"You'll find some books and papers on the table in the next room," said Jim, as I finished my first look about. "I'll ask you to amuse yourself with 'em for a little while, until I can dispose of my morning's mail; after which we'll resume our hunt for resources. We haven't any morning paper yet, and the evening _Herald_ is shipped in by freight and edited with a saw. But it's the best we've got--yet."
He read his letters, ran his eyes over his newspapers and a magazine or two, and dictated some correspondence, interrupted occasionally by callers, some of whom he brought into the room where I was whiling away the time, examining maps, and looking over out-of-date copies of the local papers. One of these callers was Mr. Hinckley, the cashier of the bank, who came to see about some insurance matters. He was spare, aquiline, and white-mustached; and very courteously wished Lattimore the good fortune of securing so valuable an acquisition as ourselves. It would place Lattimore under additional obligations to Mr. Elkins, who was proving himself such an effective worker in all public matters.
"Mr. Elkins," said he, "has to a wonderful degree identified himself with the material progress of the city. He is constantly bringing here enterprising and energetic business men; and we could better afford to lose many an older citizen."
I asked Mr. Hinckley as to the length of his own residence in Lattimore.
"I helped to plat the town, sir," said he. "I carried the chain when these streets were surveyed,--a boy just out of Bowdoin College. That was in '55. I staged it for four hundred miles to get here. Aleck Macdonald and I came together, and we've both staid from that day. The Indians were camped at the mouth of Brushy Creek; and except for old Pierre Lacroix, a squaw-man, we were for a month the only white men in these parts. Then General Lattimore came with a party of surveyors, and by the fall there was quite a village here."
Jim came in with another gentleman, whom he introduced as Captain Tolliver. The Captain shook my hand with profuse politeness.
"I am delighted to see you, suh," said he. "Any friend of Mr. Elkins I shall be proud to know. I heah that Mrs. Barslow is with you. I trust, suh, that she is well?"