It is needless to detail the excitement which had followed this. "Lies, lies, liars!" were the epithets hurled from Gregory. "The railroad is in Gregory to stay; to stay for"—oh, they couldn't say how many years, perhaps a hundred; but all that noise to the west was a bluff, a simon pure bluff, and that ended it. That is, until they started the same noise over again. But it had not been a bluff. The tracks had been laid from Gregory to Dallas early in the spring that followed, and now Dallas was the town instead of Gregory, and the boom that had followed the building of the town, is a matter never to be forgotten in the history of the country.

Gregory's one good fortune was that she had secured the land office which necessitated that all filings should be entered there, and in this way got more of the boom that was occasioned by the land opening at the west than it had expected to when the railroad company had pushed its way west out of the town.

It was about this time while great excitement was on and thousands of people were in the town of Dallas that something occurred that came near literally wiping that town off the map. Jean Baptiste had loaded his wagons and was on the way from his land to the claims of his sister when the same came to pass.

The greatest danger in a new country comes after the grass has died in the fall and before the new grass starts in the spring. But in the fall when the grass is dry and crisp, and the surface below is warm and dry, is the time of prairie fires. No time could have been more opportune for such an episode than the time now was. The wind had been blowing for days and days, and had made the short grass very brittle, and the surface below as hot as in July. Jean Baptiste was within about a mile of where New Dallas now reposed vaingloriously on a hillside, her many new buildings rising proudly, defiantly, as if to taunt and annoy Gregory, against the skyline, when with the wind greeting him, he caught the smell of burning grass. He reached a hillside presently, and from there he could see for miles to the west beyond, and the sight that met his gaze staggered him.

"A prairie fire," he cried apprehensively, and urged his teams forward toward Dallas. One glance had been sufficient to convince him what it might possibly mean. A prairie fire with the wind behind it as this was, would bid no good for Dallas, and once there he could be of a little service, since he knew how to fight it.