V
Thestockyards had been the scene of feverish activity for weeks. The loading pens were crowded to capacity and throughout every hour of the day and night there sounded the bawls of thirsty cattle and the shrill yelps of cowhands as they urged unwilling steers through the loading chutes. Long trainloads of cows rolled out of Caldwell in swift succession and loading was resumed as soon as empty cattle cars could be obtained. An antiquated switch engine wheezed noisily as it shunted cars along the switches and spotted them at the chutes. Day by day the congestion increased. The quarantine belt swarmed with stock, as some two hundred thousand head had been gathered from the Cherokee lands for shipment. In addition to these the regular run of summer business from the south continued as the trail herds from Texas and New Mexico came plodding up to add to the congestion.
Money flowed back into Caldwell in steady streams as trainloads of cattle were converted into cash on the Kansas City and Chicago markets. Many owners, having been deprived oftheir range by the stringent orders, found themselves unable to reinvest in cows the funds received from recent shipments. In their restlessness many of these turned to the green tables for relaxation and there were stud games where hundreds and often thousands were wagered on the turn of every card. All the cowhands of the Strip were banked up in the quarantine belt, holding the cows of their employers on grass until such time as they could be cleared and shipped. In their leisure hours they swarmed the streets of Caldwell. Added to these were the trail-herd crews from the whole Southwest, among them many Mexican peelers with their tremendous hats, silver-mounted saddles and three-inch silver rowels.
Four troops of cavalry were camped along the line and troopers mingled with the crowds. Caldwell, the last of the old-time cow towns, had now entered upon her last wild fling. It was now definitely known that in three months’ time the Cherokee Strip would be thrown open for settlement and the homeless from all corners of the country were already beginning to assemble. For weeks on end there was not a room available in town and men spread their campbeds in vacant lots. Eating places were crowded to capacity and new restaurants were being opened up inframe shacks or even in tents wherever vacant sites were available. As always, where business is rushing and money freely flowing, there were symptoms of a boom. It was openly predicted that the settling of the country to the southward would throw Caldwell into the enviable position of the one logical metropolis of the whole Southwest.
Cowmen cursed the troopers, seeing in them the visible symbol of that authority which had excluded them from their rightful domain. The unowned lands were thoroughly patrolled and detachments of cavalry were camped at strategic points throughout the Strip. It was this latter circumstance which had upset Carver’s calculations. He had planned with Bart Lassiter to hold a bunch of six hundred of Younger’s three-year-old steers on the forbidden range for a period of one year, receiving a substantial proportion of the increased price which they would bring as four-year-olds. Both Carver and Nate Younger had seen the futility of the attempt. Others had entertained similar ideas but had abandoned them as events moved swiftly past the farthest bounds of their previous comprehensions and rendered their hopes untenable.
Carver, once assured that his plans for the immediate future must be relinquished, cast aboutfor some substitute occupation which might prove equally remunerative. He rode away from Younger after their mutual decision, spinning his lone coin into the air and catching it as his horse jogged slowly across the range.
“It appears as if it’s going to be real difficult to provide you with all the company I’d counted on,” he said. “Time is skipping right along and here you are—occupying my pocket all by yourself without even one mate to jingle up against. Only last week I had it all mapped out to gather in several thousand of your sort to keep you company. But that plan’s flown out the window and here I am without one idea to work on.”
He turned along the south line fence of the Half Diamond H leases.
“Little lonely dollar, you must mount up to a million,” he asserted. “But we’ve got to insert our wedge somewheres right soon and start to mounting.”
His eye traveled along the fence line to where it disappeared in the distance, and suddenly he turned and rode back to where the outfit was camped and sought out the boss.
“About those fences being ordered down,” he said. “What arrangements have you made?”
“Not any,” Nate admitted. “What with gathering eight thousand head of steers and shipping’em I haven’t taken time off to worry over fences. We’ll have the last steer headed north in a few days now. Then I’ll see about scrapping fences—or let the squatters tear ’em down when they come in to roost.”
