind the fact that these houses were in the main unpaid for, and that his creditors might swoop down upon him at any moment. “My creditors? Oh, hell—let 'em sweat!” and the general snapped his fingers almost gaily, and said in the same breath, “I expect you're cussing me, Steve, for fetching you here.” “Nothing of the kind, general!” said Stephen stoutly. “If I fooled you, I fooled myself, Steve; I knew there was some foxy gentlemen in this part of Kansas, but I thought I was the foxiest thing on two legs. I have had my ambitions too, Steve, and they ain't dead yet, a man of my calibre don't give up readily; but I'm adaptable. I don't sit down to weep over an unpropitious occasion, in some fashion I dominate it. For the present I suppose there is nothing for us to do but wait and see how things turn out.” And through one long hot summer they watched things turn out. They saw the departure of the town-site speculators; they saw the settlement of tents and prairie schooners disappear from the waste beyond the town, until at last there was only the rolling plain, with its thousands of pegs that marked the lots of the various subdivisions, or the streets by which they were to be reached; and with this swift panoramic change came a leaden depression which ate into the very soul. There was no more poker at the Metropolitan, once a feature of the nightly gatherings there; the wilderness of signs creaked idly in the breeze; half the houses stood tenantless; the stages ceased to rumble in and out of town; the remnant of a population loafed in heavy lethargetic idleness. Gibbs and Stephen sat through that long summer, idly for the most part, in their shirt-sleeves in the shade of their office; the only business they had was to see Gibbs's creditors, and in the end these ceased to trouble them. At first Stephen had been somewhat sustained by Gibbs's confidence; for Gibbs had been sure things would come right, that the depression was only temporary; but in the end even his fine courage failed him. He spent less and less time in the shade of his office, and more and more time at Mr. Youtsey's bar; but at last Mr. Yout-sey announced that he was about to leave to seek fortune elsewhere.