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That was the best word one could say for Drumwell: it was railroad leavings. In those days the accretions which settled down after the flood of railroad building had passed and quieted, were not the choicest screenings of the earth. They were graduates of one of the roughest schools of experience that men and women ever attended, but a university whose doors closed long ago, its advantages no longer offering to the unsophisticated of the world.

Drumwell flourished in the days of the Cherokee leases, when Kansas and Texas cattlemen first began to feel keenly the encroachment of agriculture upon the range in their own states, a condition which the pioneers of the industry never believed would curtail the unrestricted exercise of their ancient privileges. But that condition had come to pass, squeezing many an old-timer to face the alternative of either quitting business or paying out hard money for the use of grazing-lands, to them an imposition that seemed as unjust as it was unprecedented.

A branch railroad had been built southward from one of the big lines crossing Kansas east and west, down to the Cherokee Nation line. Like a nodule on the root of a legume, Drumwell formed at the end of this crooked line of hastily built railroad, and rose to a peculiarly notorious eminence in its day.