Another few decades and old Joe Hinman, himself accounted a wise man among his fellows, sat his horse on a little rise of ground and lamented his own lack of foresight. Donald Carver, his younger companion, gazed off across the flat where several riders held some two thousand head of steers. Hinman had come with the vanguard of the invaders and had watched succeeding waves of home seekers swarm past on all the ancient trails, the bull trains stretching almost without a break from the Missouri to the Colorado hills, when Cheyenne, Kiowa and Comanche contested the advance at every crossing of the Republican and the Smoky Hill, at the Great Bend of the Arkansas, and historic Pawnee Rock; had watched the bull teams and the prairie schooner giving way to freight cars that rattled past on steel rails which spanned a continent. He had seen the rolling plains of Kansas, once constituting the first reaches of the Great American Desert, lifted bodily into statehood and wondrous fertility, so long since that younger men had almost forgotten that their native State had ever been other than a prosperous agricultural community. While the main tides of settlement had swept on to the west and north, Hinman had turned aside and traveled south on the Chisholm Trail till he reached a point where the floods of home seekers were halted by some invisible barrier. There he had settled and prospered, but even now, thirty years after driving his first claim stakes through the prairie sod, that same barrier resisted all advance. Just outside his dooryard a vast tract, sixty miles by two hundred in extent, remained undeveloped and untouched. The land was rich and beckoned temptingly to those who sought a scrap of ground which might constitute a home, yet beyond Hinman’s holdings the virgin sod extended to the far horizon with never a ribbon of smoke by day or a twinkling window by night to indicate the friendly presence of a settler’s cabin,--the Cherokee Strip, upon which the white man was forbidden to settle by the terms of an ancient treaty. This great tract had been set aside to serve as insulation between warring whites and reds, its status still the same even though the necessity for such insulation had been long since removed,--an empire lying dormant and awaiting only the magic word which should strike off the shackles and permit its broad miles to blossom into productiveness. “There she lays, son,” Hinman said, waving an arm in a comprehensive sweep toward the unowned lands. “Some day right soon they’ll open her. Every land-hungry party in four States has his eye on the last frontier and whenever she’s throwed open to settlement you’ll see one hair-raising mad stampede. So if you’re going off somewheres, like I heard it rumored, why I’d cancel the arrangements and sit tight.” The younger man nodded without comment.