The Settling of the Sage. Hal G. Evarts
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Hal G. Evarts
The Settling of the Sage
Published by Good Press, 2019
EAN 4064066194581
Table of Contents
A rider jogged northward along the road on a big pinto horse, a led buckskin, packed, trailing a half-length behind. The horseman traveled with the regulation outfit of the roaming range dweller—saddle, bed roll and canvas war bag containing personal treasures and extra articles of attire—but this was supplemented by two panniers of food and cooking equipment and a one-man teepee that was lashed on top in lieu of canvas pack cover. A ranch road branched off to the left and the man pulled up his horse to view a sign that stood at the forks.
"Squatter, don't let the sun go down on you," he read. "That's the third one of those reminders, Calico," he told the horse. "The wording a little different but the sentiment all the same."
Fifty yards off the trail the charred and blackened fragments of a wagon showed in sharp contrast to the bleached white bones of two horses.
"They downed his team and torched his worldly goods," the rider said. "All his hopes gone up in smoke."
He turned in his saddle and looked off across the unending expanse of sage. Coldriver—probably so named from the fact that the three wells in the town constituted the only source of water within an hour's ride—lay thirty miles to the south, a cluster of some forty buildings nestling on a wind-swept flat. Seventy miles beyond it, and with but two more such centers of civilization between, the railroad stretched across the rolling desolation. North of him the hills lifted above the sage, angling with the directions so that four miles along the Three Bar road that branched off to the left would bring him to their foot and a like distance along the main fork saw its termination at Brill's store, situated in a dent in the base of the hills, the end of the Coldriver Trail.
The man took one more look at the evidence left behind to prove that the sign was no empty threat before heading the paint-horse along the left-hand fork. The crisp cool of early spring was blown down from the slope of the hills. Old drifts, their tops gray-streaked with dust, lay banked in the gulches and on sheltered east slopes, but the new grass had claimed the range to the very foot of the drifts, the green of it intensified in patches watered by the trickle that seeped from the downhill extremities of the snow banks. He noted that the range cows along his route were poor and lean, their hip bones showing lumpily through sagging skin, giving them the appearance of milkers rather than of beef stock. The preceding summer had been hot and dry, browning the range six weeks before its time, and the stock had gone into the winter in poor shape. Heavy snowfalls had completed the havoc and ten per cent. of the range stock had been winter-killed. Those that had pulled through were slow in putting on weight and recovering their strength.
A big red steer stood broadside to him, the Three Bar brand looming on its side, and the man once more pulled up his horse and lost himself in retrospection as he gazed at the brand.
"The old Three Bar, Calico," he remarked to the horse. "The old home brand. It's been many a moon since last I laid an eye on a Three Bar cow."
The man was gazing directly at the steer but he no longer saw it. Instead he was picturing the old-time scenes that the sight of the brand recalled. Step by step he visioned the long trail of the Three Bar cows from Dodge City to the Platte, from the Platte to the rolling sage-clad hills round old Fort Laramie and from Laramie to the present range. Many times he had heard the tale, and though most of the scenes had been enacted before his birth, they were impressed so firmly upon his mind by repetition that it seemed as if he himself had been a part of them.
His mind pictured two boys of somewhere round eighteen years of age setting forth from the little home town of Kansas City, nestling at the confluence of the Missouri and the Kaw. A year later Cal Warren was whacking bulls on the Santa Fe Trail while the other, William Harris, was holding the reins over four plunging horses as he tooled a lumbering Concord stage over the trail from Omaha to the little camp called Denver.
It was five years before their trails crossed again. Cal Warren was the first of the two to wed, and he had established a post along the trail, a rambling structure of 'dobe, poles and sod, and there conducted the business of "Two for One," a calling impossible and unknown in any other than that day and place.
The long bull trains were in sight from horizon to horizon every hour of the day. The grind of the gravel wore down the hoofs of the unshod oxen, and when footsore they could not go on. One sound bull for two with tender feet was Warren's rule of trade. These crippled ones were soon made sound in the puddle pen, a sod corral flooded with sufficient water to puddle the yellow clay into a six-inch layer of stiff, healing mud, then thrown out on the open range to fatten and grow strong. But transitions were swift and sweeping. Steel rails were crowding close behind the prairie schooners and the ox-bows. Bull trains grew fewer every year and eventually Cal Warren made his last trade of two for one.
Bill Harris had come back to view the railroad of which he had heard so much and he remained to witness and to be a part of the wild days of Abilene, Hays and Dodge, as each attained the apex of its glory as the railroad's end and the consequent destination of the Texas trail herds. The sight of these droves of thousands implanted a desire to run cows himself and when he was wed in Dodge he broached this project to his boyhood pal.
It was the sincere wish of each to gain the other as a partner in all future enterprise, but this was not to be. Warren had seen the bottom drop out of the bull trade and he would not relinquish the suspicion that any business dealing in four-footed stock was hazardous in the extreme and he insisted that the solution of all their financial problems rested upon owning land, not cows. Harris could not be induced to farm the soil while steers were selling round eight dollars a head.
Warren squatted on a quarter of land. Harris bought a few head of she-stock