Page:The Indian Dispossessed.pdf/273

The Indian Dispossessed So, once more in the fall, there is the renter, and his family—plus one. The annual cycle is rarely left incomplete.

Months ago the renter heard of the great Cherokee Strip opening, and started forthwith for the promised land. He has been camping out all the way down from Io way, or Illi noiay; he has been camping here for weeks. But for the first time in his life his cock-sureness wobbles a little; there is something in the determined looks, in the be-pistoled figures of the line in front that dispels his dream of a home for the asking. Deluded renter, you are only one of fifty thousand! This is to be a race for the swift, not for the settler.

The great, lumbering wagon cannot make the run—he gets that through the armor of his self-conceit. So he proceeds to "on-hitch" his least "winded" plough-horse, and gets astride; and as this Don Quixote outfit shuffles to the front, the children squall, and the chickens squawk, while his long-suffering, much better half tearfully prays that this once in their dreary lives good fortune may smile upon them.

Over there is a man standing beside a rough stone set in a little mound of earth; that stone is a section corner. He is talking in a low tone with two or three friends; the quarter section of land marked by that stone is worth four thousand dollars, and it will cost some lucky man two hundred and forty. 252