But there was no blood shed even during the greatest excitement of that feverish afternoon. This was in great part due to the fact that the provost marshal confiscated all the arms he saw. At three o’clock the train from the north arrived with hundreds more hanging from the steps and crowding the aisles. The sight of so many others who had beaten them in the race seemed to drive these late-comers almost frantic, and they fell over one another in their haste, and their race for the choicest lots was like a run on a bank when no one knows exactly where the bank is. One young woman was in such haste to alight that she crawled out of the car window, and as soon as she reached the solid earth beneath, drove in her stake and claimed all the land around it. This was part of the military reservation, and the soldiers explained this to her, or tried to, but she was suspicious of every one, and remained seated by her wooden peg until nightfall. She could just as profitably have driven it into the centre of Union Square. Another woman stuck up a sign bearing the words, “A Soldier’s Widow’s Land,” and was quite confident that the chivalry of the crowd would respect that title. Captain Stiles told her that he thought it would not, and showed her a lot of ground still unclaimed that she could have, but she refused to move. The lot he showed her is now on the main street, in the centre of the town, and the lot she was finally forced to take is three miles out of the city in the prairie. Another woman drove her stake between the railroad ties, and said it would take a locomotive and a train of cars to move _her_. One man put his stake in the very centre of the lot sites laid out by the surveyors, and claimed the one hundred and sixty acres around for his homestead holding. They explained to him that he could only have as much land as would make a lot in the town site, and that if he wanted one hundred and sixty acres, must locate it outside of the city limits. He replied that the proclamation said nothing about town sites. “But, of course,” he went on, “if you people want to build a city around my farm, I have no objections. I don’t care for city life myself, and I am going to turn this into a vegetable garden. Maybe, though, if you want it very bad, I _might_ sell it.”