IV
Thecook wagon lumbered down Cabin Creek toward the Salt Fork of the Arkansas. A dozen hands, riding in couplets, straggled irregularly behind. The bed wagon followed and the horse wrangler brought up the rear with theremudawhich numbered some two hundred head of horses, including the string of extra mounts for each round-up hand who rode with the Half Diamond H wagon.
A rider waited on the far bank of the Salt Fork with his string of extra horses and the men speculated idly as to whether he represented Crowfoot or the Coldstream Pool, it being the custom to exchange “reps” to ride with neighboring wagons. The horseman proved to be Bart Lassiter, repping for Crowfoot. Carver’s intimation as to Crowfoot’s methods and their possible connection with the X I L trail herd, dropped on the occasion of his last visit with Molly Lassiter, had borne fruit. The Half Diamond H crew had been full-handed but the girl had induced Bart to ride with their wagon as Crowfoot’s rep instead of accompanying his half-brothers to the X I L.
Lassiter threw his extra mounts in with theremudaand joined Carver, who opened up on him without parley.
“I tendered you the key to my little house so that you could use it for living purposes,” he said, “but without any notion that you’d start up in business. From all that I can gather you set out to abate the thirst of the whole Cherokee Nation.”
“Well, the poor devils are fixed up every other way,” Bart explained. “They draw beef rations, flour rations, blanket issues and so on, but nobody’s ever been thoughtful enough to provide them with licker rations, so they’re forced to live a one-sided, unbalanced kind of existence and I was striving to supply the lack and sort of round out their lives.”
“An’ you came near to finishing mine,” Carver stated.
“It was only that once,” Bart defended. “I did dispose of several cases at a right handsome profit and you’ve no notion how much they enjoyed theirselves the next night. It would have done your heart good to have heard it. All Caldwell turned out to listen to the expansive sounds emanating from the Cherokee camp south of town.”
Carver had placed that first illusive impressionthat Molly Lassiter was in grave need of something without which her life was not quite complete. It was no material requirement but a need that was deeper than that. She despised the ways of the two older half-brothers, who had been practically strangers to her during her own early life, showing up at her father’s home but infrequently. Later, after her own mother’s death, they had returned and made it their home. There had never been any bond between them and herself, and she had feared the effect their ways might exercise upon Bart. Freel had spoken the truth when he asserted that she knew what it was to have the law always barking at her door. Carver knew now that what she most needed was peace,—assurance that the same old conditions would not pertain to her life and Bart’s.
“Why do you put Molly up against that sort of thing?” he demanded.
“She didn’t know,” Bart returned.
“But she’d know if they happened to clamp down on you for it,” Carver insisted. “And that’s what she’s guarding against. She’s always had that sort of thing to fight off.”
“She has for a fact,” Bart admitted. “The old man was a hard citizen himself, way back in his youth. He’d quieted down for a good many years but after the two boys came back he sort ofleaned their way again. There’s been times when Molly and me was kids, and left all alone in the house or wherever we happened to be at the time, that folks would come round inquiring about his whereabouts, and the old man hiding out in the hills about them. She thought a lot of him, Molly did, and hated Milt and Noll for leading him off.”
“Then why don’t you shake them?” Carver demanded. “There’s no common bond between you and them, and Molly would be way better off.”
“I’ve made the break now and again,” Bart explained. “But they always turn up. Our family line-up is fashioned after that fabled joint snake. You can disrupt the critter but the pieces crawl back together again and all stand united.”
“If there’s any more midnight visits made at my cabin,” said Carver; “there’ll be one middle joint absent from the next family reunion.”
“I take it you’re referring to Noll,” said Bart. “If you’ll only accept my earnest advice you’ll decoy Noll off to some quiet spot and snap a cap at him. I promise it won’t upset me a bit.”
On the third day out from the ranch Carver rode with Nate Younger along a low ridge studded with a straggling stand of black-jack timber. The old man’s face was stern and set ashe viewed the procession filing for two miles along the open bottoms below them.
A dozen round-up crews made up the picture, for this was a coöperative move by all the outfits ranging in the Strip, the great final combing of stock from the unowned lands.
Far up the valley, a mere speck in the distance, the Half Diamond H wagon led the way while the others trailed at intervals. Two hundred riders, the personnel probably including the most efficient body of cowhands in the world, straggled up the bottoms in irregular formation. The extra horses, if combined into onecavayadowould number over two thousand head. A group of riders hovered near the last wagon, it having encountered difficulties in making the crossing of the Cimarron, resuming their way as the quick-sands relinquished their sucking hold upon the wheels and the floundering horses snaked the lumbering vehicle out upon the solid shore. A band of twenty Cherokees flanked thecavalcadeand dashed from one outfit to the next, begging food from each wagon boss in turn. Midway of the procession a detachment of cavalry rode in double file while the officer in command conferred with the man in charge of that particular wagon. As Carver watched they dropped back abreast of the next in line and he knew the message deliveredto each one in turn by the soldiery,—the instructions to make a thorough sweep and clear every head of stock from the Cherokee Strip.
