The green summer range stretched away to the far horizon with never a plow furrow to break it. Two trail herds had been bedded for the night at widely separate points. A third, whose trail boss had evidently made a hard day’s drive to reach the quarantine belt in hope of an earlier clearance and shipping date than that accorded to his slower fellows, passed below the two on the knoll and plodded northward. Two men rode the points, the right and left forward extremities of the herd, guiding the foremost animals on the chosen course. One man skirted either flank and two others rode the “drags” in the rear of the herd to press forward any stragglers as the weary cattle drifted slowly toward the chuck wagon which was stationed a mile or more ahead and where the rest of the trail-herd crew had already gathered.
“That’s yesterday, girl,” Carver repeated. “Remember all this as you see it now; the green range and the trail herds coming up from the south. Have a last look at it—for here comes to-morrow,” and he pointed off to the northward.
Miles away across the quarantine belt a slender ragged line extended either way beyond the range of their vision. A thousand ribbons of white smoke writhed aloft and glowed in pallid outline against the darkening sky. For two hundred miles along the line, wherever water was available, there was one continuous camp of squatters, and still the land seekers increased at the rate of two thousand families a week, all the landless of a mighty nation gathering here to participate in what would go down in history as the Cherokee Run, the most frenzied stampede of the century.
Both watchers felt a sudden tightening of the throat as they gazed upon the scene, their feelings much the same but occasioned by different viewpoints. Carver’s sympathy was with the riders who handled the cows on the near side of that continuous camp, men who, like himself, had loved the old open range, the range that was passing for all time. The girl’s heart went out to those homeless hosts outside the line, for she herself was homeless and could understand the longing which had brought them to this spot to join in a mad and desperate rush on the chance that they might be among the fortunate locaters who should be first to drive their stakes on any scrap of ground which would constitute a home. Perhaps they too were tired of gypsying, she reflected, and yearned for some one spot which they might call their own.
He pointed to the tiny scattering specks that were riders moving from point to point, then on beyond them to that stolid line.
“Yonder come the pumpkins to crowd out the tumbleweeds,” he said.
The soft summer night shut down and transformed the pale smoke columns into a tortuous trail of twinkling fires which extended for two hundred miles along the line.
“We’d best be going now,” the girl said at last. “There’s a fifteen-mile ride ahead. I’m glad you brought me here to see all this. It means one thing to you, Don, and exactly the opposite to me. But it’s something we won’t forget.”
“No,” he said. “We’ll not forget.”
They rode on in silence, the girl occupied with her thoughts of the homeless legions who would soon have homes, Carver content with the mere fact of her nearness. When he decided that this thoughtfulness had claimed her for too long a time he recounted his transactions of the past few days.