Page:Micheaux - The Conquest, The Story of a Negro Pioneer (1913).djvu/206



completing the first survey, however, the surveyors returned, and made another that struck Amro. This survey swerved off from the first survey to the southwest between Colone and Amro and struck the valley of a little stream known as Mud Creek, which empties into the Dog Ear at Amro. But being a most illogical route, I felt confident the C. & R. W. had no intention of following it, perhaps only making the survey out of courtesy to the people in Amro, or possibly to show to the state railroad commissioners, if they became insistent, why they could not strike the town.

About this time Ernest Nicholson appeared on the scene, and purchased a forty acre tract of land north of the town, for which he paid fifty-five dollars an acre, later paying ten thousand dollars for a quarter, joining the forty. Still later he purchased the entire section of heirship land, belonging to a man named Jim Riggins, an Oristown city justice, and a former squaw-man, whose deceased wife had owned the land. For this section of land the Nicholsons paid thirty-five thousand dollars. The price staggered the people of Amro, who declared Nicholson had certainly gone crazy. They set up a terrible "howl." "What were the d— Nicholsons sticking their noses into Tipp county towns for? Were they not satisfied with Calias, where they had grafted everybody out of their money?"