I thrust the paper into his hands. "It won't obligate you in any way," I explained.
"All right," he agreed. He enjoyed playing jokes and this one amused him. "But you're sure I won't get no homestead?"
Coyote poised the pen stiffly in his hand. "Let's see," he murmured in embarrassment, "it's been so gosh-darn long since I signed my name--danged if I can recollect--" the pen stuck in his awkward fingers as he swung it about like a lariat.
Finally he wrote laboriously "Calvin Aloysius Bancroft."
With the signed paper in my hands I saddled Lakota and streaked off for the thirty-five-mile trip to Pierre.
Late that night a tired horse and its rider pulled up in front of a little hotel in Ft. Pierre. I routed a station agent out of bed and sent a telegram to the young man who had left his claim.
Next morning when the U. S. Land Office at Pierre opened its door the clerks found me backed up against it with a paper in my outstretched hand. Half an hour later, when the morning mail was opened at the Land Office, there was a contest in it filed at Presho. But I had slapped a contest on the same quarter-section first, a contest filed by one Calvin Aloysius Bancroft, a legal applicant for the claim.
In the mail I received a signed relinquishment for the land from the young man, withdrew the contest and sold the relinquishment, which is the filer's claim to the land, for $450. I had made enough on the deal to meet our own emergencies and had saved $200 for the young man who needed it badly.
And _The Wand_ was still safe. All around us the land was being harnessed, a desert being conquered with plowshares as swords.
Scotty Phillips stopped in at the print shop on his way from Pierre, where he lived, to his ranch. "The stockmen have been asleep," he said. "They ridiculed the idea that the range could ever be farmed. And now they are homesteading, trying to get hold of land as fast as they can. I have Indian lands leased, so I am all right."
As a squaw man he naturally owned quite a bit of land, a piece for each child, and he had three children.
Panicky, some of the stockmen filed on land, but a homestead for them was just big enough for the ranch buildings and corrals; it still did not allow for the essential thing--large range for the cattle. They began to buy from homesteaders and lease lands around them. For years the livestockman of the West had been monarch of all he surveyed, and the end of his reign was in sight. Like all classes of people who have failed to keep step with the march of progress, he would have to follow the herd.