Page:The Green Bay Tree (1926).pdf/36



HERE had been a time, within the memory of Lily, though not of Irene who was but two years old, when the first transcontinental railroad stretched its ribbons of steel through the northern edge of the Town, when the country surrounding Cypress Hill was open marsh land, a great sea of waving green, of cat tails and marsh grasses with a feathery line of willows where a muddy, sluggish brook called the Black Fork threaded a meandering path. In those days Cypress Hill had been isolated from the Town, a country place accessible only by the road which John Shane constructed across the marshes from the Town to the great mound of glacial moraine where he set up his fantastic house. As a young man, he came there out of nowhere in the fifties when the Town was little more than a straggling double row of white wood and brick houses lining a single street. He was rich as riches went in those days, and he purchased a great expanse of land extending along one side of the single street down the hill to the opposite side of the marsh. His purchase included the site of the Cypress Hill house, which raised itself under his direction before the astonished eyes of the county people.

Brickmakers came west over the mountains to mold bricks for him in the kilns of the claybanks along the meandering Black Fork. Town carpenters returned at night with glowing tales of the wonders of the new house. Strange trees and shrubs were brought from the east and a garden was planted to surround the structure and shield it from the hot sun of the rolling, fertile, middle west. Gates of wrought iron were set up and stables were added, and at last John Shane returned from a trip across the mountains to occupy his house. It gained the name of Shane's Castle and, although he called it Cypress Hill, the people of the Town preferred