Page:Micheaux - The Conquest, The Story of a Negro Pioneer (1913).djvu/127

 chat, treat the boys, tell a funny story, and be off. Nobody was mean enough or bold enough to tell him to his face any of the things they told to his back.

Ernest was never known to say anything about it. His scheme simply kept John Nogden moving buildings. He wrote checks in payment, that the bank of Calias cashed, for it was open for business the next day after it had been moved out on the prairie, five miles west of Megory.

The court record showed six quarter sections of land west of town had recently been transferred; the name of the receiver was unknown to anyone in Megory, but such prices, forty to fifty dollars per acre. The people who had sold, brought the money to the Megory banks, and deposited it. All they seemed to know was that someone drove up to their house and asked if they wanted to sell. Some did not, while others said they were only five miles from Megory, and if they sold they would have to have a big price, because Megory was the "Town of the Little Crow" and the gateway to acres of the finest land in the world, to be opened soon. "What is your price?" he would ask, and whether it was forty, forty-five or fifty per acre, he bought it.

This must have gone on for sixty days with everybody wondering "what it was all about", until it got on the nerves of the Megoryites; and even the town dads began to get a little fearful. When Ernest was approached he would wink wisely, hand out a cigar or buy a drink, but he never made anybody the wiser.