Cherokee Trails/Chapter 26
The pardners were returning from their last trip to Drumwell with bones. They had cleared up the wreckage of the great winter kill on the Block E ranch; the homesteaders had scoured the neighboring territory, picking up the last bleached rib. So far as the partnership was concerned, that business was closed.
It had turned out a profitable venture for all involved, in spite of its painful beginning. They had made a handsome profit on the bones bought and shipped, winning wide confidence and friendship through their promptness and inflexible honesty. There never had been any hedging, once their word was passed, a thing so remarkable in those lean homesteaders' experience as to cause them to remember the bone firm with deep gratitude.
Waco and Tom, homeward bound from completing the last car they were to undertake, had made camp for the night in their most favored spot, the wooded bank of a little stream about fifteen miles from Drumwell. It was a soft warm evening late in March; the frost had been out of the ground for two weeks or more, drawing out so gradually as to leave the roads in good condition, the fields mellow to the plow. Frogs were trying out their voices for the first time since frost drove them deep into the mud; the quickening influence of springtime was in the air.
The friends were smoking by their little fire, supper eaten, the dishes licked, Tom Simpson, unarmed like any farmer, never having borne the weight of a gun since rising from the painful bed where his adventures with guns had stretched him. He had no fear that avenging riders would come up the Cherokee trails to seek him; the last vicious nest of them was empty, the straws of it blown to the winds. Waco had not given up his gun, although he confessed he had no more need of it than a cow had of wings. It was strapped around him now in due and ancient form, ready for the emergency which, much as he enjoyed a little fight now and then, he knew in his heart never would rise on that border again.
Waco was thinking of that as he sat looking across the fire at his friend. How would things have been around there if the quiet man, a stranger from a far-off land, had not come when he did and cleaned up Wade Harrison's gang? How would it have been with Drumwell, insolent and oppressive to everybody who did not come there to spend in a wastrel's way, if Tom Simpson had let them throw their bluff on him? Wide open and a hummin', very likely; a little more to his personal liking than its present respectable business state, but far worse for young fellows with their lives before them and mothers at home. Great changes had come in his brief time there; greater changes were coming, all owing to the boost Tom Simpson had given them to start them on their way.
"Hell!" said Waco, breaking out in wide irrelevance to what had been running in his mind; "I've got over six hundred dollars in the bank!"
"Rich old devil!" said Tom, the inflection of affectionate admiration in his voice.
"It'd 'a' took me five years to work and save that much."
"Work and save?" Tom repeated, feigning astonishment. "Don't you call this life work?"
"No, I don't call ridin' around in a wagon on a soft spring seat, behind a double span of good colts work. It's recreation, as the widder woman said when she changed from worshin' to cookin'. I can see now why I never started to git rich before. I always worked so hard at work I never had no time to make money."
"Since you've got the secret, keep it up, old feller."
"I aim to," Waco said, serenely confident.
"You'll make it go," Tom said heartily. "You've made this go—we never would have got anywhere if you hadn't taken hold with both hands while I was down and out. Lucky for the company I was down and out—I never would 'a' plunged into it the way you did and made it pay from the jump."
"Oh, you go on now!" said Waco, modestly embarrassed by the praise. "What I done wasn't out of enterprise, as the feller said. It was done out of revenge on that dang lumber yard man, more than anything else. When I heard he wasn't goin' to die I laid myself out to bust up his bone business. That's why I went into it tooth and toenail."
"Oh, very well," said Tom, with his old-time, wordtossing nonchalance, so expressive of disdain for the lame deceit that Waco laughed.
"Well, it was the makin' of me," Waco said. "I never would 'a' known I had sense enough in me to start up business if I hadn't been crowded to it that way."
"So you'll go right on? Now, that's the ticket!"
"Yeah, if I can ship a couple of cars a month it'll beat workin' for somebody. I guess I can do that, anyhow. They'll be rakin' up bones on this prairie for a long time to come, and down in the Strip, when they open it, they'll find plenty more. Then dam' Indians they don't pick up no bones to speak of, but the boomers they'll grab 'em in a hurry when they go in. Bones is goin' to be bacon and corn-bread to some of them fellers before they make a crop, if the openin's set for September, like they say it is."
"They're pushin' the railroad down there in a hurry," Tom said. "A cowboy from down that way was tellin' me today the graders are nearly across the Strip—sixty or seventy miles from Drumwell—already, the tracklayers tight on their heels."
"Drumwell's goin' to take a boom, too, when they begin runnin' trains down into Oklahoma," Waco asserted, rather than predicted. "Them cattlemen in the Strip they'll all have to clear out of there this summer, and where in the hell they're goin' to I can't figger. It's a cinch they can't find any range in Kansas. I hate to see all that good country busted up, but I guess when I start in buyin' wheat"
"No-o-o?" said Tom in a long, wondering, delighted question.
