Free Cottonwood by Scott Phillips Page B

and this was borne out when the prints were done; the dull Maggie and Marc who peered out from that canapé looked mesmerized. On the second they were indeed more like themselves, bright-eyed and wry, but Katie, as I’d anticipated, was recorded only as an oval blur above a dress; I had no stereoscope handy, but was practiced enough in the art of free-viewing that I was able to coax from it a three-dimensional image with my naked eyes. Marc and Maggie stood out in perfect relief against a soft canapé with Katie Bender between them, her head a hazy, silvery apparition in which could just be made out several faint impressions of disembodied eyes and teeth. My instinct was to chemically clean the plate for re-use, but something stopped me and I placed it in its padded berth in my negative case.
    The talk of the town that day was primarily of the fire, and the work that would be involved in rebuilding Otis’s shop. Marc offered to divert the materials from the construction on his house, which would cease until the forge was completed and more lumber had arrived, and to facilitate a bank loan for him. The other item that occupied the idle tongues and brains of Cottonwood was the elopement the night before of the widow Hattie Steig and young Francis Comden, who had slipped out of town under cover of night; I don’t believe it occurred to anyone but me that Hattie was the author of the blaze.

3
     
    COTTONWOOD, KANSAS MARCH 1873 The Occasion of Sin
     
    It had been scarcely three months since Marc Leval’s arrival in Cottonwood, followed shortly by that of the railroad and then the cattle town rumors, and already the town bore little resemblance to its once quiet and modest self. Marc now controlled the Citizens’ National Bank of Cottonwood at the end of Main Street and had evicted its president, Stanley Eaton, from his office in its rear; the office was full of supplicants of one kind or another from sunup to sundown, looking for funds to start up this new business or that, and often Marc didn’t even go home for lunch. Stanley now sat at a forlorn desk behind the teller cage, scornfully refusing to acknowledge any greetings through the bars, and at least once he flew into a rage when an impatient newcomer innocently asked Bernard Stanton, the skeletal teller, when they were going to put in a second cage for the other teller.
    I would be hard-pressed to estimate the population of the town at that time, but it certainly approached a thousand people at its height, more than three quarters of them male. Men arrived every day on horseback and on foot and by wagon, and few left. One of the rare locals who didn’t stay was Katie Bender; she had been asked by her family to return to the farm and help out at the inn, which had apparently prospered with the increased traffic across the prairie. I was glad to see her go; to my surprise so was Maggie, who, according to Marc, had come to the depressing conclusion that her friend was a charlatan.
    The men who came seeking employment generally found it. There was so much anticipatory building going on, and so much money being attracted from elsewhere and spent, that the casual observer would have thought the cattle pens were in place already, but in fact the profits were all in the future. When the railroad tracks had finally reached town a boxcar was taken off the track and set up for use as a depot, pending completion of a more permanent facility a few feet to the west. Every train that arrived brought lumber with it, and it wasn’t ever enough. Construction of a proper Methodist church was now under way, financed by a subscription hinging on the faith that new congregants would soon be flocking to Cottonwood alongside the day laborers and speculators who had materialized in Leval’s wake. Plans were afoot for its Baptist and Congregationalist equivalents, for which building societies had already been organized. The site of the Methodist church was across Main Street from the former