“Oh, I couldn’t permit you to go to so much trouble, Mr.—Zeb.”
“No permission needed,” laughed the other. “It’s my buckboard and my horses, and you ride with me if you will. We leave in the morning at seven. There’s no time to lose,” he continued, consulting the contents of a large envelope, “as these lands are to be opened for entry exactly eight days from to-morrow, and you’d better be at the land office at least a couple of days ahead. I shouldn’t wonder but there’s men—and women too, maybe—lined up there waiting now, but most of them are eager to file on the land closer in. They haven’t been out that far, and they don’t know what they’re missing. Now there’ll be a ten dollar fee to pay—you have a little money?” Burton nodded. “Very well. If you’re short, say so. There’ll be some other expenses too. You’ll have to line up before the door of the land office and stay there night and day to hold your place. Caterers will bring you food if you are willing to pay for the service, and you can perhaps hire a man to stand in your place part of the time, but be sure he’s honest, or he may give it up to someone else. Then, of course, you have a little land to break each year, and certain improvements to make in the way of building a house or the like, and in three years if you can show that you have lived on the property six months in each twelve and complied with the other regulations you will receive from the Government a certificate of title to the property.”
They talked about many details in connection with homestead life, talked, indeed, long after they were in bed, while a coyote howled to his mate across the plain and a waxing moon slanted its soft light through the single square window of the shanty.
Five days later Burton walked down the street to the Land Office. At first he thought there must be a riot or disturbance of some sort in front of the buildings, but on arrival found that the crowd was genial and orderly, and arranged in single file in the form of a half circle before the building. Where the end of the half circle came back to the curb the line extended along the sidewalk. Burton walked slowly the length of the line, looking curiously into the faces of these patient waiters; men of all nationalities, Canadian, American, British Islanders, German, Russian, French, Austrian, Pole, Italian, Hungarian, Scandinavian, Chinamen—here they were gathered from the corners of the globe and waiting patiently through night and day, through heat and cold, through wind and rain, through any trial and any hazard for the God-sent privilege, born of a new country, of calling the land beneath their feet their own. There were tired faces there, faces where the cheek bones stood rugged under a tawny skin and the eyes glowed under deep foreheads—faces of men from the ballast gang and the sewer gang, from the tie camp and the grading camp—men who had sweat hard in the hot sun for the few dollars necessary to stake them to home and title of their own. Here and there a woman was seen in the line, seated on soap box or suit case, complacently knitting or engaged with her fancy work. But they were all good-natured. This human material, combustible as powder, seemed as innocent as dry sand. And Burton learned that their good nature and their complacence was due to one fact only—their confidence that whatever was done would be done in conformity with the law and with absolute fairness to all concerned. Once shake that confidence, and you have dropped the spark into what you thought was sand!