A figure rode toward him in the moonlight and the old man in question joined him as Lassiter departed. Nate too had been restless and had found himself unable to sleep. As Carver had reflected that such a move would inflict an undeserved hardship upon his employer, so Nate was wondering as to what effect it would have upon his hands, for in common with all cowmen of his type, Younger was proud of the accomplishments of his riders.
Every brand owner would stand back of the men who rode for him; every rider evidenced a similar devotion to the owner’s interests,—a loyalty to the brand for which he worked. Perhaps in all history there has never been another calling which has inspired the same allegiance throughout its entire personnel. A man must be proficient in many lines to qualify as a cowhand. First of all he must be a horseman capable of mastering any horse on the range and of training his mounts to perform the various and intricate duties required of them; a roper of parts, able to front-foot a calf or to rope and hog-tie a mighty range bull with equal facility; sufficiently skilled in blacksmithing to shoe his own horses; for these and many other acquirements, working at them sixteen hours a day, he was paid a lesser sum than any unskilled laborer received for ten hours of far less gruelling work. It was the wild free life, not the pay, which held him to his chosen calling. The driving spring rains which soaked his bed roll as he slept on wet ground in the open; the shrivelling heat of summer and the shrieking blasts of winter blizzards; the congenial companionship of round-up days and the long lonely vigils at isolated winter line camps; all these he chose in preference to the softer life and greater pay of other less strenuous pursuits.
“What will all the boys be doing in another season?” Younger asked. “Where’ll they all go when there’s no more range work for them to do?”
“Texas maybe,” Carver predicted. “Or New Mexico.”
“Both those countries are coming to be overrun with nesters,” Nate returned. “The big brands are getting their range cut up right now. They’ve been forced to reduce the size of their outfits in proportion to the decrease in their range. There’s more cowhands down there now than there are jobs to go around.”
“Then maybe the Northwest range country,” Carver suggested.
“The surplus bronc peelers of Texas and New Mexico have been drifting up there for the last ten years,” Nate stated. “They’re a drug on the market right now, cowhands are. And they’re irrigating that Northwest country rapid and cutting up the range. Once they settle the Strip, all the boys down there will have to go into other lines. That’s sure.”
The herd was worked and reworked almost daily as cows wearing brands that ranged in different parts of the Strip were culled out and turned over to some wagon crew whose ultimate destination lay in that direction. All along a two-hundred-mile front more than a score of wagons were operating in unison. Owners ranging south of the Strip sent parties up to trail-herd back any of their stock that had wandered to these parts. These men brought with them little bunches of Half Diamond H cows and others that had drifted from the Strip to southern ranges. Some came from beyond the Canadian and at least one little assortment had been combed from the distant Washita. Younger, in common with other large owners of his neighborhood, maintained drift fences and line camps to prevent the drifting of his stock from the home range. Even with these precautions there was a certain annual leakage, but the percentage of Half Diamond H cows gathered south of the Cimarron was small.
Day after day as the round-up progressed the men threshed out the fate of the unowned lands. It constituted the sole topic of discussion whenever two riders met on the circle or paused to converse as they stood their turn on night guard. It filled that brief period of general indolence in which they indulged each evening before taking to their beds with the setting sun. Carver, perhaps to a greater extent than any of them, had anticipated certain transitions. He had correctly interpreted the presence of those white-topped wagons camped along the line and knew what they portended, yet even now he found it impossible to give credence to such drastic changes as were predicted by old Nate and others of his kind. He sought for an analogous example and found it in the settling process which Kansas had been undergoing for a period of forty years; yet throughout the whole western half of that State ranches of five to fifty thousand acres were the rule. In view of this circumstance he could not quite conceive of the vast expanse of the unowned lands being cut up into quarter sections in the space of a few short years. It would all take time. He advanced this idea to Younger on a day some three weeks out from the ranch.
“All this talk about men being ordered out of the Strip,” he said. “How are they going about that? I’ve seen the squatter outfits rolling up to the line and making camp. But we’ve had similar demonstrations before now; that year the boomers fired the grass for one; and nothing came of it. They were ordered out. Even if they let ’em in it will take years to settle up the Strip.”