"Curly," says he, "I was in hopes something would happen, so that this range of ours wouldn't be no temptation to them irrigation colonizers; I was hoping something would happen to them, so they would lose their money. But they lost their minds instead. These last four years they raised their bid on the Circle Arrow a half million dollars every year. They've offered me more money than there is in the whole wide world. They say now that for the brand and the range stock and the home ranch, and all the hay lands and ditches that we put in so long ago, they'll give me three million eight hundred thousand dollars, a third of it in real money and the rest secured on the place. What do you think of that?"
"I think somebody has been drunk," says I. "There ain't that much money at all. I remember seeing Miss Anderson, Bonnie Bell's teacher down at Meeteetse, make a million dollars on the blackboard, and it reached clear acrost it—six ciphers, with a figure in front of it. And that was only one million dollars. When you come to talking nearly four million dollars—why, there ain't that much money. They're fooling you, Colonel."
"I wisht they was," says he, sighing; "but the agent keeps pestering me. He says they'll make it four million flat or maybe more if I'll just let go. You see, Curly, we picked the ground mighty well years ago, and them ditches we let in from the mountains for the stock years ago is what they got their eyes on now. They say that folks can dry-farm the benches up toward the mountains—they can't, and I don't like to see nobody try it. I'm a cowman and I don't like to see the range used for nothing else. But what am I going to do?"
"Well, what are you going to do, Colonel?" says I. "I know what you'll do, but I'll just ast you."
"Of course," says he, "it ain't in my heart to sell the Circle Arrow—you know that—but I got to. Here's Bonnie Bell. She's finished—that is to say, she ain't finished, but just beginning. She's at the limit of what the range will produce for her right now. We got to move on."
I nodded to him. We both felt the same about it. It wasn't so much what happened to us.
"Well," says he, "we got to pick out a place for her to live at after we sell the range. I thought of St. Louis; but it's too hot, and I never liked the market there. Kansas City is a good cowtown; but it ain't as good as Chicago. I reckon Chicago maybe is as good a cowtown as there is."
"Well, Colonel," says I, "I reckon here's where I go West."
"You go where?" says he to me, sharp.
"West," says I.