Claim Number One

by George W. Ogden

  CLAIM NUMBER ONE

  by

  GEORGE W. OGDEN

  Author ofThe Duke of Chimney ButteTrails End, Etc.

  Frontispiece by J. Allen St. John

  Grosset & DunlapPublishers New York

  Made in the United States of America

  Copyright

  A. C. McClurg & Co.1922

  Published May, 1922

  Copyrighted in Great Britain

  Printed in the United States of America

  CONTENTS I. Comanche 1 II. Guests for the Metropole 9 III. Unconventional Behavior 21 IV. The Flat-Game Man 46 V. Skulkers 63 VI. The Drawing 79 VII. A Midnight Extra 104 VIII. The Governor's Son 122 IX. Double Crookedness 140 X. Hun Shanklin's Coat 154 XI. Number One 172 XII. The Other Man 188 XIII. Sentiment and Nails 206 XIV. "Like a Wolf" 219 XV. An Argument Ends 233 XVI. A Promise 255 XVII. A Plan 273 XVIII. The Strange Tent 288 XIX. Crook Meets Crook 304 XX. A Sudden Cloud 325 XXI. The Crisis 343

  CLAIM NUMBER ONE

  CHAPTER I

  COMANCHE

  Coming to Comanche, you stopped, for Comanche was the end of the world.Unless, of course, you were one of those who wished to push theboundary-line of the world farther, to make homes in the wildernesswhere there had been no homes, to plant green fields in the desert wherenone had been before.

  In that case you merely paused at Comanche, like the railroad, to waitthe turn of events.

  Beyond Comanche was the river, and beyond the river, dim-lined in thewest, the mountains. Between the river and the mountains lay thereservation from which the government had pushed the Indians, and whichit had cut into parcels to be drawn by lot.

  And so Comanche was there on the white plain to serve the present, andtemporary, purpose of housing and feeding the thousands who hadcollected there at the lure of chance with practical, impractical,speculative, romantic, honest, and dishonest ideas and intentions.Whether it should survive to become a colorless post-office andshipping-station for wool, hides, and sheep remained for the future todecide. As the town appeared under the burning sun of that Augustafternoon one might have believed, within bounds, that its importancewas established for good and all.

  It was laid out with the regular severity of the surveyor's art.Behind the fresh, new railroad depot the tented streets swept awaypretentiously. In the old settlements--as much as two months beforethat day some of them had been built--several business houses of woodand corrugated sheet-iron reared above the canvas roofs of theirneighbors, displaying in their windows all the wares which might beclassified among the needs of those who had come to break the desert,from anvils to zitherns; from beads, beds, and bridles to winches,wagons, water bottles, and collapsible cups.

  At the head of the main street stood a hydrant, which the railroadcompany supplied with water, offering its refreshment to all comers--toman, beast, and Indian, as well as to dusty tourists with redhandkerchiefs about their necks. Around it, where teams had been fed andthe overflow of water had run, little green forests of oats werespringing, testifying to the fecundity of the soil, lighting unbelievingeyes with hope.

  "Just look what a little water will do!" said the locaters and town-sitemen, pointing with eloquent gesture. "All this land needs, gentlemen, isa little water to make it a paradise!"

  On the right hand of the hydrant there was a bank, presenting a front ofbricked stability, its boarded sides painted in imitation of that sameresisting material, for the comfort of its depositors perhaps, and thebenefit of its credit before the eyes of the passing world. Well out inthe desert, among the hummocks of earth heaped around anchoring sageclumps, stood the Elkhorn Hotel. It was built of logs, with a designtoward the picturesque and an eye to the tourist class of adventurerswho were expected to throng to the opening. The logs had been cut alongthe river--they were that gnarled cottonwood which grows, leaning alwaystoward the northeast, in that land of bitter extremes--the bark strippedfrom them until they gleamed yellowly, and fitted together with studiedcrudity. Upon the projecting end of the ridge-pole rode a spreadingelk-prong, weathered, white, old.

  And there was the Hotel Metropole. There always is a Hotel Metropole anda newspaper, no matter where you go. When you travel beyond them youhave penetrated the _Ultima Thule_ of modern times. The Hotel Metropolewas near the station. It was picturesque without straining for it.Mainly it was a large, sandy lot with a rope around it; but part of itwas tents of various colors, sizes, and shapes, arranged around theparent shelter of them all--a circus "top," weathered and stained fromthe storms of many years. Their huddling attitude seemed to express alack of confidence in their own stability. They seemed a brood of dustychicks, pressing in for shelter of the mothering wing.

  All was under the direction of a small man with a cream-coloredwaistcoat and a most incendiary-looking nose. It seemed tempting thelaws of physics governing dry materials and live coals to bring thatnose into the shelter of a desert-bleached tent. But it was there, andit flared its welcome with impartial ardor upon all arrivals.