"I aim to put me in a pair of platform scales right away, and build a little warehouse by fall. These homesteaders they're goin' to have a purty good sprinkle of wheat to sell this fall, and maybe by the time you're ready to ship what you're goin' to raise on the Block E I'll have a grain elevator of my own. Who in the hell knows?"
"You're a man with a vision, Waco," Tom said soberly, meaning every word. "I'm only a man with a scheme."
"You've got men breakin' up that sod, and them fields old man Ellison used to have corn in, ain't you? You're makin' a start on your scheme, ain't you?"
"But I don't know how far it will go. Even Mrs. Ellison thinks I've got a leak somewhere when I talk of a thousand, five thousand, acres of wheat. Well, I'll do fine if I get a hundred in this fall, I expect, but the big time's coming, boys; the big time's coming. You'll see this country all one wheatfield before ten years have come and gone."
"Yes, it's the right lookin' kind of ground."
"Mrs. Ellison said, when I talked of buying her ranch, you know, and she put the ice on me so hard I'm cold yet"
"Froze you stiffer 'n a corncob," Waco chuckled at the recollection. "Said no man'd ever git his hands on that land unless he married it—biddin' for me to step up and ask her. But I ain't no marryin' man at my age; not any more, Tom."
Both laughed at this, and at the memory of the widow's indignation at the proposal to sell the land she had held to through privation and lean years, going without dresses to pay the taxes sometimes. And all because Ellison had said the day was coming when the land would be worth fifteen dollars an acre. The day came when it was worth ten times that, and before there were many more gray hairs on the widow's head.
"I always suspected you was one of them lord-dukes," Waco said; "and when you spoke of buyin' out that ranch I knew it."
"Not at all," Tom disclaimed, laughing shortly at his friend's effort to establish him among the striped and ringstreaked of his native land. "As I've told you, I'm nothing less than the son of a tanner, but he's got the change to buy up two or three lord-dukes, Waco, if he took the notion to do it. Lord-dukes!" Tom repeated, chuckling deeply.
"Or whalin' princes, or something," said Waco.
"Just so. He told me when I got through roving, found something I wanted and believed I could make a go of it, he'd stake me to the price. Simple enough, what?"
"Sure," said Waco, enlightened, but not convinced that Tom was not at least a duke with a college education.
"So, as I liked the Block E ranch, I wanted to buy it. And I got sat down on so hard I'm still a bit flat."
"Runnin' it on shares ain't so bad, Tom."
"Not half bad, old chap."
Waco smoked a while, meditatively. Tom was sitting in a Turkish posture, shins crossed before the fire, hat pushed back from his forehead, chin up, his eyes on the stars, as the eyes of Kansans, native and adopted, have been fixed always in their aims of achievement, great and small.
"You know the boomers are beginnin' to come to Drumwell already, Tom?"
"Boomers? You mean people who expect to take up land in the Strip when it's thrown open?"
"Four or five fam'lies of 'em tentin' along the crick. They've got a long wait ahead of 'em till fall, and if they ain't got something to live on—and no boomer I ever run into never had nothin'—they'll be in a mighty poor fix to face the winter on their claims. I reckon they'll scratch around somehow, railroad a little and cut hay, and manage to pull through. You can't kill a boomer."
"If starvation could have done it they'd have been pretty thin in Oklahoma the first year, from what I've been told. I look for a better class to come down for the opening of the Strip than rushed Oklahoma—farmers who have sold out in other places on the hunt for new land. They're always on the jump after new land out here in the west; they haven't learned how to make it last more than fifteen or twenty years."
"Land 'd last always if they'd use it out here for what it was intended," Waco said. "This prairie country wasn't made for farmin', the ground's too thin, but you could raise cattle on it a million years and leave it as good as it was when you started. I ain't knockin' farmin', but it sure gits my gizzards to see all this good country fenced off and plowed up, Tom."
"I know, old chap."
"But if I don't make a go of my business I'll bust over with the rush and grab me off a claim in the Strip. I'm out of the cattle business for good—worked at it twenty years and never owned a calf. All I had to show for that lifetime of ridin' the range from Texas to Montany when Sid Colburn fired me was three old crowbaits and a sixty-dollar saddle. Wel-l-l-l," a long, regretful sigh—"I had a good time while it lasted, anyhow."
"Yes, there were times and experiences in our cowpunchin' days we'll remember happily when we're millionaires," Tom said.
"You started young, Tom."
"No, not so young. I was twenty-two when I came over."
"Wel-l-l," Waco sighed, "I'd like to line up with my navel agin the bar just once more to-night, old feller, and drink a round to the old days that's gone and the old life we're leavin'. But as we can't do it, we'll pass 'em up without regrets and say here's luck for the new."
