“All right. I have to get the buckboard at the livery first. And my gun. You stay here, and I’ll come back for you.”
Jane agreed and stayed seated until he was gone. Then she went into the kitchen to speak to Ida Mae Sterling.
They were five miles beyond the Bitter Springs town limits when Morgan announced they were on Morning Star land. Beside him, Jane leaned slightly forward as though this posture might improve her distance vision. “You won’t see the house from here,” he told her. “We have three miles to go.” He was aware that Jane was still straining to see something.
“How do you recognize the edge of your property?” she asked.
“How do you recognize the back of your hand?”
Her smile was a quiet one. “Of course,” she said.
Morgan pointed off to his left. “See that rise in the grassland? And the slip of cottonwoods just beyond it? That’s the marker most folks use to distinguish my property from what can still be homesteaded. If it stops being respected, I’ll have to stake it or put up a fence. There’s enough fence already, in my opinion, so I don’t like the idea of it. I keep what the Burdicks put up in good repair and try not to unroll more barbwire.”
“I thought fence was good.”
“Something else you read?”
“Yes.”
He did not miss the slight defensiveness in her tone and realized he had not suppressed the sarcasm in his. “I’m sorry. It’s good you wanted to learn things before you came, but most of what I read in New York papers that make it this far west is wrongheaded. Some of it is just wrong. Like everything else, there’re two sides to putting up fence.”
“Explain it to me.”
He wondered if she was interested or merely being mannerly, and then wondered why he thought she couldn’t be both. “Well, the fence keeps the cattle in. That’s the obvious advantage. Limits the open range. Makes pulling the herd together or sectioning it off easier. That’s helpful when your cattle number in the tens of thousands.”
“You have so many?”
“Not now. Market for beef is down some after the boom. I’m building the herd back, testing what the market will bear. I understand the Burdicks had near that many head at one time, but lost about twenty-five percent in the blizzard in ’86 and fifteen percent of what was left during the drought that followed. When the ranch was sold at auction, they barely had two thousand head. You see, when a big snowstorm is gathering, the cattle will move out ahead of it. It’s in their nature. I don’t know how they know what they know, but you can depend on it. When the weather calms, there they are where the grass is, or at least where they can get to it. With the wire up, they move until they’re stopped by it, and then they pile up against the fence and die. It’s not in their nature to push through.”
Jane whispered, “How awful. Those poor creatures.”
“Cattle would have died during the blizzard regardless of the wire, but there’s a case to be made that wire made it worse. Weather here is unpredictable. It can happen again, did actually the following year, but by all accounts that winter was not as hard as what came before it. Eighty-six is the marker folks around here use for comparison.”
Morgan noticed that Jane was no longer holding the seat under her as tightly as she had when they started out. He guessed she had learned to relax and roll with the juddering instead of trying to fight it.
“Fence has critics in Washington, too,” he said. “Ranchers settled the territory, claimed the land that their cattle roamed as their own. Hundreds of square miles. Entire valleys. They could do that because no one was there to dispute it. The railroad and the federal government had already beaten back the Indians. Fence went up to mark ranch land. The problem came when Congress granted homesteads to encourage more settlement. The homesteaders were given plots and proper deeds and told to go west. They ran right into the fences, and unlike cattle, they pushed through.”
“The range wars,” said Jane.
Morgan nodded. “Ranchers accused the homesteaders of something worse than taking their land; they accused them of taking their cattle. There’s swift and widely accepted justice for cattle thieving, and the ranchers enforced it. Land disputes were usually settled with a gun or a rope before they ever had a chance to be settled in court. Around here, the Burdicks had influence with the land office, so homesteaders were usually bought off. Scared off, if it came to that. Their deeds were turned over to the Burdicks.”
“Is all of Morning Star deeded now?”
“Yes.”
“So you benefited from the tactics the Burdicks used.”
“Not just from them. The eastern speculators that came after had a hand in securing what the Burdicks hadn’t. They wanted government contracts for dams and hydraulic works. If they had gotten them, they would have parceled out the land and sold off the pieces they didn’t need. Homesteaders would have populated this entire area. One more way the government works against its own interests. Now I’m here, alone, on almost seven hundred square miles, and I’m not inclined to put any of it up for sale.”
“Do you have problems with rustlers?”
“When I first took over, I did. It’s been a couple years now. There was some testing of the waters, I suppose you’d call it. Cattle thieves looking to see if I was an easy mark.”
“Were you?”
Morgan glanced sideways. “What do you think?”
“I think you applied swift justice.”