The Indians, having gathered contributions sufficient for the moment, including a steer which was pointed out to them by the owner of the brand worn by the animal, hazed this moveable meat supply to the crest of an adjacent knoll and there dropped it with an accompaniment of rifle shots. Younger waved a hand toward the scene spread out before him.
“That’s the way I saw the Old West first,” he said. “The picture is mighty near identical; the wagons rolling along just like that, only drawn up in more tight formation; thecavayadotrailing under guard, holding all the extra horses of the settlers; maybe a band of marauding reds clustered off to one side like them that are hacking up that steer; sometimes a little escort of troopers helping us at bad crossings where the Kiowas and Comanches was most liable to jump us while a part of the train was bogged down in the sand. The wagons was more likely dragged by bulls than horses then, and buffalo was scattered round the landscape in place of range cows, but on the whole the picture tallies close enough.” The old man turned his gaze away. “That’s the way we was first ushered into the Old West, son. Maybeit’s fitting that we’re being similarly ushered out of the last bit that’s left for us.”
They rode on in silence and regained the head of the line. The various wagons made camp at intervals sufficient to permit theremudasof different outfits to be held on good grass at widely separate points to prevent the possibility of their mixing. On this occasion the men rode from one night camp to the next to renew old friendships, fraternizing with the hands who rode for rival brands. Another crew of similar magnitude had assembled at another point in the Strip and during this same hour these men too were mingling from one outfit to the next. Perhaps among the entire three hundred odd gathered at these two points there was not one man who fully realized that this meeting was to be the last of its sort; not one who could even partly vision the circumstances of the next.
Never again in history were these men to gather as a whole on the open range. This night was the last. Many would meet in the future; others would never meet again. Some would be neighbors for a lifetime and it was slated that the trails of others should cross in far places. Perhaps it is well that it is not given to man to look far into the future. This last occasion was not marred by any thought that the summons forthe next gathering would not go forth for more than a quarter of a century. There were many present who would heed that plea which would one day be issued for all the old-time peelers and bronc fighters of the Cherokee lands to assemble for a final rally. They would not then travel across the open range with chuck wagons and saddle horse. Some would be carried in luxuriously appointed coaches that roared along steel rails; others in glittering vehicles that purred swiftly along fenced and well-kept highways; some would arrive in strange craft that swept across the skies above thriving western cities situated on spots now widely known as ideal cow-camp sites. A few indeed, but very few, would come in buckboards or ride in on horses, their ropes coiled on ancient saddles; and it would be these latter ones who would then appear strange and out of place. But no such glimpse of future actualities troubled the men as they sought friends who worked with other wagons. There was a general disposition to scoff at the notion that there would be no more cows ranged on the Strip. Even if it were opened for entry it would be long before there were sufficient settlers to take up any great percentage of the range. The settlement of any country was a slow and tedious process. In any event there were long years oflife in the open—the only sort of existence which they could endure with satisfaction—stretching forth ahead of them; so why concern themselves over vague possibilities of the future? That was the general attitude of them all, excepting old Nate and his contemporaries, men who, like himself, were being ushered out of their domain as they had been ushered in a generation past. Their day was passing and they knew it.
Throughout the following day various wagons turned aside to the right or left, branching away toward some far spot allotted to them, there to begin the first actual work. In the late afternoon the Half Diamond H wagon made its stand on a creek that flowed to the Cimarron from the low watershed between that stream and the North Fork of the Canadian. The cook’s summons brought the men tumbling from their bed rolls an hour before dawn. The night hawk hazed theremudainto a corral fashioned by a single rope stretched between stakes sledged solidly into the sod, and after breakfasting the men entered in pairs, each to rope a circle horse of his own particular string. In the first light of day Younger led off up a ridge to the main divide flanking the creek to the left and turned upstream along it. Other reps had joined the wagon and there were now nearly twenty riders following where he led.At the head of each draw he detailed one or two men to work it. When half of the crew had been assigned to cover certain stretches Younger dropped again to the bottoms, mounted to the opposite divide and moved downstream in a similar fashion until even with the wagon, working the last draw himself.
The riders combed the scrub-oak side hills and the gulches, shoving all stock before them to the bottoms and heading them upstream. The first riders to finish their details were stationed across the valley to halt the cows brought in by others. The chuck wagon had lumbered on up the creek to the point from which the next circle would be thrown. The night hawk had gone off duty with sunrise but the wrangler held theremudain a rope corral. While a part of the men held the herd the others repaired to this enclosure and caught fresh horses, those who were to engage in the next gathering swing putting their ropes on circle mounts, while those detailed to bring up the day herd caught trained cow horses belonging to their individual strings.
