Page:Caroline Lockhart--The Fighting Shepherdess.djvu/300

 The Boosters Club still went on boosting, but its schemes for self-advertisement resembled a defective pin- wheel, which, after the first whiz, lacks the motive powers to turn further. The motive power in this instance was money. Prouty wantQd money with the same degree of intensity that the parched Lazarus wanted water.

Real estate owners in Prouty regarded their property without enthusiasm, for there were few residences not ornamented with a " plaster " in the form of^ mortgage. Abram Pantin's boast that he never " held the sack " was heard but seldom, for there was more than a reasonable doubt that he was able to collect the interest on his farm mortgages, to say nothing of the principal.

The town was at a stage when merely to eat and go on wearing clothes was cause for self-congratulation. It was conceded that a person who could exist in Prouty could live anywhere. Its citizens seemed to partake of the nature of the cactus that, grubbed up and left for dead, always manages somehow to get its roots down again.

The Prouty Grit still called the attention of the world to the country's natural resources, but Mr. Butefish's editorials had a hoUoW ring, like the " spiel " of the side show barker, who talks in anticipation of a swift kick from a dissatisfied patron.

Major Prouty, who had hoped to die in his boots, picturesquely, had passed away quietly in his bed with acute indigestion from eating sour-dough sinkers of his own manufacture. It was cold the day he was buried, so not many went to the funeral, and the board which had been put up to mark his grave, until the town could afford a suitable monument, had blown over. A " freighter " had repaired his brake block with a portion of the marker, so no one except the grave digger was sure where the Major lay.