Firebrand Trevison

THE trail from the Diamond K broke around the base of a low hill dotted thickly with scraggly oak and fir, then stretched away, straight and almost level except for a deep cut where the railroad gang and a steam shovel were eating into a hundred-foot hill to Manti. A month before, there had been no Manti, and six months before that there had been no railroad. The railroad and the town had followed in the wake of a party of khaki-clad men that had made reasonably fast progress through the country, leaving a trail of wooden stakes and little stone monuments behind. Previously, an agent of the railroad company had bartered through, securing a right-of-way. The fruit of the efforts of these men was a dark gash on a sun-scorched level, and two lines of steel laid as straight as skilled eye and transit could make them-and Manti. Manti could not be overlooked, for the tom ob truded upon the vision from where Brand Trevison was jogging along the Diamond K trail astride his big black horse, Nigger. Manti dominated the Iandscape, I nbt because It was big and imposing, but because it w. T n ew s . Maqtis buildings were scattered-there had be no need for crowding but from a distance - from Trevisons distance, for instance, which was a matter of three miles or so-Manti looked insignificant, toy like, in comparison with the vast world on whose bosom it sat. Manti seemed futile, ridiculous. But Trevison knew that the coming of the railroad marked an epoch, that the two thin, thread-like lines of steel, ere the tentacles of the man-made monster that had gripped the East-business reaching out for newer fields - and that Manti, futile and ridiculous as it seemed, was an outpost fortified by unlimitedresource, Manti had come to stay. And the cattle business was going, Trevison knew. The railroad company had built corra1s at Manti, and Trestison knew they would be needed for several years to come. But he could foresee the day when they would be replaced by building and factory. Business was extending its lines, cattle must retreat before them...