The Settling of the Sage | Page 2

had been enacted before his birth, they were impressed so firmly upon his mind by repetition that it seemed as if he himself had been a part of them.
His mind pictured two boys of somewhere round eighteen years of age setting forth from the little home town of Kansas City, nestling at the confluence of the Missouri and the Kaw. A year later Cal Warren was whacking bulls on the Santa Fe Trail while the other, William Harris, was holding the reins over four plunging horses as he tooled a lumbering Concord stage over the trail from Omaha to the little camp called Denver.
It was five years before their trails crossed again. Cal Warren was the first of the two to wed, and he had established a post along the trail, a rambling structure of 'dobe, poles and sod, and there conducted the business of "Two for One," a calling impossible and unknown in any other than that day and place.
The long bull trains were in sight from horizon to horizon every hour of the day. The grind of the gravel wore down the hoofs of the unshod oxen, and when footsore they could not go on. One sound bull for two with tender feet was Warren's rule of trade. These crippled ones were soon made sound in the puddle pen, a sod corral flooded with sufficient water to puddle the yellow clay into a six-inch layer of stiff, healing mud, then thrown out on the open range to fatten and grow strong. But transitions were swift and sweeping. Steel rails were crowding close behind the prairie schooners and the ox-bows. Bull trains grew fewer every year and eventually Cal Warren made his last trade of two for one.
Bill Harris had come back to view the railroad of which he had heard so much and he remained to witness and to be a part of the wild days of Abilene, Hays and Dodge, as each attained the apex of its glory as the railroad's end and the consequent destination of the Texas trail herds. The sight of these droves of thousands implanted a desire to run cows himself and when he was wed in Dodge he broached this project to his boyhood pal.
It was the sincere wish of each to gain the other as a partner in all future enterprise, but this was not to be. Warren had seen the bottom drop out of the bull trade and he would not relinquish the suspicion that any business dealing in four-footed stock was hazardous in the extreme and he insisted that the solution of all their financial problems rested upon owning land, not cows. Harris could not be induced to farm the soil while steers were selling round eight dollars a head.
Warren squatted on a quarter of land. Harris bought a few head of she-stock and grazed his cows north and west across the Kansas line into the edge of the great unknown that was styled Nebraska and Northwest District. At first his range was limitless, but in a few short years he could stand on the roof of his sod hut and see the white points of light which were squatters' wagons dotting the range to the far horizon in any direction he chose to look. The first of these to invade his range had been Cal Warren, moving on before the swarm of settlers flocking into the locality of his first choice in such alarming numbers that he feared an unhealthy congestion of humanity in the near future. The debate of farming versus cows was resumed between the two, but each held doggedly to his own particular views and the longed-for partnership was again postponed.
Harris moved once more--and then again--and it was something over two decades after his departure from Dodge with the Three Bar cows that he made one final shift, faring on in search of that land where nesters were unknown. He made a dry march that cost him a fourth of his cows, skirted the Colorado Desert and made his stand under the first rim of the hills. Those others who came to share this range were men whose views were identical with his own, whose watchword was: "Our cows shall run free on a thousand hills." They sought for a spot where the range was untouched by the plow and the water holes unfenced. They had moved, then moved again, driven on before the invasion of the settlers. These men banded together and swore that here conditions should be reversed, that it was the squatter who should move, and on this principle they grimly rested.
Cal Warren had been the vanguard of each new rush of settlers that had pushed Bill Harris on to another range, and the cowman had come to see the hand of