CHAPTER X
Bright sunlight flooded Alberta. The miraculous harvest was over, and the buzz of the thousand threshing machines, day and night, sounded like music in the ears of the ranchers. The greatest bumper crop in the history of the continent had made Alberta famous throughout the grain world.
Settlers were pouring in from across the line. Land values soared to preposterous heights; and wherever there were municipalities of open range and unbroken land, the territory was being staked and fenced.
On the heels of the famous crop came first the fatal oil and then the fatal city real estate boom, which later was to act as a boomerang to the land, since it brought in the wildcat speculator, the get-rich-quick folk, the gold-brick seller and the train of clever swindlers that spring up from nowhere when a boom is on. The great province was to be exploited by these parasites. The boom swelled to fabulous proportions almost overnight. The streets of Calgary were thronged, train loads poured into the country; hysterical, half-crazed gamblers and "suckers" made or lost fortunes overnight; businesses of all kinds were started on "a shoe-string"; the wildest stories of oil flowing like water raced about the land. Oil indeed there was, as also coal in unlimited quantities, for the mineral wealth of the province had barely been scratched, but the boom was in full swing before the tests had been properly made, with the result that conservative people began to regard it askance, and almost as quickly as it had started, like an inflated bubble the oil boom burst. This brought undeserved desertion and wholesale ruin upon the country. Alberta had been made the "goat" of a flock of get-rich-folk from across the line, intent on making fortunes which then existed only upon paper.
The one solid and substantial asset that all the deflated booms could not affect, was the agricultural wealth of the province, real and potential. During this period, Bull Langdon's power and wealth swelled to enormous proportions. Before the year was out, he had become a multimillionaire. His cattle ranged over those "thousand hills"; his hundreds of granaries were overflowing with the grain of that bumper crop, grain that he held to sell as soon as the market was right; his grip was upon the stockyards and packing house industry and the stock market was under his control. No one questioned his right to be called the Cattle King of Canada.
Bloated with affluence and power, illiterate and uncouth as ever, his vanity was boundless. It flattered him to be known as the richest and most powerful man in the Province; to have his cattle, his stock, his immense ranches pointed out; to see his brand far-flung over the cattle country, and encroaching into the western States; his name stamped upon the beef that topped the market, not merely in the east but in the west, even into the Chicago stockyards—there to be exhibited, and wondered at—grass fed steers, competing with and surpassing the cornfeds of the U.S.A.
Above all his possessions he placed his magnificent purebred Hereford bulls, a race whose stamp was upon the whole cattle country, for scarcely a farmer or rancher in the country, but aspired to have his herd headed by a Bar Q bull. He had spared neither expense nor labor upon the breeding of these perfect animals, whose sires had come from the most famous herds in England and the States, and whose mothers were pure Canadian stock.
He coveted now the world championship for his latest product, a two-year-old Hereford bull, Prince Perfection Bar Q the Fourth. The Prince, as he was known throughout the purebred world, was of royal ancestry, and already, as a mere calf, his career at the cattle fairs in Canada had brought him under the eyes of the experts and cattle specialists. He was the son of that Princess Perfection Bar Q the Third, who had brought the lordly price when exhibited by Bull Langdon in Chicago of $40,000. His sire was of foreign birth, shipped to Canada by a member of the royal family, who, infatuated with the "cattle game," had acquired a ranch in Canada, and declared it to be the sport of kings.