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 "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?"