“Last year when I went up to Kansas City in charge of a train-load of your steers a banker showed me a collection of scrip he’d made,” said Carver. “It was Civil War Scrip, issued to veterans in lieu of pensions, or maybe on top of pensions, I don’t know which. Anyway, it entitles the holder to lay that paper on any tract of government land and get a patent to it without having to live there and prove up. A number used it on small plots left open round where they lived and sold off the fractions left over for whatever they could get. On and off in the last ten years this banker has accumulated such fractions to the amount of seventeen hundred acres. He intimated that he’d let them go for the price of the raw land. If he’ll sell for three dollars an acre he’s found a customer.” “But the Strip won’t be opened for entry till a certain hour,” Hinman objected. “And right then there’ll be three men for every claim turned loose across the line at once.” “There’s thousands making the run that don’t consider proving up,” said Carver. “They’ll relinquish for whatever they can get. I can furnish them with scrip to get their patent and they can deed it right back to me.” Carver returned a week later, owner of scrip to the extent of nearly two thousand acres. As he stepped from the train he noted Bart and Noll Lassiter conversing, Bart grinning as usual while Noll’s face expressed black wrath. “Noll is a trifle upset over our turn in off-brand steers,” Bart told Carver as he joined him. “He considers me a traitor and is deciding which of twenty different methods will be the most painful way to kill me. Says he’s no brother of mine, which it’s a relief for me to discover the fact, since I’ve always wished he wasn’t. He seemed real irate.” They turned to view a murky haze off to the south, a haze that changed to dense billowing black smoke as a hungry blaze licked across the parched prairies. Some thought the soldiers had fired the grass to drive out the sooners that skulked in hiding in the Strip. Others averred that the cowmen, remembering that time when the boomers had fired the range, had waited till this time to retaliate, a few days before the settlers were to take over their old domain. Whatever its source, the fact remained that in the space of two days there were hundreds of square miles of the unowned lands transformed into a black and devastated waste. VII Soldiers sat their horses at half-mile intervals, awaiting the appointed hour to give the signal for the home seekers to cross the line. Molly Lassiter’s eyes snapped excitedly as she viewed the scene, a spectacle which has never been duplicated in all history. More than a hundred and fifty thousand souls were banked up behind the Cherokee-Kansas line and a thinner wave had assembled on the Oklahoma side, where the barrier would be lowered at the same hour as that along the northern edge.