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was still on the boom, not quite as much as the summer before, but more than it was some time later, for as yet New Calias was still regarded as a joke, until one day Stanley, the same wiry-looking individual with the black mustache and the piercing eyes, got off the stage at Megory and began to do the same work he had started west of Oristown the year before.

Oh, it was a shame to thus wreck the selfish dreams of these Megoryites upon the rocks of their own shortsightedness. Stanley was followed a few days later by a grade contractor, who had been to Megory the summer before and who had becamebecome [sic] popular around town, and was known to be a good spender. They had bidden him good-bye along in December, and although nothing was said about it, the truth was, Megory did not wish to see any more railroad contractors, for a while, not for five or ten years anyway.

It is a peculiar thing that when a railroad stops at some little western burg, that it is always going to stay ten or twenty years. This has always been the case before, according to the towns at the end of the line, and at this time Megory was of the same opinion as regarded the extension to New Calias. So Oristown had been in regard to the extension to Megory. But Trelway built the road to New Calias, and built it the quickest I ever saw a road