“It won’t leave you short-handed now if Bart Lassiter and I lay off,” Carver suggested. “You lend me a team and wagon from the home place and we’ll snatch out those fences for what material there is in them.”
“The fence is yours,” Younger agreed. “Provided the other half-owners of any stretches are agreeable. Go get it.”
Lassiter assented instantly when Carver stated the proposition.
“I always did feel suffocated in a fence country,” he announced. “I was always so much opposed to seeing every fence go up that I figure it will be a real entertaining pastime to help tear ’em down.”
This spirit of optimism lasted during the two days required to hunt up other part owners of certain stretches and get their endorsement of the plan, his enthusiasm lasting through the first few days of actual work. They were out before sunrise and knocked off after dark, pulling posts, coiling wire and freighting the materials to the Half Diamond H home ranch. His interestlagged but he did not openly rebel until after two thirds of the fence had been salvaged. Carver roused him one morning for breakfast and Bart blinked sleepily at the smoky lantern that lighted the sod hut in which they had stayed overnight.
“We’ve got enough wire piled up to enclose the State of Texas,” he stated. “There’s thirty miles of three-wire fence we’ve collected if there’s a foot. That’s twenty-nine miles more than both of us will ever need. Let’s leave the rest of her set.”
“But we contracted to scrap the whole of it,” Carver dissented. “Another week will see us through.”
“A week!” Lassiter moaned. “I just can’t face it, honest. I’ve reformed. I hope I hang if I ever extract another staple.”
“A week’s not such a long stretch,” Carver urged.
“Donald, I’ll break down and cry if you lead me up to just one other measly fence post,” Lassiter announced. “You take my half and let me off. I’ve got to amble over to Crowfoot’s and draw my spring wages. Then, too, I’d ought to collect Molly and get her settled somewhere in Caldwell. She’s all alone over on Turkey Creek.”
“I’ll pay you thirty dollars for what time you’ve put in—sometime when I’ve got it—and take over your wire and finish the job myself,” Carver at last conceded. “You can locate Molly in my little plant in Caldwell; only mark me now! There’ll be no more balancing of Cherokee rations conducted on the premises. I’ll remonstrate with you at some length if I catch you at it again.”
Carver worked on alone and at the end of another ten days he viewed with satisfaction the numerous coils of fence wire and the great stack of posts neatly corded behind the deserted buildings of the Half Diamond H.
“At present that assortment is only wood and iron,” he said. “But it’s a real imposing pile nevertheless, and I can likely convert it into dollars when the squatters come romping in.”
When he rode into Caldwell he was amazed at the swift transitions. The incoming transients had trebled the population in the last two months. Being unprepared for this sweeping change he was all the more prepared to lend a willing ear to the prediction that Caldwell was to become the metropolis of the whole Southwest. There was a conversational boom in progress and Carver, looking upon the crowded, teeming streets, the numerous tent houses everywhere in evidenceand the new frame shacks in the process of construction through the town, divined the possibility of actual boom days just ahead. He rode out to his little frame cabin to visit with Molly Lassiter whom he had seen but three times in as many months. He found neither Bart nor Molly at home but the door was unlocked and he entered.
The two rooms of the bare little shack had been transformed. Two worn Navajo rugs were spread on the pine-board floor and soft curtain materials were draped across the windows.
“She’s made it all homelike,” Carver said. “Just with a touch here and there. What couldn’t she do with things to work with and a real house to operate on? We’ll give her one some day if only she’ll agree.” He drew forth the lucky dollar and consulted it. “Let’s you and me hatch out a new idea,” he invited. “We can’t be loafing on the job.”
While the idea was hatching he sat peering abstractedly through the doorway, rousing from his reverie only when he found his gaze riveted on the girl as she turned into the pathway leading to the house. Molly halted suddenly when within a few feet of the door, as she saw him sitting just inside it.
“I hadn’t expected you this soon,” she said.
“Bart told me the fence job would keep you another month at least. Did you decide not to finish it?”
