“If you ever decide to risk a mistake I’ll maybe help you out to a mild extent,” he said, “provided you come through with this present little errand I’m sending you on.” Carver thanked him, pocketed the bills which constituted the advance upon his venture, and headed his horse off to the east. As he rode he reviewed all possible motives underlying Hinman’s proposal. Tax-dodging on a smaller scale was no unusual thing along the line, but he was morally certain that this motive, though the purported object of the trip, was entirely secondary in Hinman’s considerations. “The taxes won’t amount to half the expenses of the trip,” Carver reflected. “Now just what is he aiming at?” He had reached no satisfactory solution when, an hour later, the squat buildings of Caldwell loomed before him. He dismissed the problem temporarily. As he rode down the wide main thoroughfare it seemed that the hand of time had been turned back two decades to the days of Abilene, Hayes and Dodge, when each of those spots in turn had come into its brief day of glory as the railroad’s end and the enviable reputation of being the toughest camp on earth. In their day all those towns had eclipsed the wildest heights of wickedness attained by mushroom mining camps of lurid fame, then had passed on into the quiet routine of permanent respectability as the trading centers of prosperous agricultural communities. But little Caldwell stood unique, as if she were a throwback to an earlier day, nestling in the edge of a state where prohibition and anti-gambling regulations had long prevailed, yet her saloons stood invitingly open by day and night and the clatter of chips and the smooth purr of the ivory ball were never silent in the halls of chance; for just beyond lay No Man’s Land, the stamping ground of all those restless spirits who chafed against restrictive laws that were not of their own making, and wide-open Caldwell reaped the harvest of their free-flung dollars. Groups of tall-hatted, chap-clad men hailed Carver from the sidewalk as he rode down the wide main street. Scores of saddled horses drowsed at the hitch rails and ranchers’ families rattled past in buckboards drawn by half-wild ponies. The street was thronged with blanketed Indians, for the Government beef issue was parcelled out semi-monthly on the little hill south of Caldwell and every two weeks the whole Cherokee nation made the pilgrimage to receive the largess of the Great White Father. As if to complete the illusion that he had been transported back to the days of Dodge and Abilene, Carver could make out the low-hanging pall of dust which marked the slow progress of a trail herd moving up from the south along the old Chisholm Trail, a thoroughfare now paralleled by the railroad that pierced the Cherokee Strip, but which was still available to those who would save freight charges and elected instead to follow the old-time method of pastoral transportation in marketing their droves.