Part 3

“They mean business this time,” Carver predicted. “There’ll be cavalry patrols riding to keep an eye on the round-up, likely, and make sure that everything’s gathered and shoved outside. There’ll be upwards of two hundred thousand cows collected and marketed this summer in order to clear the Strip.”

“Maybe you’re right, son,” Younger said. “It’s beginning to look that way. You don’t want to miss the round-up. The likes of it will never be seen again on this old footstool. All wiped out in a single season. It ain’t right. It just can’t be right.”

The old man’s thoughts strayed from the immediate matter in hand, that of evening the old score with Hinman, and he nodded abstractedly to the comments of his younger companion. He was possessed of cows in plenty and if forced to market them he could cash in for a fortune; but this game was his life. Take away his cows and money would mean little.

“I was just thinking, Nate,” Carver said. “It’ll take a long time to settle all this country up after you folks are ordered out with your stock, and there’ll be worlds of good range going to waste with nothing to eat it off. A man could hold a dodge-bunch down here on good feed and keep ’em moving from point to point. If we were questioned we could explain that we were trail herding ’em through when they up and made a night run off to one side; that we are just gathering ’em up again to move them on up to the Box T range.”

“Box T!” Younger scoffed. “Joe Hinman, that wrinkled old pirate, wouldn’t let a second elapse before he’d be spreading the news that I had a bunch down here. He’d never let a Half Diamond H cow set foot on his range and ever get off with its hide on.”

“But if you’d help him out now, like I said a while back, he’d be bound to return it out of sheer human decency,” Carver pointed out. “I could hold a bunch down here easy. If you help Joe out now he can’t go back on you then.”

“Can’t be?” Nate inquired. “I don’t know.” The blank wall of a cowless future loomed just ahead. In a few more months his old brand would be but a tradition. The only alternative would be to buy out another brand in some distant part where open range was still available. But this was his chosen territory and a move did not appeal. “One time and another I’ve dealt him a hell-slew of trouble.”

“He’s put in fifteen years handing it back to you,” Carver said. “That’s part of the game, the way the pair of you has played it. Joe’s not the man to stick at trifles like that.”

Younger shook his head.

“Then maybe he was mistaken about how you felt,” said Carver. “He gave me my instructions straight enough. ‘If you strike trouble down there just go right to the Half Diamond H and get in touch with Nate Younger,’ he says. ‘He’ll put you straight, and if he can’t fix you up then there’s no way out.’ That’s the last words he told me.”

“He didn’t,” Nate returned doubtfully. “You got mixed in the names. He didn’t ever instruct you to look to me for anything but trouble.”

“Those were my orders,” Carver affirmed. “Word for word, as near as I can recall, just as I recited them to you. That’s what he says, looking right at me, just what I told you he did.”

“I don’t know what he’s driving at,” Younger stated. “But I’ll certainly hand him a surprise. I’ll take him up--which’ll be exactly the last thing he’d counted on.”

He tugged his hat over his eyes and turned to the nearest of the riders who trailed behind him.

“You boys dangle along back and take down the north fence for a few hundred yards west of the creek,” he instructed. “Pull the staples and lay the wire flat on the ground so Carver can cross in with his bunch any time.”

The men gazed in blank astonishment at thus being deprived of their contemplated sport but they turned back without comment.

“That Carver now,” one youth remarked. “He’s the silver-tongued little fixer. He’s somehow managed to reverse old Nate in mid-air. Once in Caldwell he talked me out of my last dollar. He did, honest.”

“But he spent it on you later,” another testified. “That’s him. But now he’s gone and ruined my whole day. I’d prefer to be jamming them cows north at a run to coaxing staples out of fence posts.”

Some days thereafter Freel rode northward through the leases of the Half Diamond H, crossed the Salt Fork and stayed overnight at the home ranch of that brand. For several days the marshal had been visiting the widely scattered outfits operating in that portion of the Strip and making inquiries as to the whereabouts of certain men on a day of the preceding week. Freel knew the customs of the men with whom he had to deal, being familiar with the evasiveness which was a country-wide characteristic whenever one citizen was questioned concerning the possible operations of another. The marshal’s queries were therefore more or less desultory and wholly unproductive.

On the date in question four masked horsemen had surrounded a box car recently planted beside the railroad track in the Cherokee Strip. This car had served as a station and the word “Casa” had been painted in white letters upon either end. The stockmen had stubbornly resisted all attempts to establish stations in the unowned lands, foreseeing in such moves another possible link toward the dreaded settling of the Strip. These wild riders had evicted the two men stationed there and applied the torch to the box car which seemed to presage a future settlement at that point. The embryo city of Casa was no more. Freel was conscious of no particular regret over the fate of this defunct metropolis, but in view of the fact that only Federal officers were vested with authority in the Cherokee lands he felt it expedient to make a few perfunctory inquiries.