“It’s salvaged to the last strand of wire,” he returned. “I speeded up some so as to have it over with.”
“I’m sorry Bart quit,” she said. “You see he won’t stick at anything.”
“Don’t know as I blame him,” said Carver. “The last few days I’ve developed a downright aversion to the sight of fence wire myself. Glad to see me?”
“Yes,” she said. “I’ll be out of here and established in a room of my own so that you can have your house by to-morrow, Don. I’ve been waiting for the present occupants to vacate.”
“You stay right on here,” he insisted. “I won’t be needing it.”
“Thanks, Don, but I can’t do that,” she said. “I have to stop floating and find some nook of my own. I can’t follow Bart around any longer. For three years now we’ve drifted from one spot to the next; sometimes in line camps; more frequently in some rooming house in any town where we happened to be, always knowing that wherever it was it wouldn’t be home for long. I didn’t mind at first, for I was trying to keep Bart away from Milt and Noll; but they always turn upagain and he follows them off. I’d love even a sod house if only I could call it my own and know I wouldn’t have to move out on an hour’s notice. I’m sick of gypsying. I want to feel settled—feel that I’m attached!”
He reached over and rested a hand on her shoulder.
“I know, Honey,” he said. “So do I. That’s exactly my own frame of mind. The best way all round is for you and me to get attached and settle. Won’t you?”
She felt that he had failed to grasp the fact of what a sense of permanency would mean to her after the nomadic existence she had followed for the past few years.
“Listen, Molly,” he said, divining something of her thoughts. “It’s not the way a man says a thing but the way he means it that really counts. And I was meaning that a lot.”
“But you don’t even know to-day what you’re going to do to-morrow,” she said. “It would be only exchanging one state of gypsying for another. Don’t you see that?”
He did, at least, see that the moment was not right and he settled back into his chair and twisted a cigarette.
“You always lean to the dark side of things,” he accused. “Most complaints I’ve heard aboutfamily strife was occasioned because menfolks generally were so occupied with business that they didn’t spend much time at home. Now with me not having any special business it would leave me free to put in most of my time around the house. There’s that advantage.”
“Yes,” she laughed. “There’s that. Sometimes, Don, I almost wish you really were a settled sort of a soul; but that time will never be.”
Carver crooned softly:
“Oh, I’m a rolling rambler,”Said the speeding tumbleweed.“The prairies are my race track,The wild wind is my steed.“I never cease my roaming;I’m always hard to catch,But the pumpkin stays foreverIn the same old garden patch.“But I’d rather be a wild, wild weedThan a sluggish yellow squash:”
“Oh, I’m a rolling rambler,”Said the speeding tumbleweed.“The prairies are my race track,The wild wind is my steed.“I never cease my roaming;I’m always hard to catch,But the pumpkin stays foreverIn the same old garden patch.“But I’d rather be a wild, wild weedThan a sluggish yellow squash:”
“Oh, I’m a rolling rambler,”Said the speeding tumbleweed.“The prairies are my race track,The wild wind is my steed.
“Oh, I’m a rolling rambler,”
Said the speeding tumbleweed.
“The prairies are my race track,
The wild wind is my steed.
“I never cease my roaming;I’m always hard to catch,But the pumpkin stays foreverIn the same old garden patch.
“I never cease my roaming;
I’m always hard to catch,
But the pumpkin stays forever
In the same old garden patch.
“But I’d rather be a wild, wild weedThan a sluggish yellow squash:”
“But I’d rather be a wild, wild weed
Than a sluggish yellow squash:”
“And I’d so much rather be a pumpkin than the wildest of all wild weeds,” she said. “There’s only that little difference between the two of us.”
“Tell me,” he urged, “what sort of a quiet home life do you pine for most? Does your preference run to a cottage in town or stray off towards a dwelling in the country?”
“The country,” she returned. “Somewhere on a farm where I could watch things grow.”
“That’s my choice too,” he confessed. “Whatever business I settle on will have to be at the source of things. Like you said, I want to watch things grow—calves or crops, it don’t much matter which. I’ll start casting about for a farm right off.”
