The beginnings of faction were in our town-sites; for most of them were in no sense towns, or even villages.  There was a future county-seat fight in the rivalry between Monterey Centre and Lithopolis—­and not only these, but in the rival rivalries of Cole’s Grove, Imperial City, Rocksylvania, New Baltimore, Cathedral Rock, Waynesville and I know not how many more projects, all ambitiously laid out in the still-unorganized county of Monterey, and all but one or two now quite lost to all human memory or thought, except as some diligent abstractor of titles or real-estate lawyer discovers something of them in the chain of title of a farm; the spires and gables of the ’fifties realized only in the towering silo, the spinning windmill, or the vine-clad porch of a substantial farm-house.  But in the heyday of their new-driven corner stakes, what wars were waged for the power to draw people into them; and especially, how the county-seat fights raged like prairie fires set out by those Nimrods who sought to make up in the founding of cities for what they lacked as hunters, in comparison with the establisher of Babel and Erech and Accad and Calneh in the land of Shinar.

Between the Maquoketa and Independence I lost N.V.  Creede, merely because I traded for some more lame cows and a young Alderney bull, and had to stop to break them.  He stayed with me two days, and then caught a ride with one of Judge Horace Stone’s teams which was making a quick trip to Lithopolis.

“Good-by, Mr. Vandemark,” said he at parting, “and good luck.  I am sorry not to be able to remunerate you for your hospitality, which I shall always remember for its improving conversation, its pancakes, its pork and beans, and its milk and butter, rather than for its breathless speed.  And take the advice of your man of the law in parting:  in your voyages over the inland waterways of life, look not upon the flush when it is red—­not even the straight one; for had I not done that on a damned steamboat coming up from St. Louis I should not have been thus in my old age forsaken.  And let me tell you, one day my coachman will pull up at the door of your farm-house and take you and your wife and children in my coach and four for a drive—­perhaps to see the laying of the corner-stone of the United States court-house in Lithopolis.  I go from your ken, but I shall return—­good-by.”

I was sorry to see him go.  It was lonesome without him; and I was troubled by my live stock.  I soon saw that I was getting so many cattle that without help in driving them I should be obliged to leave and come back for some of them.  I found a farmer named Westervelt who lived by the roadside, and had come to Iowa from Herkimer County, in York State.  He even knew some of the relatives of Captain Sproule; so in view of the fact that he seemed honest, I left my cattle with him, all but four cows, and promised to return for them not later than the middle of July.  I made him give me a receipt for them, setting forth just what the bargain was, and I paid him then and there for looking out for them—­and N.V.  Creede said afterward that the thing was a perfectly good legal document, though badly spelled.