Jonesville proved to be a typical Texas town of the modern
variety, and altogether different to the pictured frontier
village. There were no one-storied square fronts, no rows of
saloons with well-gnawed hitching-rails, no rioting cowboys. On
the contrary, the larger buildings were of artificial stone, the
sidewalks of concrete, and the store fronts of plate-glass. Arc-
lights shed a bluishwhite glare over the wide street-crossings,
and all in all the effect was much like that of a prosperous,
orderly Northern farming town.
Not that Jonesville would have filled an eye for beauty. It was
too new and crude and awkward for that. It fitted loosely into its
clothes, for its citizens had patterned it with regard for the
future, and it sprawled over twice its legitimate area. But to its
happy founder it seemed well-nigh perfect, and its destiny roused
his maddest enthusiasm. He showed Dave the little red frame
railroad station, distinguished in some mysterious way above the
hundred thousand other little red frame railroad stations of the
identical size and style; he pointed out the Odd Fellows Hall, the
Palace Picture Theater, with its glaring orange lights and
discordant electric piano; he conducted Law to the First National
Bank, of which Blaze was a proud but somewhat ornamental director;
then to the sugar-mill, the ice-plant, and other points of equally
novel interest.
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