The West saw many "boom" towns. They followed in the wake of "gold strikes;" they grew, mushroom-like, overnight--garish husks of squalor, palpitating, hardy, a-tingle with extravagant hopes. A few, it is true, lived to become substantial cities buzzing with the American spirit, panting, fighting for progress with an energy that shamed the Old World, lethargic in its smug and self-sufficient superiority. But many towns died in their gangling youth, tragic monuments to hopes; but monuments also to effort, and to the pioneer courage and the dreams of an empire-building people.
Manti was destined to live. It was a boom town with material reasons for substantial growth. Behind it were the resources of a railroad company which would anticipate the development of a section of country bigger than a dozen Old-world states, and men with brains keen enough to realize the commercial possibilities it held. It had Corrigan for an advance agent--big, confident, magnetic, energetic, suave, smooth.
Manti had awaited his coming; he was the magic force, the fulfillment of the rumored promise. He had stayed away for three weeks, following his departure on the special car after bringing Judge Lindman, and when he stepped off the car again at the end of that time Manti was "humming," as he had predicted. During the three weeks of his absence, the switch at Manti had never been unoccupied. Trains had been coming in regularly bearing merchandise, men, tools, machines, supplies. Engineers had arrived; the basin near Manti, choked by a narrow gorge at its westerly end (where the dam was to be built) was dotted with tents, wagons, digging implements, a miscellany of material whose hauling had worn a rutted trail over the plains and on the slope of the basin, continually active with wagon-train and pack horse, and articulate with sweating, cursing drivers.
"She's a pippin!" gleefully confided a sleek-looking individual who might have been mistaken for a western "parson" had it not been for a certain sophisticated cynicism that was prominent about him, and which imparted a distasteful taint of his profession. "Give me a year of this and I'll open a joint in Frisco! I cleaned out a brace of bull-whackers in the _Plaza_ last night--their first pay. Afterward I stung a couple of cattlemen for a hundred each. Look at her hum!"