The Grafters

In point of age, Gaston the strenuous was still no more than a lusty infant among the citiesof the brown plain when the boom broke and the junto was born, though its beginnings as ahalt camp ran back to the days of the later Mormon migrations across the thirsty plain; tothat day when the advanced guard of Zophar Smith's ox-train dug wells in the damp sandsof Dry Creek and called them the Waters of Merom. Later, one Jethro Simsby, a Mormon deserter, set up his rod and staff on the banks of thecreek, home-steaded a quarter-section of the sage-brush plain, and in due time came to beknown as the Dry Creek cattle king. And the cow-camp was still Simsby's when the locatingengineers of the Western Pacific, searching for tank stations in a land where water wasscarce and hard to come by, drove their stakes along the north line of the quarter-section;and having named their last station Alphonse, christened this one Gaston. From the stake-driving of the engineers to the spike-driving of the track-layers was a fulldecade. For hard times overtook the Western Pacific at Midland City, eighty miles to theeastward; while the State capital, two days' bronco-jolting west of Dry Creek, had railroadoutlets in plenty and no inducements to offer a new-comer.