After leaving her he mingled with the swarming crowds on the main street. The conversational boom was in full swing and he heard it discussed on all sides. There were but few who dissented from the general prediction that an era of great prosperity lay ahead for Caldwell. Carver put in three active hours, then sought out Nate Younger to draw his back wages for the spring work, a sum totalling a trifle less than two hundred dollars.
He found Younger in his room at the hotel in conference with Joe Hinman. The two old cowmen had pooled resources and formed the Plains Land and Cattle Company, Younger having purchased grasslands adjoining Hinman’s holdings. They planned to make the new concern a beef ranch straight through instead of a breeding ranch as now operated by Hinman.
“We’ll be the biggest outfit in this end of the State,” Hinman was predicting, as Carver thrusthis head through the door. “Come in, son, and set on the bed. The Plains Land and Cattle Company is going to be the biggest of the lot.”
“I’m counting some on organizing a similar concern myself,” said Carver. “Maybe a trifle smaller than yours just at first; and in order to make the start I’ve got to borrow somewhat. I’m owning a nine-hundred-dollar equity in that bunch of calves we made the deal for last spring. How about your lending me eight hundred against it?”
“But that would leave you owing me thirteen hundred on the bunch,” Hinman objected. “And right now those calves wouldn’t fetch that price on the market.”
“Set the date for maturity of the loan far enough ahead so they’ll grow into it,” Carver suggested. “Before it comes due they’ll have advanced way beyond that figure. Then if I don’t pay up you can close me out at a profit.”
“Now ain’t that a fact!” Hinman exclaimed admiringly. “There was a time, Buddy, when I marvelled at your ability to shed a season’s wages overnight. It does look now as if you might also learn me a few tricks on the reverse side of things. You’ve got a business mind.”
He produced a check book and a stub of pencil.
“How long do you want this loan to run?” Carver asked.
“According to your own figures the longer it runs the more I stand to make,” said Hinman. “So I don’t know as it makes much difference. It does appear as if you’d let me in on a pretty good thing—so set the date yourself.”
“One year from to-day,” Carver decided.
“What do you aim to do with all this money?” Hinman inquired. “Setting out to break the bank in the Gilded Eagle?”
“I’ve purchased a building,” Carver proclaimed.
“You’ve which?” said Hinman. “What building?”
“Pirie’s place; down in the next block,” Carver informed. “It’s got a grocery business on the ground floor and the grocer’s wife rents room upstairs.”
He extended a contract and Hinman perused it, observing that Carver had agreed to purchase at three thousand dollars, paying six hundred down and a like amount each year.
“I’d rented my little shack,” Carver explained. “Only to find that there wasn’t a room for rent in town; not one! It was either buy a place of my own or set up.”
“It’ll save you considerable room rent,” Hinmanagreed, “you being in town easy three nights out of the year. But what’s the final object?”
“Each season those calves will be worth more and I can borrow enough additional against them to meet the payments,” Carver pointed out. “Meantime the grocer pays me thirty dollars rent money every month, which gives me a steady income to live off till such time as I can turn the building at a profit and buy a tract of land to run those calves on.”
“I didn’t know your ambitions run toward owning land,” said Hinman.
“But now since I’ve come into so much surplus fence wire,” Carver explained, “it looks like the only economical thing to do is to acquire a piece of land to set inside it.”
“Son, you’ve mapped out a self-operating business,” Nate Younger congratulated. “All you have to do now is to stand back and watch it ripen. Meantime why don’t you read up on Belgian hares?”
He handed over the sum due for back wages and Carver studied the two checks reflectively.
“This surplus now,” he said. “I was figuring to put into horses. They’ll almost give you horses nowadays just to come and drive them off. If you don’t mind my throwing a few head up on your range, I’ll buy up a little bunch andpay you fifty cents a head for pasture fees, agreeing to get ’em off your grass November first.”
“We’d better let him put ’em on, Joe,” Nate agreed. “It’s that much more security for that loan.”
