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Show NADA COMMERCIAL CLUB AND HIS EXCELLENCY Chapter X Nada was more fantasy than fact. The cloud castles the Nash-Avery land-locaters dreamed for us quickly began to come apart. Some homesteaders us gave up early. Yet the rest ofAcobbled up our delusions with any materials we could find. So that weird contradiction the Nada Commercial Club was born. Sometimes we saw that fables Nash-Avery told us were parts of a fantastic fast-sell intended to skim the cream off the Nada boom and our bankrolls. But the odd part was the large amount of illusions we cherished after the schemers had departed and we opened our innocent phase of boosterism. You see, we'd sunk all we had in the Land, staked our futures on it. And we humans cannot live without hopes and dreams. Around the red glowing stove in ths store those first winters we recalled tall tales the land-locaters had told us. We'd laugh half-ashamed at our gullibility. Then usually the mood shifted to plans for the future, and the new dreams were woven of materials very like those that Nash-Avery drivers and cooks and salesmen had left us! Quite honestly we could one moment curse the Pied Piper who had piped us to the desert, and in the next we could be missionaries of the Message that here was the Promised Land. Stories the company had told us we reworked in our fancy, and we longed to persuade others of our visions. So I'm not straining to defend Father's image when I maintain he was unselfish in furthering the second, non-profit chapter of promotion. He had set up store and post office primarily to aid settlement. He proved that by staying longer than anyone, and never did he reveal a beclouding of his faith. Nevertheless there was a well-nigh unbelievable relationship between Nash-Avery as villain and the Nada Commercial Club as selfless hero-virtuous |