Waco put out his hand; Tom's met it over' the fire.
"Here's luck for the new," Tom repeated the sentiment, solemnly as a rite.
"I'll have to round up my colts in the morning when we git home and rack right back to town. I've got my scales to put in and build me a little office and put my advertisement in the paper."
"We'll be sorry to see you go," Tom said.
"Oh well, I ain't jumpin' off. I'll be out now and then to see how you're makin' it."
"Of course," Tom said. He looked up quickly, the firelight glancing in his eyes like that old trick of a glimmering smile. "Do you remember the time you thought—you remarked, you know, old chap—I was married into the family, what?"
"Sure I do," Waco replied heartily. "It was a poor guess, but it was well meant."
"Just so," said Tom. "Next time you come out, old feller, it will be that way."
"The-hell-you-say!" said Waco, his delight beyond confines.
That called for another handshake, and an expression of regret from Waco that there was no bar to line up along and drink a round to such agreeable news. He could not have been much happier if the important change had been impending in his own state. He had much to say in praise of Eudora Ellison, his highest encomium being that she was the kind of a girl that just naturally wouldn't let a man die. There were two living examples of her determination beside that fire, he said, and he wound up his talk, complimentary and advisory, with these words, solemnly delivered as if drawn from the treasure house of a vast experience:
"Take 'em one at a time, and fur apart, Tom. That's my advice to you."
They were on the road before sunrise next morning, and at the ranch a little after noon. Eudora was at the gate to meet them, and Waco, driving in the lead, stopped his wagon between the gateposts to lean down and shake hands with her as if he had not seen her in a long, long time. There was the warmth of sincere wishes, the tenderness of sincere friendship, in Waco's eyes as he held her hand a little while, bending down from his high perch, his foot on the brake.
"Hello, Eudory,"—his voice, his tender touch, his broad-spreading red grin telling her that he knew it all: "How you likes to be a w'ale?" ········ Ten years and prosperity had made little change in Waco Johnson. He still wore a queer outfit half way between cowboy and country banker, although he seldom straddled a horse. Distance between his enterprises was too great for that ancient method of travel, although he kept a high-stepping team and a red-wheeled buggy for town driving and short excursions in the country from his headquarters at Indian Rock, the county seat.
A railroad had been built through that country, a great trunk-line reaching out to El Paso and on to the Pacific coast. There was a station, around which a little town was growing, on Tom Simpson's ranch, and there Waco was building a tall, poured-concrete grain elevator, the walls of which were already up. It was number nine in his chain of elevators stretching across' the rich wheat belt of Southern Kansas.
On this sunny day in late June the harvest was tingeing yellow; in a week the binders would be at work, and soon the red stream of hard winter wheat would be pouring into Waco Johnson's bins. Waco was driving out with a big buyer from Kansas City, who was abroad making crop estimates and contracts. They had stopped at the margin of what seemed a sea of wheat, its distant shores invisible to the eye.
"So this is the famous Simpson ranch?" said the buyer, speaking with the satisfaction of one who had fulfilled a long desire.
"Eleven thousand acres of wheat in one patch," Waco said, nodding. "I remember when he put in a hundred and forty, and people thought he was crazy. He's the man that started the ball rollin' down here in this country—I reckon they'd been rangin' cattle over here yet, lettin' this good wheat land go to waste, if it hadn't been for that far-seein' Englishman. He made all of us down here in this country. All we had to do was trail him and git rich. Couldn't help it; wasn't nothing to our credit."
"I've seen a lot in the papers about Simpson," the wheat buyer said; "pictures of his steam gang-plows throwing a furrow ten feet wide, a disc harrow hitched on behind, turning out a finished job at once."
"All ready for the drill," Waco said. "Eleven thousand acres, all in one patch. And Simpson harvests around twenty bushels to the acre where a lot of wheat farmers don't average more than fifteen. You can figger it up for yourself, and wheat at eighty-seven cents, July delivery. Some money for a farmer to slip in his sock—tell me!"
"Is that his house down there among the trees?"
"He calls it a cottage—it's only got twenty-four rooms! Yeah, that's Tom Simpson's house. His wife's a fine woman—I've knowed her since she was knee-high—well, maybe she was a little higher—but it's been a good long time."
Waco touched the mettled horses absently with the whip, treatment which they seemed to resent from the way they started off, keeping their driver's attention fixed to the muting of his ready tongue. Presently they fell to a swinging trot, and Waco relaxed, turning to his customer with a big red grin.
"Yes sir, Tom Simpson and me made our start together, right here on this ranch, haulin' and shippin' bones. Dang his old hide! named one of his boys after me. Waco. Yeah—Waco Johnson Simpson. Mean trick to play on a innocent child. Take him a long, long time to live it down."