Last fall the deadly mortgage had grown from the little hand-breadth cloud until it had covered the land, blanketed it, blighted it, filled earth and sky to them. It was over. They had toiled for naught, and no profit had they taken of all their labor under the sun. They were beaten at last.
Once more the old Studebaker wagon. Within it a haggard, dogged, disappointed man,—yet indomitable; a woman still young, robbed forever of the brightness of youth, yet striving to nourish a spark of the old hope,—a mother, too. Two little children clung to her, healthy, lusty, strong, happy; they had neither known nor suffered. There was the same old team between the "tugs," sobered, quieted, saddened like their master, perhaps, and Kentucky. Kentucky was leaner than he should be, not so well nourished as they would like to have him, but his spirit was unabated. He, at least, had not been beaten down.
So they set forth again. "Once more into the breach," brave pair. Life insistently craves bread. Men must work; ay, and women too, though they may weep as well. There were the little children, oh, father and mother! treasure of health and teaching must be laid up for them. The old cause must be tried out yet again. Farewell to defeat, farewell to failure, farewell to the old. Let us stir up hope again, look forward into the future, deserve a triumph. All had been lost but love; that had not failed, and while God is it cannot. It is a mighty talisman with which to attempt the morrow. So armed, they started out again.
With one hundred dollars in his pocket, a small lot of household necessaries, a stove, some blankets, etc., and Kentucky, Samuel Maxwell and Sue Belle and the two children started out in the wagon again to have another wrestle with fortune. They determined to go to the Kansas-Indian Territory border and try to secure free land in Oklahoma Territory, which was to be opened for settlement that summer.
They hated the prairie where they had lived now. It was associated with their ruin, eloquent of their future. That season bade fair to be as bountiful a time as had been the year of their arrival, but they could not stay. They had pulled up the stakes, and nothing was left for them but to go on. Indeed, they were wishful to do so, and had they known that, as it happened, the five years of starvation, drought, and failure were to be succeeded by twice as many years of abounding plenty, they would not have stayed. They loathed the spot. They could not have remained anyway. Another man held the farm and succeeded where they had failed, reaping where they had sown.
It was late summer when they reached Solomon City, from which they had elected to make the run into the hitherto forbidden land. The place was filled with all sorts and conditions of men and women attracted by the possibility of getting a quarter section or a town lot practically free in the Cherokee strip; there were half a million of them on the border-line! And there, too, were congregated the human vultures that live to prey upon the crowd.
The distribution of the lots and sections was to be made on the principle of first come first served. All seekers for locations were to line up on the edge of the strip on a given date at a certain hour, and when a signal was given they were to rush into the Nation, drive a stake in a quarter section, or in a town lot at the places where the towns had previously been surveyed and lots plotted and staked out by the government, throughout the vast body of land in the Indian Territory thrown open for settlement. Then they were to hold their places, living in tents and shanties, until they could erect houses and prove their claims.
Samuel intended to ride Kentucky into the strip and take his chance at a town lot. He had had enough of farms. Not many miles below Solomon City, on the railroad running through the "strip,"—as the land was called,—the future town of Newlands had been laid out by the surveyors. It was a paper town as yet, but the day after the run would see it suddenly become a city, and good lots would probably be of value. If he could get a good one it might be worth several thousand dollars, and he could start again. It was a desperate chance, but he had to take it; there was nothing else.
Ill fortune was not yet done with them, however, for in scrambling down the bank of the river to get water for his team, the unfortunate man fell and broke his arm. He climbed up to the wagon, sank down on the dry grass beside it, and gave way. Sue Belle stood by with white face as the local doctor bound up his arm, but she did not cry. She felt that she had other things to do, that she must play the man, and that she could not indulge in the womanly luxury of weeping.
"I'm not crying, doctor, because it hurts," said Samuel, brushing away his tears with his uninjured arm; "but because this seems to be just the last straw in our bad luck. We were married five years ago, and we bought a farm in Cimarron. I'm a good farmer, I was born on a farm and raised on it, and I was trained in the Agricultural College in Kansas. I know the thing theoretically and practically, too, but everything failed us. We've lost everything, and we came here in the hope of getting something out of the strip. God's forgot us, I guess."