“It’ll run close to twenty,” he estimated. “Maybe more. We ought to get fifteen thousand bushels or better.”
“And more next year,” she said. “You’ll put out more wheat this fall, won’t you?”
“Likely,” he answered. “I hadn’t quite made all my plans for next season.”
He had mentioned the fifteen thousand bushels of wheat casually and without elation. It would pay for the new farm machinery with which the Half Diamond H was now stocked but for which he still owed, leaving him a big margin for future operations. This first year’s crop would put him on a solid basis and well on his way toward the maturity of his original plan to buy all of the best land in the valley. By the time other homesteaders could prove up on their filings he would be in a position to buy out all who would sell. He had no present need even to avail himself of the assistance which both old Joe Hinman and Nate Younger were anxious to extend. Younger’s outfit had been the largest in the unowned lands in the old days and now Carver was building it up into the largest of the new day that had dawned. He had been top hand for both the Box Bar and the Half Diamond H under the old régime, a moving spirit among the riders of the Cherokee Strip, and now he had become a leader among the settlers. Both of his old employers, having taken a part in raising him, were duly proud of the fact; theirs still the loyalty that had always prevailed between an owner and the men who rode for his brand. The easy road to success now opened invitingly to Carver but he found no joy in the prospect. He had worked steadily toward his original aim but his initial enthusiasm was lacking.
The girl had observed this change and it troubled her. Of late Carver had exhibited a restlessness that was akin to Bart’s; and she wondered. He had gone so far; would he turn back now?
She accompanied him but a short distance and the conversation was confined to impersonal topics. She observed that for the first time in six months he was wearing his gun. As they parted he noted her troubled gaze resting upon it.
“Sho! This?” he said, tapping the weapon. “I someway don’t feel dressed up without it. I wear it as an ornament, kind of, the way a girl wears a ribbon,” and he moved on up the trail.
A few days later Molly mounted the ridge and watched the start of the harvesting. There was nothing to attract swarms of harvest hands such as crowded into the country farther north where the whole landscape seemed a solid body of wheat. Another year, when the acreage seeded to wheat would be increased fourfold, then they would come. But Carver had found no scarcity of hands to help him harvest his crop. From her point of vantage the girl could see tall-hatted, chap-clad men toiling in the fields. Later in the season, after the wheat had been stacked, she would see them plowing. They rode their horses out to their work as they had always done, and left them standing about.
She would see no other harvest such as this. Another season and the wheat fields of the Strip would be invaded by the riffraff that always came south for the harvest and followed it north. Then the tumbleweeds would be gone. Now they had rallied to lend a helping hand to one of their own kind, one man who had understood. And as she watched them toiling at these unfamiliar tasks she experienced a thrill of sympathy for the men who had helped to make homes possible for others and now found no place in the new scheme of things for themselves. For the riders of the waste places had ever been the vanguards of civilization. Fur traders had skimmed the riches of their calling from a vast territory and departed, leaving it no more habitable than before; gold seekers had prospected the hills and passed on but the cowhands had stayed to make the West habitable for those who should follow. And now that the followers had come there was no further use for the ones who had led the way.
As the summer advanced the girl observed how swiftly the ranks of the grub-liners were depleted as they were forced to realize the fact that spring work would never open up for their sort again. Families of Cherokees still prowled the countryside at will, pitching their teepees along the streams, the squaws begging incessantly from one homestead cabin to the next. The settlers, expecting nothing better from the Indians, were prone to tolerate this sort of nuisance but looked with increasing disfavor upon the nomadic white riders that drifted about in much the same aimless fashion. Yet they were not parasites, these men, even though the newcomers so viewed them. Rather they came from a proud fraternity. In grub-lining they had been merely following an ancient and respected custom of their kind and when they now found that this no longer prevailed they desisted.