He paused and looked at the men before him. They were farmers, drooped to rest after the long summer day's work, yet they listened with intense eagerness. Only Asher Aydelot sat in easy dignity, looking straight at Darley Champers with steady interest. The four years' training in the University of the Civil War had not been overcome by his hold on the plow handles. And no farmer will grow hopelessly stooped in shoulders and sad of countenance who lifts his face often from the clods beneath his feet to the stars above his head. "You all know crops was poor last year and only moderately promisin' this year," Champers continued. "But this is temporary and you are stayers, as I can testify. The Champers Town Company is ready to locate a townsite and start a town right here at the deep bend of Grass River. We propose to plat the prairie into town lots with a public square for the courthouse and sites for the railroad station and grain elevators, a big hotel, an opera house, and factories and foundries that's bound to come." The speaker paused a moment. Then the inspiration of the evening came to him. "When you first came here, Aydelot, there wasn't nothing but imagination to make this a farming community. And it looked lots more impossible then than this looks to me now. What's to prevent a metropolis risin' right here where a decade and a half ago there wasn't nothing but bare prairie?" The appeal was forceful, and the very men who had stood like heroes against hardships and had fought poverty with a grim, unyielding will-power, the same men fell now before Darley Champers' smooth advances. "Our company's chartered with no end of stock for sale now that in six months will be out of sight above par and can't be bought for no price. It's your time to invest now. You can easy mortgage your farms to raise the money, seein' you can knock the mortgage off so quick and have abundance left over, if you use your heads 'stead of your tired legs to make money out of your land." Cyrus Bennington and Todd Stewart and Jim Shirley, with others, were sitting upright with alert faces now. Booms were making men rich all over Kansas. Why should prosperity not come to this valley as well? It was not impossible, surely. Only the unpleasant memory of Champers' holding back the supplies in the days when the grasshopper was a burden would intrude on the minds of the company tonight. Champers was shrewd to remember also, and he played his game daringly as well as cautiously.