The Flying U's Last Stand by B. M. Bower (ebook reader with highlighter TXT) 📕

three or four of the most indignant settlers, next day, where they would find their cattle. But he added that the feed was pretty good back there, and advised them to leave the stock out there for the present.

“It isn't going to do you fellows any good to rear up on your hind legs and make a holler,” he said calmly. “We haven't hurt your cattle. We don't want to have trouble with anybody. But we're pretty sure to have a fine, large row with our neighbors if they don't keep on their own side the fence.”

That fence was growing to be more than a mere figure of speech The Happy Family did not love the digging of post-holes and the stretching of barbed wire; on the contrary they hated it so deeply that you could not get a civil word out of one of them while the work went on; yet they put in long hours at the fence-building.

They had to take the work in shifts on account of having their own cattle to watch day and night. Sometimes it happened that a man tamped posts or helped stretch wire all day, and then stood guard two or three hours on the herd at night; which was wearing on the temper. Sometimes, because they were tired, they quarreled over small things.

New shipments of cattle, too, kept coming to Dry Lake. Invariably these would be driven out towards Antelope Coulee—farther if the drivers could manage it—and would have to be driven back again with what patience the Happy Family could muster. No one helped them among the settlers. There was every attitude among the claim-dwellers, from open opposition to latent antagonism. None were quite neutral—and yet the Happy Family did not bother any save these who had filed contests to their claims, or who took active part in the cattle driving.

The Happy Family were not half as brutal as they might have been. In spite of their no-trespassing signs they permitted settlers to drive across their claims with wagons and water-barrels, to haul water from One Man Creek when the springs and the creek in Antelope Coulee went dry.

They did not attempt to move the shacks of the later contestants off their claims. Though they hated the sight of them and of the owners who bore themselves with such provocative assurance, they grudged the time the moving would take. Besides that the Honorable Blake had told them that moving the shacks would accomplish no real, permanent good. Within thirty days they must appear before the register and receiver and file answer to the contest, and he assured them that forbearance upon their part would serve to strengthen their case with the Commissioner.

It goes to prove how deeply in earnest they were, that they immediately began to practice assiduously the virtues of mildness and forbearance. They could, he told them, postpone the filing of their answers until close to the end of the thirty days; which would serve also to delay the date of actual trial of the contests, and give the Happy Family more time for their work.

Their plans had enlarged somewhat. They talked now of fencing the whole tract on all four sides, and of building a dam across the mouth of a certain coulee in the foothills which drained several miles of rough country, thereby converting the coulee into a reservoir that would furnish water for their desert claims. It would take work, of course; but the Happy Family; were beginning to see prosperity on the trail ahead and nothing in the shape of hard work could stop them from coming to hang-grips with fortune.

Chip helped them all he could, but he had the Flying U to look after, and that without the good team-work of the Happy Family which had kept things moving along so smoothly. The team-work now was being used in a different game; a losing game, one would say at first glance.

So far the summer had been favorable to dry-farming. The more enterprising of the settlers had some grain and planted potatoes upon freshly broken soil, and these were growing apace. They did not know about these scorching August winds, that might shrivel crops in a day. They did not realize that early frosts might kill what the hot winds spared. They became enthusiastic over dry-farming, and their resentment toward the Happy family increased as their enthusiasm waxed strong. The Happy Family complained to one another that you couldn't pry a nester loose from his claim with a crowbar.

In this manner did civilization march out and take possession of the high prairies that lay close to the Flying U. They had a Sunday School organized, with the meetings held in a double shack near the trail to Dry Lake. The Happy family, riding that way, sometimes heard voices mingled in the shrill singing of some hymn where, a year before, they had listened to the hunting song of the coyote.

Eighty acres to the man—with that climate and that soil they never could make it pay; with that soil especially since it was mostly barren. The Happy Family knew it, and could find it in their hearts to pity the men who were putting in dollars and time and hard work there. But for obvious reasons they did not put their pity into speech.

They fenced their west line in record time. There was only one gate in the whole length of it, and that was on the trail to Dry Lake. Not content with trusting to the warning of four strands of barbed wire stretched so tight that they hummed to the touch, they took turns in watching it—“riding fence,” in range parlance—and in watching the settlers' cattle.

To H. J. Owens and his fellow contestants they paid not the slightest attention, because the Honorable Blake had urged them personally to ignore any and all claimants. To Florence Grace Hallman they gave no heed, believing that she had done her worst, and that her worst was after all pretty weak, since the contests she had caused to be filed could not possibly be approved by the government so long as the Happy Family continued to abide by every law and by-law and condition and requirement in their present through-going and exemplary manner.

You should have seen how mild-mannered and how industrious the Happy Family were, during these three weeks which followed the excitement of the Kid's adventuring into the wild. You would have been astonished, and you would have made the mistake of thinking that they had changed permanently and might be expected now to settle down with wives and raise families and hay and cattle and potatoes, and grow beards, perhaps, and become well-to-do ranchers.

The Happy Family were almost convinced that they were actually leaving excitement behind them for good and all. They might hold back the encroaching tide of immigration from the rough land along the river—that sounded like something exciting, to be sure. But they must hold back the tide with legal proceedings and by pastoral pursuits, and that promised little in the way of brisk, decisive action and strong nerves and all these qualities which set the Happy Family somewhat apart from their fellows.