[Wifree-developers] Atter, Bill?" said I, after he had looked at me earnestly, almost pan

[Wineland <le...@ko...>]

On the opposite side of the car. Most of the company were sitting or
standing near, and the conversation was quite general. "Oh, it's like a
romance!" half whispered Antonia to us. "I envy you men who build roads
and make towns. Look at Mr. Elkins, Sadie, as he stands there! He is
master of everything; to me he seems as great as Napoleon!" She neither
blushed nor sought to conceal from us her adoration for Jim. It was the
day of his triumph, and a fitting time to acknowledge his kinghood; and
her admission that she thought him the greatest, the most excellent of
men did not surprise me. Yet, because he was older than she, and had
never put himself in a really loverlike attitude toward her, I thought
it was simply an exalted girlish regard, and not at all what we usually
understand by an affair of the heart. Moreover, at that time such praise
as she gave him would not have been thought extravagant in almost any
social gathering in Lattimore. Let me confess that to me it does not now
seem so ... Cecil Barr-Smith walked out and stood on the platform.
General Lattimore was apparently thinking of the features of the
situation which had struck Antonia as romantic. "You young men," said
he, "are among the last of the city-builders and road-makers. My
generation did these things differently. We went out with arms in our
hands, and hewed out spaces in savagery for homes. You don't seem to see
it; but you are straining every nerve merely to shift people from many
places to one, and there to exploit them. You wind your coils about an
inert mass, you set the dynamo of your power of organization at work,
and the inert mass becomes a great magnet. People come flying to it from
the four quarters of the earth, and the first-comers levy tribute upon
them, as the price of standing-room on the magnet!" "I nevah hea'd the
real merit and strength and safety of ouah real-estate propositions
bettah stated, suh!" said Captain Tolliver ecstatically. Jim stood
looking at the General with sober regard. "Go on, General," said he.
"Not only that," went on the General, "but people begin forestalling the
standing-room, so as to make it scarcer. They gamble on the power of the
magnet, and the length of time it will draw