"You won't ever—" Bill corrected.
"I won't ever have to wear specs for strained eyes," Lahoma concluded, smiling at Bill as if she knew why he was as he was, and willingly took him so because he couldn't help himself.
It was Brick who heard about Wilfred's adventures on leaving the Red River ranch, and as all three sat outside the cabin in the dusk of evening, he retailed them as gathered from a recent trip to the corral. That was a strange story unfolded to Lahoma's ears, a story rich with the romance of the great West, wild in its primitive strivings and thrilling in its realizations of countless hopes. The narrative lost nothing in the telling, for Brick Willock understood the people and the instincts that moved them, and though Wilfred Compton might differ from all in his motives and plans, he shared with all the same hardships, the same spur to ambition.
It was now ten years since the discovery had been made that in the western part of Indian Territory were fourteen million acres that had never been assigned to the red man and which, therefore, were public land, subject to homestead settlement. As long as the western immigrants could choose among the rich prairie-lands of Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota, Dakota and Kansas—and the choice was open to all, following the agreement of the plains tribes to retire to reservations,—it was not strange that the unassigned lands of Indian Territory should have escaped notice, surrounded as they were by the Cherokee Strip, the Osage and Creek countries, the Chickasaw Nation, the Wichita, Cado, Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes.
But other public lands were now scarce, or less inviting, and as far back as 1879, when Lahoma was five years old, colonies had formed in Kansas City, in Topeka and in Texas, to move upon the Oklahoma country. The United States troops had dispersed the "boomers," but in the following year the indefatigable Payne succeeded in leading a colony into the very heart of the coveted land. It was in order to escape arrest—for again the United States cavalry had descended on settlers—that several wagons, among them that of Gledware's, had driven hastily toward the Panhandle, to come to grief at the hands of ruffians from No-Man's Land.
As Brick Willock told of Payne's other attempts to colonize the Oklahoma country, of his arrests, of his attempts to bring his various cases to the trial, she felt that Willock was, in a way, dealing with her personal history, for had she not been named Lahoma in honor of that country which her step-father had seen only to loose? Time and again the colonists swarmed over the border, finding their way through Indian villages and along desolate trails to the land that belonged to the public, but was enjoyed only by the great cattlemen; as many times, they were driven from their newly-claimed homes by federal troops, not without severity, and their leaders were imprisoned.
But, at last, April the twenty-second, 1889, had been appointed as the day on which the Oklahoma country was to be opened up to settlement, and it was to meet this event that Wilfred Compton had left Greer County. He was a unit in that immense throng that waited impatiently for the hour of noon—a countless host, stretching along the north on the boundary of the Cherokee Strip, on the south, at the edge of the Cherokee Nation; on the east, along the Kickapoo and Pottawatomie reservations; and on the west, blackening the extremity of the Cheyenne and Arapaho countries. He was one of those who, at the discharge of the carbines of the patrolling cavalrymen, joined in the deafening shout raised by men of all conditions and from almost every state in the Union—a shout as of triumph over the fulfillment of a ten-years' dream. And, leaning forward on his pony, he was one of the army of conquest that burst upon the desert, on foot, on horseback, and in vehicles of every description, in the mad rush for homes in a land that had never known the incense of the hearth or the civilizing touch of the plow.
At noon, a wilderness, at night, a land of tents, and on the morrow, a settled country of furrowed fields. "Pioneer work is awful quick, nowadays!" grumbled Bill Atkins, as Brick concluded. "It wasn't so in my time. Up there in the Oklahoma country, fifty years have been squeezed into a week's time—it's like a magician making a seed grow and sprout and blossom right before the audience. Lucky I came to Greer County, Texas—I don't guess IT'LL ever be anything but sand and a blow."
"It's a great story," Brick declared with enthusiasm. "I reckon it's the greatest story that America can put out, in the pioneering line. There they had everything in twenty-four hours that used to wear out our ancestors: Injuns, unbroken land, no sign of life for hundreds of miles—and just a turn of the hand and cities is a-coming up out of the ground, and saloons and churches is rubbing shoulders, and there's talk of getting out newspapers. What do you think of it, honey?"
Lahoma was sitting in grave silence, her hands clasped in her lap. She turned slowly and looked at Willock. "Brick, I'm disappointed."