Land of the Burnt Thigh Part 13

He looked doubtful. "Doesn't look to me as though anyone ever slept there. Not a thing in the shack--no bed."

Ida Mary called out to me, "Edith, didn't you lend that woman some bedding yesterday?"

"Yes," I declared, "so she could sleep there a few nights before the deadline."

All our early training in truth-telling was lost in the skirmish, and sometimes I doubted if the truth was left in us. But there was zest in this outwitting of men who would have defrauded the settlers if they could.

One day I noticed two men driving back and forth over a vacant claim nearby. At sundown no one had established residence. I watched the maneuvers of the two men.

"Ida," I called, "those men are going to jump that claim."

I looked over my land plat and saw that the homestead belonged to Rosie Carrigan from Ohio. It was the last day of grace. She had until midnight to get there.

It was a moonlight night. Ida Mary saddled Pinto and rode down the draw toward the claim. From a slope where she could not be seen she watched the two men. The evening wore on. At eleven o'clock, secure in the knowledge that the owner had failed to arrive, the men pitched camp.

Ida Mary rode quietly up the draw and galloped up to the cabin. "They are sleeping on the claim," she said breathlessly. This meant that next morning, as soon as the Land Office opened, one of them would be there to slap a contest on the land, while the other held possession. It also meant that when Rosie Carrigan arrived she would find her homestead gone.

"What shall we do?" I asked anxiously.

Ida Mary considered for a moment. "One of us must be Rosie Carrigan,"

she decided. She ran out to hitch the team to the wagon while I hurriedly dragged a few things out of the house and loaded them--things such as an immigrant must carry with him, bedding, boxes, a traveling bag or two. We threw them in the wagon, circled off a mile or two, and then drove straight back onto the land. A few rods from the claim-jumpers we drove a stake, hung a lantern on it, and began to unhitch, s.h.i.+vering with excitement and apprehension.

The noise of our arrival roused the two men, who stirred, and then with an exclamation got to their feet. We saw the flare of a match. One of them had drawn out his watch and was looking at it. Under the smoked-lantern light we looked at ours--it was ten minutes to twelve!

We heard them murmur to each other, but continued unhitching the horses, dragging the hastily a.s.sembled articles out of the wagon. Then my heart began to pound. One of the men walked over to us. He was short, burly, heavy-jawed.

"Here, you can't stay here! Where do you think you are?" he demanded.

We made no answer, but the bed I contrived to make under his watching eyes was a hopeless tangle.

"We're on this land ..." he bl.u.s.tered. He was trying to run a bluff, to find out whether we were on the right quarter-section or whether, like him, we were land-grabbers.

"I guess I'll have to have your identification," he said again. "What's your name?"

"Rosie Carrigan," I answered, "from Ohio. What are you doing on my land, anyway? You have no right here!"

He hesitated, weighing the situation and the possibilities.

"Get off!" I blazed at him.

He got. The two men rolled up their bedding and moved on, and Ida Mary and I sat limply on the ground watching them go.

In case they should come back we decided to hold the land for the night, gathered up the bedding, and slept in the wagon--when we slept.

At daybreak we were wakened by the rumble of a heavy-loaded wagon coming slowly over the prairie behind a limping team. A tall, slim girl and a slight boy sat high on the front seat. They drove up beside our wagon.

Fastened on the back of their load was a chicken coop, and as they stopped a rooster stuck its head out and crowed.

The girl was Rosie Carrigan. The boy was her brother. And the rooster was the first of his kind to settle on the reservation. They had been delayed by footsore horses. But no land-grabbers, no one except ourselves, ever knew that Rosie Carrigan did not establish residence at ten minutes before midnight.

Not long after this, a rough-looking stranger rode up to an old man's shack and took some papers out of his pocket. "There's some mistake here, pardner," he said. "Looks like you're on the wrong quarter. This is section--" he read the description, "and it happens to be mine."

"But that's the number of the claim I filed on at the Drawing," the old man a.s.sured him.

After much arguing and bullying, with the old man contending he was right, the stranger ordered him off the land.

"You don't pull that stuff on me, pardner; you'd better vacate."

"Now keep your s.h.i.+rt on, stranger," the old man said, with a twitching of his long white mustache, inviting him in for a bite to eat while he hunted up his land receipts.

"I'm all crippled up with the rheumatiz," he groaned as he hobbled back into a corner of the room to get the papers. "A pore way for the gov'ment to open up land, I says.

"Now down in the Oklahomy Run we used speed and brains to stake a claim, beating the other fellow to it. But it was a tough bunch down there, and sometimes, stranger, we--" he turned and pointed a gun straight at the man seated at the table, "we used a gun."

The old man who had stood leaning on his cane at the Drawing, complaining that neither legs nor brains counted in winning a claim, used his ingenuity to hold one.

During those last days of settling, Ida Mary and I lived in a state of tension and suspense. We watched our land plat and often rode out over the prairie to watch for the arrival of settlers whose land was being spotted. After a few of our deceptions, the claim jumpers became wary of the newspaper and cursed "that snip of a newspaper woman." And the girl who ran the post office was a government employee.

Here was a job for _The Wand_. In the next issue there appeared a black-headline article. It began:

"It has been reported that owing to the swift settlement of the Brule, Secret Service Agents from the Federal Land Department are being sent out to protect the settlers against claim jumpers who are said to be nesting there. This tampering with government lands is a criminal offense, and it is understood that legal action will be pushed against all offenders."

One afternoon some two weeks later there walked into the print shop a man with an official manner about him. He called for the publisher of the paper.

"What do you know about this?" he demanded, pointing to the article.

"What authority did you have for it?"

I was speechless. He was a Federal Agent.

"Well," I said at last, defiantly, "if the government is not furnis.h.i.+ng agents on the land to look after these things, it should."

And it did. The agent looked into the matter, claim-jumping quieted down, there were fewer "spotters" swarming around, and soon, when their six months of grace had expired, the Lucky Numbers were all on the ground.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

VIII

EASY AS FALLING OFF A LOG

"Any old cayuse can enter a race," Bronco Benny remarked one day. "It's coming in under the wire that counts."

Ida Mary and I had saddled ourselves with a newspaper, a post office, a grocery store, an Indian trading post, and all the heavy labor of hauling, delivery of mail and odd jobs that were entailed. We were appalled to realize the weight of the responsibility we had a.s.sumed, with every job making steady, daily demands on us, with the Ammons finances to be juggled and stretched to cover constant demands on them.

And there was no turning back.

The Lucky Numbers were all settled on their claims. Already trails were broken to the print shop from every direction. There was no time to plan, no time in which to wonder how one was to get things done. The important thing was to keep doing them. On the whole Strip there was not a vacant quarter-section. Already a long beaten trail led past the print-shop door north and south from Pierre to Presho; another crossed the reservation east and west from McClure to the Indian tepees and the rangeland beyond. Paths led in from all parts of the Strip like spokes, with Ammons the hub around which the wheel of the reservation's activities revolved.