Four troops of cavalry were camped along the line and troopers mingled with the crowds. Caldwell, the last of the old-time cow towns, had now entered upon her last wild fling. It was now definitely known that in three months’ time the Cherokee Strip would be thrown open for settlement and the homeless from all corners of the country were already beginning to assemble. For weeks on end there was not a room available in town and men spread their campbeds in vacant lots. Eating places were crowded to capacity and new restaurants were being opened up in frame shacks or even in tents wherever vacant sites were available. As always, where business is rushing and money freely flowing, there were symptoms of a boom. It was openly predicted that the settling of the country to the southward would throw Caldwell into the enviable position of the one logical metropolis of the whole Southwest.
Cowmen cursed the troopers, seeing in them the visible symbol of that authority which had excluded them from their rightful domain. The unowned lands were thoroughly patrolled and detachments of cavalry were camped at strategic points throughout the Strip. It was this latter circumstance which had upset Carver’s calculations. He had planned with Bart Lassiter to hold a bunch of six hundred of Younger’s three-year-old steers on the forbidden range for a period of one year, receiving a substantial proportion of the increased price which they would bring as four-year-olds. Both Carver and Nate Younger had seen the futility of the attempt. Others had entertained similar ideas but had abandoned them as events moved swiftly past the farthest bounds of their previous comprehensions and rendered their hopes untenable.
Carver, once assured that his plans for the immediate future must be relinquished, cast about for some substitute occupation which might prove equally remunerative. He rode away from Younger after their mutual decision, spinning his lone coin into the air and catching it as his horse jogged slowly across the range.
“It appears as if it’s going to be real difficult to provide you with all the company I’d counted on,” he said. “Time is skipping right along and here you are—occupying my pocket all by yourself without even one mate to jingle up against. Only last week I had it all mapped out to gather in several thousand of your sort to keep you company. But that plan’s flown out the window and here I am without one idea to work on.”
He turned along the south line fence of the Half Diamond H leases.
“Little lonely dollar, you must mount up to a million,” he asserted. “But we’ve got to insert our wedge somewheres right soon and start to mounting.”
His eye traveled along the fence line to where it disappeared in the distance, and suddenly he turned and rode back to where the outfit was camped and sought out the boss.
“About those fences being ordered down,” he said. “What arrangements have you made?”
“Not any,” Nate admitted. “What with gathering eight thousand head of steers and shipping ’em I haven’t taken time off to worry over fences. We’ll have the last steer headed north in a few days now. Then I’ll see about scrapping fences—or let the squatters tear ’em down when they come in to roost.”
“It won’t leave you short-handed now if Bart Lassiter and I lay off,” Carver suggested. “You lend me a team and wagon from the home place and we’ll snatch out those fences for what material there is in them.”