When he rode away from the Half Diamond H he elected to wend his way up Cabin Creek and so chanced across two thousand head of Joe Hinman’s cows grazing in the quarantine strip. Freel sought out Carver and acquainted him with the details of the Casa raid.

“The Lassiters rode out of Caldwell Tuesday night, you recollect,” he said. “They’re a shifty bunch of boys, the Lassiters. But Crowfoot assures me that they turned up at his place on Turkey Creek early Wednesday morning and this Casa raid was Wednesday night. Crowfoot says they’ve been there straight through. That lets the Lassiters out.”

Carver recalled the black scrap of cloth he had seen in the dresser drawer in the Lassiter’s room, its eyeholes staring up at him. Crowfoot’s testimony to the marshal did not cause Carver to revise his former estimate of the cowman; rather it served to strengthen his previous opinion as to Crowfoot’s character.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, that lets the Lassiters out.”

“But it don’t have any particular bearing on the fact that Hinman’s cows are grazing in the quarantine strip,” the marshal commented.

“Joe’s short of range,” Carver returned. This was according to formula. “We’re resting ’em over here for a day before taking ’em on down to the Half Diamond H.”

“That’s nice,” said Freel. “But of course it’s my duty as an officer to report their presence to the Federal authorities. Then they can use their own judgment as to quarantine proceedings and maybe even a trespass suit. Tax-dodging, is he?”

“I’ll bet fifty even that you go and do that very thing,” Carver stated.

“How do you know?” the marshal retorted. “I’ll bet you a hundred I don’t.”

“A hundred is way beyond my depth,” said Carver. “Even fifty would strain me most to pieces, but I could manage to pay it the day I land in Caldwell if I lost.”

“Fifty’s a bet,” the marshal accepted. “I’ll take you on. And don’t forget to have the money in your clothes next time you show up in Caldwell.”

Carver gazed after Freel’s retreating back as the worthy marshal rode northward toward the line.

“There goes a part of my profits,” he observed. “This petty larceny milking process enlightens me as to why I never could warm up to Freel. I’d rather he’d held me up, but the man that’ll do one won’t do the other--not ever. It all comes of my being too honest. If I’d neglected to make that losing bet, he’d have made a report that might have caused old Joe some grief. My conscience has let me down for fifty. Honesty is maybe the best policy for the long pull but it’s ruinous in short spurts.”

Someway he regretted the loss of that fifty dollars, a sentiment hitherto unknown to him, for he had never valued dollars except as a means to an end and the end was in each case the same,--the swift squandering of the means. But of late, while riding his lonely way in charge of Hinman’s cows, he had pondered the possibilities of various projects in which he might engage, the accumulation of dollars, not their spending, constituting the ultimate objective in each case.

When the marshal had disappeared Carver rode a few miles north to the crest of a high ridge, from which point of vantage he could sweep a considerable area. Off across the State line he could make out white points of light at intervals of a mile or more, and he knew them for the covered wagons of squatters who were camped just outside the Strip. He knew too that as one neared Caldwell he would find the intervals between these camps considerably decreased and he made a tentative estimate that there were fifty such outfits camped along the line in the twenty miles between himself and Caldwell. For three months these homeless ones had been rolling up to the edge of the unowned lands and making camp. These were but the vanguard, the first to respond to the persistent rumor recently set afloat to the effect that the Strip would soon be thrown open for entry and free homes be made available for all.

Carver allowed his mental vision to travel far beyond the horizon which cut off his physical view, and he saw other wagons coming. He pictured them scattered along the roads of Kansas, Nebraska and Missouri, of Illinois and Iowa. From far and near the landless of a vast country were converging upon this last corner left unsettled, their worldly effects crowded into the bulging beds of old-time prairie schooners, their live stock trailing behind and the tousled heads of their youngsters peering curiously from the wagons as they rolled through country strange to them. Their pace was slow and plodding but intensely purposeful, a miniature reproduction of that general movement which had resulted in reclaiming the Great West from savagery a few decades before,--a movement which Carver felt could not long be forestalled. He addressed his luck piece in prophetic vein.

“It’s coming and we can’t head it off. In ten years there’ll be a squatter on every second section and the old free range cut up with fence. Little lonely dollar, what will you and me be doing then? That’s the prospect that’s looming just ahead of us.”

In fact this prospect seemed nearer still when he crossed back with Hinman’s cows some weeks thereafter. With the first warm days of approaching spring the slow stream of incoming squatters had increased and there were more outfits camped along the line. Carver rode up to the ranch house in the gray light of dawn to report that the herd was back on Hinman’s own range once more. He found old Joe at breakfast and was invited to sit in.

