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CLAIM NUMBER ONE
by
GEORGE W. OGDEN
Author of
The Duke of Chimney Butte
Trails End, Etc.
Frontispiece by J. Allen St. John
Grosset & Dunlap
Publishers 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 the
boundary-line of the world farther, to make homes in the wilderness
where there had been no homes, to plant green fields in the desert where
none had been before.
In that case you merely paused at Comanche, like the railroad, to wait
the turn of events.
Beyond Comanche was the river, and beyond the river, dim-lined in the
west, the mountains. Between the river and the mountains lay the
reservation from which the government had pushed the Indians, and which
it had cut into parcels to be drawn by lot.
And so Comanche was there on the white plain to serve the present, and
temporary, purpose of housing and feeding the thousands who had
collected 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 and
shipping-station for wool, hides, and sheep remained for the future to
decide. As the town appeared under the burning sun of that August
afternoon one might have believed, within bounds, that its importance
was 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 away
pretentiously. In the old settlements--as much as two months before
that day some of them had been built--several business houses of wood
and corrugated sheet-iron reared above the canvas roofs of their
neighbors, displaying in their windows all the wares which might be
classified 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 railroad
company supplied with water, offering its refreshment to all comers--to
man, beast, and Indian, as well as to dusty tourists with red
handkerchiefs about their necks. Around it, where teams had been fed and
the overflow of water had run, little green forests of oats were
springing, testifying to the fecundity of the soil, lighting unbelieving
eyes with hope.
"Just look what a little water will do!" said the locaters and town-site
men, pointing with eloquent gesture. "All this land needs, gentlemen, is
a little water to make it a paradise!"
On the right hand of the hydrant there was a bank, presenting a front of
bricked stability, its boarded sides painted in imitation of that same
resisting material, for the comfort of its depositors perhaps, and the
benefit of its credit before the eyes of the passing world. Well out in
the desert, among the hummocks of earth heaped around anchoring sage
clumps, stood the Elkhorn Hotel. It was built of logs, with a design
toward the picturesque and an eye to the tourist class of adventurers
who were expected to throng to the opening. The logs had been cut along
the river--they were that gnarled cottonwood which grows, leaning always
toward the northeast, in that land of bitter extremes--the bark stripped
from them until they gleamed yellowly, and fitted together with studied
crudity. Upon the projecting end of the ridge-pole rode a spreading
elk-prong, weathered, white, old.
And there was the Hotel Metropole. There always is a Hotel Metropole and
a newspaper, no matter where you go. When you travel beyond them you
have penetrated the _Ultima Thule_ of modern times. The Hotel Metropole
was 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 it
was tents of various colors, sizes, and shapes, arranged around the
parent shelter of them all--a circus "top," weathered and stained from
the storms of many years. Their huddling attitude seemed to express a
lack of confidence in their own stability. They seemed a brood of dusty
chicks, pressing in for shelter of the mothering wing.
All was under the direction of a small man with a cream-colored
waistcoat and a most incendiary-looking nose. It seemed tempting the
laws of physics governing dry materials and live coals to bring that
nose into the shelter of a desert-bleached tent. But it was there, and
it flared its welcome with impartial ardor upon all arrivals.
The scheme of the Hotel Metropole was this: If you wanted a cot in a
tent where each bed was partitioned from the other by a drop-curtain of
calico print, you could enjoy that luxury at the rate of two dollars a
night in advance, no baggage accepted as security, no matter what its
heft 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 sleeping
arrangements, you might have a cot anywhere in the circus-tentful of
cots, spread out like pews. There the charge was one dollar. That rate
chancing to be too steep for you, you might go into the open and rest in
one of the outdoor canvas pockets, which bellied down under your weight
like a hammock. There the schedule was fifty cents.
No matter what part of the house you might occupy on retiring, you were
warned by the wall-eyed young man who piloted you to the cot with your
number pinned on it that the hotel was not responsible for the personal
belongings of the guests. You were also cautioned to watch out for
thieves. The display of firearms while disrobing seemed to be encouraged
by the management for its moral effect, and to be a part of the ceremony
of retiring. It seemed to be the belief in the Hotel Metropole that when
a man stored a pistol beneath his pillow, or wedged it in between his
ribs 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 its
center, stood the little house which sheltered the branch of the United
States land-office, the headquarters being at Meander, a town a day's
journey 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 as
a schoolhouse or a forest-ranger station. Around it the crowd looked
black and dense from the railroad station. It gave an impression of
great activity and earnest business attention, while the flag was
reassuring to a man when he stepped off the train sort of dubiously and
saw it waving there at the end of the world.
Indeed, Comanche might be the end of the world--didn't the maps show
that it _was_ the end of the world, didn't the railroad stop there, and
doesn't the world always come to an abrupt end, all white and uncharted
beyond, at the last station on every railroad map you ever saw? It might
be the end of the world, indeed, but there was the flag! Commerce could
flourish there as well as in Washington, D. C., or New York, N. Y., or
Kansas City, U. S. A.; even trusts might swell and distend there under
its benign protectorate as in the centers of civilization and patriotism
pointed 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 the
flag is a great institution when a man is far away from home and
expecting to bump into trouble at the next step.
Opposite the bank on the main street of Comanche were the tents of the
gods of chance. They were a hungry-mouthed looking lot that presided
within them, taken at their best, for the picking had been growing
slimmer and slimmer in Wyoming year by year. They had gathered there
from the Chugwater to the Big Horn Basin in the expectation of getting
their 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 by
playing them, and there seemed to be a pretty good percentage of curious
persons 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 and
lodging-places, of which there were hundreds; or the saloons, of which
there were scores. But when they were counted in, that was all.
Everybody in Comanche who owned a tent was on the make, and the making
was good. Many of the home-seekers and adventure-expectant young men and
women had been on the ground two weeks. They had been paying out good
money for dusty stage-rides over the promising lands which had been
allotted to the Indians already by the government. The stage people
didn't tell them anything about that, which was just as well. It looked
like land where stuff might be grown with irrigation, inspiration,
intensity of application, and undying hope. And the locaters and
town-site boomers led their customers around to the hydrant and pointed
to the sprouting oats.
"Spill a little water on this land and it's got Egypt skinned," they
said.
So the mild adventurers stayed on for the drawing of claims, their
ideals and notions taking on fresh color, their canned tomatoes (see the
proper literature for the uses of canned tomatoes in desert countries
frequented by cowboys) safely packed away in their trunks against a day
of emergency.
Every one of them expected to draw Claim Number One, and every one of
them was under the spell of dreams. For the long summer days of Wyoming
were as white as diamonds, and the soft blue mountains stood along the
distant west beyond the bright river as if to fend the land from
hardships and inclemencies, and nurture in its breast the hopes of men.
Every train brought several hundred more to add to the throng already in
Comanche--most of them from beyond the Mississippi, many of them
schemers, most of them dreamers ready to sacrifice all the endearments
of civilization for the romance of pioneering in the West, beyond the
limits of the world as defined by the map of the railroad-line over
which they had come.