But in the heyday of their new-driven corner
stakes, what wars were waged for the power to draw people into them; and
especially, how the county-seat fights raged like prairie fires set out
by those Nimrods who sought to make up in the founding of cities for
what they lacked as hunters, in comparison with the establisher of Babel
and Erech and Accad and Calneh in the land of Shinar.
Between the Maquoketa and Independence I lost N.V. Creede, merely
because I traded for some more lame cows and a young Alderney bull, and
had to stop to break them. He stayed with me two days, and then caught a
ride with one of Judge Horace Stone's teams which was making a quick
trip to Lithopolis.
"Good-by, Mr. Vandemark," said he at parting, "and good luck. I am sorry
not to be able to remunerate you for your hospitality, which I shall
always remember for its improving conversation, its pancakes, its pork
and beans, and its milk and butter, rather than for its breathless
speed. And take the advice of your man of the law in parting: in your
voyages over the inland waterways of life, look not upon the flush when
it is red--not even the straight one; for had I not done that on a
damned steamboat coming up from St. Louis I should not have been thus in
my old age forsaken. And let me tell you, one day my coachman will pull
up at the door of your farm-house and take you and your wife and
children in my coach and four for a drive--perhaps to see the laying of
the corner-stone of the United States court-house in Lithopolis.
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