Even under favorable circumstances the horse market was poor and now with all those recently combed from the Strip as a surplus, horses could be purchased at one’s own price. For a week Carver rode early and late. The average run of Indian ponies were selling for less than five dollars a head but it was not this class of horse flesh which Carver sought. He selected young mares and geldings, ranging from eleven to twelve hundred pounds in weight, which would serve for light work stock, and eventually he drove fifty head well toward the northern extremity of Hinman’s range. They had cost him an average of ten dollars apiece and he had paid cash for half of them, issuing verbal promises to pay for the rest. He rode back into Caldwell with something over a hundred dollars in his pocket.
The equipment of all the deserted ranches in the unowned lands was banked up in Caldwell. From the Coldstream Pool Carver purchased ten sets of harness at fifteen dollars a set and three heavy wagons at forty dollars each, paying hislast hundred down and his personal note for the balance.
Hinman witnessed this last transaction.
“Considering the size of your original stake you’ve stretched it to cover considerable territory in the last few months,” he said.
“It’s only my surplus I’m spreading out so thin,” Carver explained. “My capital is still intact.” He exhibited his silver dollar. “My one rule of life is never to impair my principal.”
“Fine,” Hinman encouraged. “That’s conservative business. I was satisfied you’d play it slow and safe.”
“Now if you’ll do me just one more little kindness I’ll be grateful;” Carver said. “You and Nate engage Freel in conversation up on the corner where he’s standing and inside of five minutes I’ll saunter up and direct the course of the interview.”
“I’d like to hear it,” Hinman said. “We’ll detain him.”
Carver joined them before the appointed space of time had elapsed.
“Freel, I’ve been feeling real contrite about resisting arrest a few weeks back,” Carver said. “I’ve decided to surrender and stand trial.”
The deputy marshal glanced apprehensively at the two old cowmen.
“Oh—that,” he said. “Why, I’ve let that matter drop. That’s all closed.”
“And it was real accommodating of you to close it,” Carver returned, “but I can’t stand by and see you get in trouble on my account. Orders are orders, and you had yours. That’s the reason I wrote this letter to Art Webb.” He tendered an unsealed letter to the deputy. Webb was Freel’s chief, the head United States marshal of the district. “Webb is a good friend of mine and I’m demanding that he inform me just why he sent an order down here to you to pick me up. That will put you in the clear for not rearresting me since that night I escaped.”
Carver turned to his two friends.
“You’ve both known Webb for years,” he said. “Did you write him like I asked you?”
“It clear slipped my mind,” Hinman apologized. “I’ll get it off this evening.”
“Mine goes on the same mail,” Nate concurred. “We’ll sift this thing right to the bottom layer and clear Freel of any possible blame.”
“Freel will be on my side himself if it comes to a showdown,” Carver asserted. “He’ll be the first to testify that I’d been away from home for a solid month prior to the time that charge was lodged. Some one’s tried to deal me from thebottom, and between the four of us we’ll discover who it is.”
Freel laughed and slapped Carver on the shoulder.
“Matter of fact, that inquiry was for another party, wanting to know if he’d turned up in these parts,” he said. “I went and got the names mixed. The joke’s on me—likewise the drinks, and I’ll buy right now.”
He slowly tore up the letter to Webb.
“And here I’ve been worried almost sick,” Carver said. “It’s a big relief to have it all cleared up. I still owe you fifty on that little bet. Here’s an agreement to pay in ninety days, just as an evidence of good faith.”
He handed Freel a folded paper and the marshal frowned as he read it.
“You’ll notice I stated why I owed it,” Carver amplified. “You’ve always played square with the boys—and there’s maybe a half dozen that’s willing to step forth and declare how you’ve always met them halfway the same as you did with me.”
During the next hour Carver accosted a dozen intimate acquaintances and told each in turn, quite confidentially, that there was a rumor afloat to the effect that Freel was about to resignas deputy marshal and that Mattison was making application for the post.