“Draw up your stool and toss a feed in you,” the old man greeted. “Tell me how everything came to pass.”

“It was a right uneventful trip,” Carver reported. “There was only one patrol came messing through and we shifted the bunch down on to the Half Diamond H for a week or more.”

“The Half Diamond H!” Hinman exclaimed. “Then Nate Younger must have died without me getting word of it. I’ll send over some flowers right away. It’s a moral certainty that roan-whiskered old lizard wouldn’t let one of my cows have a spoonful of grass if he was alive and kicking.”

“On the contrary,” said Carver; “he put himself out to invite us down in case we thought best to pull off the quarantine belt. He ordered his north fence laid flat as soon as he gets word we’re in the country with your cows, and announced that he’d be palsied and paralyzed and even worse than that before he’d be found lacking in hospitality toward a friend in need.”

“Yes,” said Hinman. “Go right on. What else did he say?”

“Nothing to speak of,” Carver said. “He did sort of mention that you was welcome to throw as much stuff as you liked on the Half Diamond H as long as he was running it. So you might say the trip was more or less of a holiday.”

Hinman allowed his gaze to rove through the window and settle upon a covered wagon crawling slowly southward.

“He’ll be crowded clear off the map inside another year,” Hinman said. “I don’t suppose you told him about how glad I’d be to have him swarm over here on my grass with all his cows whenever he’s finally ordered out down there; now did you?”

“I did sort of intimate that your range would always be wide open,” Carver stated. “I was straining every little point to save the taxes on that bunch of cows. I’ll bet it would have totalled up to anyhow six hundred dollars, those taxes would.”

“Well, that’s all you agreed to do,” said Hinman. “And I guess I’d better pay you off and have it over with, even if you did get me into considerable of a snarl. Only one thing I can do now, since you made all those arrangements, and that’s to back up anything you told Nate. I never figured you’d let me in for anything like this.”

“I’d prefer to take my pay in some other form than cash,” Carver announced as Hinman produced his check book. “Suppose you give me a bill of sale for a hundred head of coming yearlings instead of nine hundred cash and let ’em range with your stuff up on the west place till November.”

“You can’t spend calves,” said Hinman.

“I could borrow against them if I was needing money,” Carver explained.

“But coming yearlings are worth twelve dollars a head,” Hinman objected.

“I’ll owe you the rest,” Carver offered.

“And when I deliver in November they’ll be worth more’n that. They’ll bring round sixteen dollars a head by then.”

“That’s what I was counting on,” said Carver. “I like to feel every morning that I’m worth just a little more than I was the night before.”

Hinman laid down the check book and regarded him.

“Now it’s always struck me that you put yourself out to be worth just a mite less each morning than you was the night before,” he stated. “Surely you haven’t gone and deserted the ranks of the tumbleweeds in favor of the pumpkins. I never knew you to set a value on a dollar.”

“That’s because I never chanced across just the right sort of dollar,” Carver explained. “Now this is different.” He produced his lucky coin and handed it over for inspection. “I’m aiming to accumulate a number of others just like this to keep it company.”

Hinman inspected the silver dollar.

“Yes,” he said. “This is a right unusual appearing sort of coin. Don’t know as I ever see one just like it. Now if you really think there’s a chance for you to collect some more like this and take an interest in holding on to them, why we might make a deal. You’ve just effected quite a saving on my taxes, so I can maybe stretch a point. But if I don’t deliver till November, and run ’em meantime on my grass, those critters will cost you fourteen apiece instead of twelve. You’ll be owing me five hundred in place of three.”

“I don’t mind owing you,” said Carver. “We’ll close the deal.”

As he rode away from the Box T he sang:

“Oh, I’ve risked many dollars On the rambling tumbleweed And only one on pumpkins But that one went to seed.”

III

The crest of the watershed separating the flow between the Salt Fork and the Cimarron was also the dividing line between Crowfoot’s range and the leases of the Half Diamond H. Carver crossed over this low divide and angled toward Turkey Creek to intersect its course at a point near Crowfoot’s place. Here the majority of the range stock wore the straggling brand intended to represent a bird’s claw, the badge of Crowfoot’s ownership.

Carver viewed the ranch buildings from the shoulder of a hill, noting particularly the corral which was fashioned as a solid stockade some ten feet high. Crowfoot had entered into a beef contract with the railroad and his slaughtering was conducted within this small enclosure. Carver entertained positive convictions as to the purpose of this arrangement but in common with others of his kind he made a religion of remaining strictly incurious regarding the calling or customs of acquaintances except in so far as they might affect his own immediate affairs.

