I watched this fight from the beginning, with interest, for I had become well enough acquainted with Ernest to feel that he knew what he was about. When the surveyors had arrived in Calias, Ernest had gone to Chicago. In declaring the road could not miss Amro the people were much like inhabitants of Megory had been a few years before. While they prattled and allowed their ego to rule, they should have been busy, and when it was seen that the town might not get the railroad, they should have gone to Chicago and seen Marvin Hewitt, putting the proposition squarely before him, and requested that if he could not give them the road, to give them a depot, if they moved to the line of the survey. By that time it was a town with two solid blocks of business houses and many good merchants and bankers. I often wondered how such men could be so pinheaded, sitting back, declaring the great C. & R.W. railway could not afford to miss a little burg like Amro, but from previous observations and experience I felt sure they would wait until the last dog was dead, before trying to see what they could do. And they did.

In the meantime the promoters, who were nearly all from Megory or somewhere in Megory county, had learned that Ernest Nicholson was nobody's fool. They hooted the Nicholsons, along with the rest of the town, declaring Ernest to be anything but what he really was, until they had roused enough excitement to make Amro seem like a "good thing." Then they quietly sold their interest to the Amoureaux Brothers, who raked up about all that was left of the fortune of a few years previous, and paid six thousand, six hundred dollars for the interest of the promoters which made the Amoureaux the sole owners of the townsite and placed them in obvious control of the town's affairs, and again in the white society they liked so well.