In a breeding-ranch country the herd would have been worked on the spot, calves roped and ironed with the brand worn by their mothers, and only the beef steers cut into a day herd, the she-stuff and all stock younger than two-year-oldsbeing allowed to scatter once more on the range. But there were no calves to brand, no she-stock on the range, for of late the cowmen of the Strip had come to follow one set rule in accord with the transition of the cow business, forming an intermediate link between the old-time cattle kings of the open range and the modern feeders of the corn belt. For beef raising, instead of a one-outfit business from start to finish, had come to be a business of progression induced by the necessities of later-day conditions. Big breeding ranches were now mainly confined to the vast wastes of Texas and the Southwest and to similar stretches in the ranges of the Northwest.
The breeding ranches of Texas and New Mexico now gathered their steers as two-year-olds and sold them to the intermediate beef-brands operating in the Strip, the short-grass plains of Western Kansas and the Sandhill country of Nebraska. Here they were ranged on grass till they had turned four-year-olds, then resold to the feeders of Missouri, Iowa and Illinois, who corn-fed and fattened and finished them for market. Except for one breeding ranch confined to a great fenced-in pasture, there was only beef stuff in the whole expanse of the Strip, which rendered the round-up a comparatively simple affair. This last event in particular was simplifiedby the orders which had just gone forth from governmental sources, and every head of stock gathered in each circle was held in the day herd.
The rope corral was dismantled, ropes and stakes loaded on the bed wagon which promptly headed up country, trailed by the wrangler with theremuda, and Carver led all the hands except those detailed with the day herd up the bottoms toward the new stand of the cook wagon. It was but ten o’clock when they dropped from their horses and fell ravenously upon a hot meal which the cook had already prepared, for while the cowhand’s day begins an hour before dawn his nooning comes at ten and his knock-off time is seldom later than five P. M.
The second circle of the day was completed in the late afternoon. The hands feasted to repletion and lolled about for an hour, buzzing angrily over a new rumor which had just reached camp. The men spread their bed rolls on the ground and retired with the setting sun.
Carver dropped instantly asleep but contrary to his usual custom he waked within an hour and sleep would not come to him as he tossed restlessly in his blankets. The turmoil of the round-up, the hoarse bawls emanating from the throats of five hundred steers, the shrill yelps of riders, the stifling dust of daytime activities; all thesehad been superseded by the night sounds of the cow camp in the open. A cool breeze stole across the range which now seemed mysteriously hushed. Occasionally some night horse on picket or tied to the stake ropes shifted uneasily and stamped a restless foot. The night hawk held thecavayadoon good grass somewhere down the bottoms and his voice drifted faintly to Carver as he sang to while away the lonely hours. The night guards on duty with the herd were likewise singing to soothe their charges on the bed ground a few hundred yards above the wagon, and fragmentary snatches of their melodies floated down to Carver’s ears as he blinked sleeplessly up at the stars. He remained awake till the hour came to stand his turn on second guard and he rolled out, mounted his night horse and rode with several others to relieve the weary riders who had stood the first shift of the night after a fourteen-hour day in the saddle.
As Carver circled the bed ground his thoughts were still concerned with the text of the rumor so recently set afloat. It was said that not only cows, but men would be ordered from the unowned lands; that every foot of fence must be removed from the range and brand owners forced to abandon home ranches. Bart Lassiter joined him.
“Well, what do you think of our latest bit of news?” he asked. “Think they’ll go through with it?”
“It don’t seem reasonable that they’d put over any such drastic measure,” Carver said. “They might. It will be hard on the old man if they do.”
A figure rode toward him in the moonlight and the old man in question joined him as Lassiter departed. Nate too had been restless and had found himself unable to sleep. As Carver had reflected that such a move would inflict an undeserved hardship upon his employer, so Nate was wondering as to what effect it would have upon his hands, for in common with all cowmen of his type, Younger was proud of the accomplishments of his riders.
Every brand owner would stand back of the men who rode for him; every rider evidenced a similar devotion to the owner’s interests,—a loyalty to the brand for which he worked. Perhaps in all history there has never been another calling which has inspired the same allegiance throughout its entire personnel. A man must be proficient in many lines to qualify as a cowhand. First of all he must be a horseman capable of mastering any horse on the range and of training his mounts to perform the various and intricateduties required of them; a roper of parts, able to front-foot a calf or to rope and hog-tie a mighty range bull with equal facility; sufficiently skilled in blacksmithing to shoe his own horses; for these and many other acquirements, working at them sixteen hours a day, he was paid a lesser sum than any unskilled laborer received for ten hours of far less gruelling work. It was the wild free life, not the pay, which held him to his chosen calling. The driving spring rains which soaked his bed roll as he slept on wet ground in the open; the shrivelling heat of summer and the shrieking blasts of winter blizzards; the congenial companionship of round-up days and the long lonely vigils at isolated winter line camps; all these he chose in preference to the softer life and greater pay of other less strenuous pursuits.