He turned his horse up the Turkey Creek bottoms and followed that stream for a dozen miles, then angled away to the right toward the Half Diamond H range. When well up the gentle slope he rode out on to the rim of a pocket. The scattering trees in the bottoms indicated the presence of water. A spring branch probably headed in the pocket and drained back toward Turkey Creek, he reflected. He pulled up his horse as a woman’s voice floated up to him. Somewhere down below him a girl was singing, and Carver headed his horse down the slope toward the sound.

A sod house nestled under the hill beside the trickling spring-creek. The singing ceased abruptly and a girl appeared in the door of the sod house at the sound of his horse’s hoofs in the yard.

For the second time Carver saw her framed in a doorway and he was conscious of a sudden pleased conviction that she should always choose a similar setting. The drab surroundings served only as a background to hold her vivid youth and charm in more startling relief. Carver recollected that he had mauled one brother in no gentle fashion and was held accountable for another’s day of transgressions; in consequence he feared a cool reception from the sister. Instead, her face lighted with sudden recognition.

“Oh, it’s you!” she greeted. “Bart will be coming home any time now and he’d be so sorry if he missed you. Won’t you step down off your horse and wait?”

She sat on the doorsill and motioned Carver to a seat on a bench against the cabin. He removed his hat and tilted back against the sod wall as she explained that Bart was even now overdue. As they talked it was quite evident that all her thoughts centered round the younger brother. Carver found the tones of her voice as pleasant to his ear as the sight of her was pleasing to his eyes, and he was content to listen, hoping meanwhile that Bart would never come.

He knew this for a Crowfoot line camp, recently installed, which accounted for the fact that he had not chanced across it the year before. The Lassiters, therefore, must ride for Crowfoot, he decided.

“Bart and I only came down last week,” she said. “We’ve been living in your little house in Caldwell. Did you know?”

“I gave him the key and told him the place was his,” Carver said. “But I’d have straightened it up a bit if I’d known he was going to install you there.”

“It was supremely tidy,” she complimented. “Which was a distinct surprise. Most men’s housekeeping is rather the reverse.”

Her gaze kept wandering off down the bottoms for some sign of Bart’s return.

“I do hope he comes,” she said.

“I’m real anxious to see Bart,” he confessed. “I certainly hope he turns up sometime inside of the next three or four hours for this is my busy day and I couldn’t conscientiously wait on him longer than that.”

His tones expressed only a mild anxiety over the possible non-arrival of his friend.

“Do please stay the very limit, at least,” she urged, and laughed up at him. “You know, you’re like Bart in a great many ways.” Carver someway felt that he knew her better after that laugh. “Don’t you think you two are somewhat alike?”

He had divined the close bond between this girl and her brother and now made swift use of the knowledge.

“Bart and I are so similar that we might easy be mistaken for twins,” he admitted. “You might say we’re almost identical.”

“He means a lot to me Bart does,” she said. “In most ways he’s a lovable youngster, but----”

Carver leaned back with an audible sigh.

“Tell me all about Bart,” he urged.

“I will,” she agreed. “In most ways he’s likable but he’s as wild as a hawk. He is absolutely irresponsible and will commit any reckless folly on a second’s notice without a thought of future consequences. The future means not one thing to him. He’s sublimely confident that every new day stands by itself, entirely unrelated to either yesterday or to-morrow. And he’s too easily led. Now don’t you think you two are considerably alike?”

Carver considered this at some length.

“There’s some few particulars wherein our make-ups branch way out apart,” he testified. “On those points we’re altogether dissimilar. Now me, I just can’t be led. I’m sometimes misled, maybe, but never plain led. And so far as the relation of one day to another”--he produced a silver dollar and regarded it--“why nothing could possibly convince me that five weeks ago last Tuesday wasn’t close kin to to-day.” The girl’s mind flashed back to that first meeting as he smiled across at her and continued: “And I’m hoping that there’ll be other days in the future that’ll belong to the same family group. You’d be downright surprised to know how far my mind wanders into the future--and you accusing me of not looking ahead.”

“He’s told me a lot about you,” she said. “You’re the supreme chief of the tumbleweeds, from what I gather; openly irresponsible.”

“On the contrary, I’m apt to take my responsibilities too much to heart if I don’t watch myself,” he defended. “Do you consider a state of responsibility one to strive for?” Then, as she nodded, “Hereafter I’ll track down responsibilities like a duck collects Junebugs, and assume one after the next.”

“I’ve raised Bart from a baby,” she said. “And I don’t want to see him go over to the wild bunch. He likes you a lot. Use that influence to steady him, won’t you, instead of the other way?”

“Just what is the main thing you want Bart to stay clear of?” he asked.

“I want him to run straight,” she said.