“By this time to-morrow every man in Caldwell will have commented on this matter to Mattison and Freel,” Carver said to Hinman. “Not because they take any special interest in it but just to make conversation. But the principals, being only human and therefore self-centered, will decide that the whole town is breathless over their affairs. Mattison will feel his ambition mounting and Freel will suspect that there’s been a fire kindled under him. Now if only you and Nate will put in your pull with Webb to give Mattison the appointment, it looks as if things would come out right.”
He rented an extra saddlehorse and invited Molly to join him in an afternoon ride. They jogged out past the stockyards where cowhands prodded unwilling steers through the loading chutes, on beyond the sound of the wheezing switch engine and the rattle and smash of cars, then angled westward through the quarantine belt where riders guarded thousands of head of cows. In the gathering dusk they rode out on the point of a lofty knoll which afforded a view throughout a great expanse of country.
“Have a last look at all this, Molly girl,”Carver said, extending an arm to the south. “There’s yesterday.”
The green summer range stretched away to the far horizon with never a plow furrow to break it. Two trail herds had been bedded for the night at widely separate points. A third, whose trail boss had evidently made a hard day’s drive to reach the quarantine belt in hope of an earlier clearance and shipping date than that accorded to his slower fellows, passed below the two on the knoll and plodded northward. Two men rode the points, the right and left forward extremities of the herd, guiding the foremost animals on the chosen course. One man skirted either flank and two others rode the “drags” in the rear of the herd to press forward any stragglers as the weary cattle drifted slowly toward the chuck wagon which was stationed a mile or more ahead and where the rest of the trail-herd crew had already gathered.
“That’s yesterday, girl,” Carver repeated. “Remember all this as you see it now; the green range and the trail herds coming up from the south. Have a last look at it—for here comes to-morrow,” and he pointed off to the northward.
Miles away across the quarantine belt a slender ragged line extended either way beyond the range of their vision. A thousand ribbons ofwhite smoke writhed aloft and glowed in pallid outline against the darkening sky. For two hundred miles along the line, wherever water was available, there was one continuous camp of squatters, and still the land seekers increased at the rate of two thousand families a week, all the landless of a mighty nation gathering here to participate in what would go down in history as the Cherokee Run, the most frenzied stampede of the century.
Both watchers felt a sudden tightening of the throat as they gazed upon the scene, their feelings much the same but occasioned by different viewpoints. Carver’s sympathy was with the riders who handled the cows on the near side of that continuous camp, men who, like himself, had loved the old open range, the range that was passing for all time. The girl’s heart went out to those homeless hosts outside the line, for she herself was homeless and could understand the longing which had brought them to this spot to join in a mad and desperate rush on the chance that they might be among the fortunate locaters who should be first to drive their stakes on any scrap of ground which would constitute a home. Perhaps they too were tired of gypsying, she reflected, and yearned for some one spot which they might call their own.
He pointed to the tiny scattering specks that were riders moving from point to point, then on beyond them to that stolid line.
“Yonder come the pumpkins to crowd out the tumbleweeds,” he said.
The soft summer night shut down and transformed the pale smoke columns into a tortuous trail of twinkling fires which extended for two hundred miles along the line.
“We’d best be going now,” the girl said at last. “There’s a fifteen-mile ride ahead. I’m glad you brought me here to see all this. It means one thing to you, Don, and exactly the opposite to me. But it’s something we won’t forget.”
“No,” he said. “We’ll not forget.”
They rode on in silence, the girl occupied with her thoughts of the homeless legions who would soon have homes, Carver content with the mere fact of her nearness. When he decided that this thoughtfulness had claimed her for too long a time he recounted his transactions of the past few days.
“About those responsibilities I promised you I’d acquire,” he said, “I’m taking them on rapid. In addition to both residence and business property here in town, I’m owning a considerable number of horses and a hundred head of calves,not to mention harness, wagons and a few score miles of good barbed wire. I’m accumulating responsibilities so fast that there’s times I can’t be real sure whether they’re mine or some one’s else.”