“What will all the boys be doing in another season?” Younger asked. “Where’ll they all go when there’s no more range work for them to do?”
“Texas maybe,” Carver predicted. “Or New Mexico.”
“Both those countries are coming to be overrun with nesters,” Nate returned. “The big brands are getting their range cut up right now. They’ve been forced to reduce the size of their outfits in proportion to the decrease in theirrange. There’s more cowhands down there now than there are jobs to go around.”
“Then maybe the Northwest range country,” Carver suggested.
“The surplus bronc peelers of Texas and New Mexico have been drifting up there for the last ten years,” Nate stated. “They’re a drug on the market right now, cowhands are. And they’re irrigating that Northwest country rapid and cutting up the range. Once they settle the Strip, all the boys down there will have to go into other lines. That’s sure.”
The herd was worked and reworked almost daily as cows wearing brands that ranged in different parts of the Strip were culled out and turned over to some wagon crew whose ultimate destination lay in that direction. All along a two-hundred-mile front more than a score of wagons were operating in unison. Owners ranging south of the Strip sent parties up to trail-herd back any of their stock that had wandered to these parts. These men brought with them little bunches of Half Diamond H cows and others that had drifted from the Strip to southern ranges. Some came from beyond the Canadian and at least one little assortment had been combed from the distant Washita. Younger, in common with other large owners of his neighborhood,maintained drift fences and line camps to prevent the drifting of his stock from the home range. Even with these precautions there was a certain annual leakage, but the percentage of Half Diamond H cows gathered south of the Cimarron was small.
Day after day as the round-up progressed the men threshed out the fate of the unowned lands. It constituted the sole topic of discussion whenever two riders met on the circle or paused to converse as they stood their turn on night guard. It filled that brief period of general indolence in which they indulged each evening before taking to their beds with the setting sun. Carver, perhaps to a greater extent than any of them, had anticipated certain transitions. He had correctly interpreted the presence of those white-topped wagons camped along the line and knew what they portended, yet even now he found it impossible to give credence to such drastic changes as were predicted by old Nate and others of his kind. He sought for an analogous example and found it in the settling process which Kansas had been undergoing for a period of forty years; yet throughout the whole western half of that State ranches of five to fifty thousand acres were the rule. In view of this circumstance he could not quite conceive of the vast expanse of the unownedlands being cut up into quarter sections in the space of a few short years. It would all take time. He advanced this idea to Younger on a day some three weeks out from the ranch.
“All this talk about men being ordered out of the Strip,” he said. “How are they going about that? I’ve seen the squatter outfits rolling up to the line and making camp. But we’ve had similar demonstrations before now; that year the boomers fired the grass for one; and nothing came of it. They were ordered out. Even if they let ’em in it will take years to settle up the Strip.”
Younger nodded abstractly. Since that event had cost him a thousand head of cows it was but natural that the incident was still fresh in his mind. A few years past a swarm of squatters had invaded the unowned lands in the face of all regulations. When the cowmen had sought to expel them after they had refused to obey the government’s order to move out, the boomers had scattered and fired the parched fall grass and stock had died by thousands throughout the burned areas. The negro cavalry had been sent in to enforce the regulations and were thereafter stationed at Caldwell, patrolling the line and turning back all insistent settlers who would enter. Now the Negro troopers had been withdrawn and a second invasion seemed imminent.
“I know, son; but this time things will be reserved,” Nate prophesied. “Then they ruled the squatters out and stood by us. This time they’ve ruled us out instead.”
“They’ll open it for entry,” Carver agreed. “It’s come to that and it’s likely we can’t postpone it. But this notion that the whole of the Cherokee country will be settled up solid in a few years’ time seems overdrawn.”
“A few months’ time, boy,” the old man corrected. “More likely a few weeks will do the trick.”
Carver’s thoughts reverted to a similar prediction made by Hinman, “It’ll be one hair-raising, mad stampede,” old Joe had said. But Carver still dissented.
“It’ll take nearly fifty thousand families to file on every quarter section in the Strip,” he said. “They’ll come eventually. I know that. But where will that many come from in a few weeks’ time?”
“Son, they’ll come from every odd corner of the country,” Younger stated. “They’ll swarm in and settle down in clouds like blackbirds in a cane field. She’ll be the damnedest, wildest scramble a man will ever live to witness. I’m telling you.”