better not take a chance, waiting till the last day in the afternoon,” she warned him vaguely. “Maybe they think you’ve forgotten the date or something—but whatever they think, I believe they’re counting on your not answering in time. I think Florence Hallman knows they haven’t any real proof against you. I know she knows it. She’s perfectly wild over the way you boys have stuck here and worked. And from what I can gather, she hasn’t been able to scrape up the weentiest bit of evidence that the Flying U is backing you—and of course that is the only ground they could contest your claims on. So if it comes to trial, you’ll all win; you’re bound to. I told Kate Price so—and those other old hens, yesterday, and that’s what we had the row over.”
“My money’s on you, girl,” Andy told her, grinning. “How are the wounded?”
“The wounded? Oh, they’ve clubbed together this morning and are washing hankies and collars and things, and talking about me. And they have snouged every speck of water from the barrel—I paid my share for the hauling, too—and the man won’t come again till day after tomorrow with more. Fifty cents a barrel, straight, he’s charging now, James. And you, boys with a great, big, long creekful of it that you can get right in and swim in! I’ve come over to borrow two water-bags of it, if you please, James I never dreamed water was so precious. Florence Hallman ought to be made to lie on one of these dry claims she’s fooled us into taking. I really don’t know, James, what’s going to become of some of these poor farmers. You knew, didn’t you, that Mr. Murphy spent nearly two hundred dollars boring a well—and now it’s so strong of alkali they daren’t use a drop of it? Mr. Murphy is living right up to his name and nationality, since then. He’s away back there beyond the Sands place, you know. He has to haul water about six miles. Believe me, James, Florence Hallman had better keep away from Murphy! I met him as I was coming out from town, and he called her a Jezebel!”
“That’s mild!” Andy commented dryly. “Get down, why don’t you? I want you to take a look at the inside of my shack and see how bad I need a housekeeper—since you won’t take my word for it. I hope every drop of water leaks outa these bags before you get home. I hope old Mister falls down and spills it. I’ve a good mind not to let you have any, anyway. Maybe you could be starved and tortured into coming down here where you belong.”
“Maybe I couldn’t. I’ll get me a barrel of my own, and hire Simpson to fill it four times a week, if you please! And I’ll put a lid with a padlock on it, so Katie dear can’t rob me in the night—and I’ll use a whole quart at a time to wash dishes, and two quarts when I take a bath! I shall,” she asserted with much emphasis, “lie in luxury, James!”
Andy laughed and waved his hand toward One Man Creek. “That’s all right—but how would you like to have that running past your house, so you could wake up in the night and hear it go gurgle-gurgle? Wouldn’t that be all right?”
Rosemary Allen clasped her two gloved hands together and drew a long breath. “I should want to run out and stop it,” she declared. “To think of water actually running around loose in this world!! And think of us up on that dry prairie, paying fifty cents a barrel for it—and a lot slopped out of the barrel on the road!” She glanced down into Andy’s love-lighted eyes, and her own softened. She placed her hand on his shoulder and shook her head at him with a tender remonstrance.
“I know, boy—but it isn’t in me to give up anything I set out to do, any more than it is in you. You wouldn’t like me half so well if I could just drop that claim and think no more about it. I’ve got enough money to commute, when the time comes, and I’ll feel a lot better if I go through with it now I’ve started. And—James!” She smiled at him wistfully. “Even if it is only eighty acres, it will make good pasture, and—it will help some, won’t it?”
After that you could not expect Andy Green to do any more badgering or to discourage the girl. He did like her better for having grit and a mental backbone—and he found a way of telling her so and of making the assurance convincing enough.
He filled her canvas water-bags and went with her to carry them, and he cheered her much with his air-castles. Afterwards he took the team and rustled a water-barrel and hauled her a barrel of water and gave Kate Price a stony-eyed stare when she was caught watching him superciliously; and in divers ways managed to make Miss Rosemary Allen feel that she was fighting a good fight and that the odds were all in her favor and in the favor of the Happy Family—and of Andy Green in particular. She felt that the spite of her three very near neighbors was really a matter to laugh over, and the spleen of Florence Hallman a joke.
But for all that she gave Andy Green one last warning when he climbed up to the spring seat of the wagon and unwound the lines from the brake-handle, ready to drive back to his own work. She went close to the front wheel, so that eavesdroppers could not hear, and held her front hair from blowing across her earnest, wind-tanned face while she looked up at him.
“Now remember, boy, do go and file your answer to those contests—all of you!” she urged. “I don’t know why—but I’ve a feeling some kind of a scheme is being hatched to make you trouble on that one point. And if you see Buck, tell him I’ll ride fence with him tomorrow again. If you realized how much I like that old cowpuncher, you’d be horribly jealous, James.”
“I’m jealous right now, without realizing a thing except that I’ve got to go off and leave you here with a bunch of lemons,” he retorted—and he spoke loud enough so that any eavesdroppers might hear.
CHAPTER 24
THE KID IS USED FOR A PAWN IN THE GAME
Did you ever stop to think of the tremendous moral lesson in the Bible tale of David and Goliath? And how great, human issues are often decided one way or the other by little things? Not all crises are passed in the clashing of swords and the boom of cannon. It was a pebble the size of your thumbend, remember, that slew the giant.
In the struggle which the Happy Family was making to preserve the shrunken range of the Flying U, and to hold back the sweeping tide of immigration, one might logically look for some big, overwhelming element to turn the tide one way or the other. With the Homeseekers’ Syndicate backing the natural animosity of the settlers, who had filed upon semiarid land because the Happy Family had taken all of the tract that was tillable, a big, open clash might be considered inevitable.
And yet the struggle was resolving itself into the question of whether the contest filings should be approved by the land-office, or the filings of the Happy Family be allowed to stand as having been made in good faith. Florence Hallman therefore, having taken upon herself the leadership in the contest fight, must do one of two things if she would have victory to salve the hurt to her self-esteem and to vindicate the firm’s policy in the eyes of the settlers.
She must produce evidence of the collusion of the Flying U outfit with the Happy Family, in the taking of the claims. Or she must connive to prevent the filing of answers to the contest notices within the time-limit fixed by law, so that the cases would go by default. That, of course, was the simplest—since she had not been able to gather any evidence of collusion that would stand in court.
There was another element in the land struggle—that was the soil and climate that would fight inexorably against the settlers; but with them we have little to do, since the Happy Family had nothing to do with them save in a purely negative way.
A four-wire fence and a systematic patrol along the line was having its effect upon the stock question. If the settlers drove their cattle south until they passed the farthest corner of Flying U fence, they came plump against Bert Rogers’ barbed boundary line. West of that was his father’s place—and that stretched to the railroad right-of-way, fenced on either side with a stock-proof barrier and hugging the Missouri all the way to the Marias—where were other settlers. If they went north until they passed the fence of the Happy Family, there were the Meeker holdings to bar the way to the very foot of Old Centennial, and as far up its sides as cattle would go.
The Happy Family had planned wisely when they took their claims in a long chain that stretched across the benchland north of the Flying U. Florence Grace knew this perfectly well—but what could she prove?