  The scheme of the Hotel Metropole was this: If you wanted a cot in atent where each bed was partitioned from the other by a drop-curtain ofcalico print, you could enjoy that luxury at the rate of two dollars anight in advance, no baggage accepted as security, no matter what itsheft or outward appearance of value. If you didn't want to go that high,or maybe were not so particular about the privacy of your sleepingarrangements, you might have a cot anywhere in the circus-tentful ofcots, spread out like pews. There the charge was one dollar. That ratechancing to be too steep for you, you might go into the open and rest inone of the outdoor canvas pockets, which bellied down under your weightlike a hammock. There the schedule was fifty cents.

  No matter what part of the house you might occupy on retiring, you werewarned by the wall-eyed young man who piloted you to the cot with yournumber pinned on it that the hotel was not responsible for the personalbelongings of the guests. You were also cautioned to watch out forthieves. The display of firearms while disrobing seemed to be encouragedby the management for its moral effect, and to be a part of the ceremonyof retiring. It seemed to be the belief in the Hotel Metropole that whena man stored a pistol beneath his pillow, or wedged it in between hisribs and the side of the bunk, he had secured the safety of the night.

  At the distant end of the main street, standing squarely across itscenter, stood the little house which sheltered the branch of the UnitedStates land-office, the headquarters being at Meander, a town a day'sjourney beyond the railroad's end. A tight little board house it was,like a toy, flying the emblem of the brave and the free as gallantly asa schoolhouse or a forest-ranger station. Around it the crowd lookedblack and dense from the railroad station. It gave an impression ofgreat activity and earnest business attention, while the flag wasreassuring to a man when he stepped off the train sort of dubiously andsaw it waving there at the end of the world.

  Indeed, Comanche might be the end of the world--didn't the maps showthat it _was_ the end of the world, didn't the railroad stop there, anddoesn't the world always come to an abrupt end, all white and unchartedbeyond, at the last station on every railroad map you ever saw? It mightbe the end of the world, indeed, but there was the flag! Commerce couldflourish there as well as in Washington, D. C., or New York, N. Y., orKansas City, U. S. A.; even trusts migh
t swell and distend there underits benign protectorate as in the centers of civilization and patriotismpointed above.

  So there was assurance and comfort to the timid in the flag at Comanche,as there has been in the flag in other places at other times. For theflag is a great institution when a man is far away from home andexpecting to bump into trouble at the next step.

  Opposite the bank on the main street of Comanche were the tents of thegods of chance. They were a hungry-mouthed looking lot that presidedwithin them, taken at their best, for the picking had been growingslimmer and slimmer in Wyoming year by year. They had gathered therefrom the Chugwater to the Big Horn Basin in the expectation of gettingtheir skins filled out once more.

  One could find in those tents all the known games of cowboy literature,and a good many which needed explanation to the travelers from afar.There was only one way to understand them thoroughly, and that was byplaying them, and there seemed to be a pretty good percentage of curiouspersons in the throng that sweated in Comanche that day.

  That was all of Comanche--tents, hydrant, hotels, bank, business houses,and tents again--unless one considered the small tent-restaurants andlodging-places, of which there were hundreds; or the saloons, of whichthere were scores. But when they were counted in, that was all.

  Everybody in Comanche who owned a tent was on the make, and the makingwas good. Many of the home-seekers and adventure-expectant young men andwomen had been on the ground two weeks. They had been paying out goodmoney for dusty stage-rides over the promising lands which had beenallotted to the Indians already by the government. The stage peopledidn't tell them anything about that, which was just as well. It lookedlike land where stuff might be grown with irrigation, inspiration,intensity of application, and undying hope. And the locaters andtown-site boomers led their customers around to the hydrant and pointedto the sprouting oats.

  "Spill a little water on this land and it's got Egypt skinned," theysaid.

  So the mild adventurers stayed on for the drawing of claims, theirideals and notions taking on fresh color, their canned tomatoes (see theproper literature for the uses of canned tomatoes in desert countriesfrequented by cowboys) safely packed away in their trunks against a dayof emergency.

  Every one of them expected to draw Claim Number One, and every one ofthem was under the spell of dreams. For the long summer days of Wyomingwere as white as diamonds, and the soft blue mountains stood along thedistant west beyond the bright river as if to fend the land fromhardships and inclemencies, and nurture in its breast the hopes of men.

  Every train brought several hundred more to add to the throng already inComanche--most of them from beyond the Mississippi, many of themschemers, most of them dreamers ready to sacrifice all the endearmentsof civilization for the romance of pioneering in the West, beyond thelimits of the world as defined by the map of the railroad-line overwhich they had come.