“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.”