I

THE SUN BEAT DOWN on the frock coat and tall silk hat of the man striding westward across the prairie. It glinted on the gold head of the cane he carried as jauntily as though he were moving through a thousand watching people. But there was no one to see him, or to know that the man’s special square-cut diamonds were gone from his cravat and his fingers, tucked carefully away. There was no habitation any-where in sight, nothing much except the dusty old wagon trail under the man’s feet and the laddered steel of the railroad track that stretched along beside him, following its line of telegraph poles toward the shimmer and heat of the far western horizon.

Back at the boxcar that served as a railroad station a scattering of men had watched the newcomer set out this morning, the two who had been sawing up logs for the fireboxes of the engines straightening their backs with their fingers as they looked after him. Their eyes followed this man as eyes always did, often soft handsome ones, with fluttering lashes. It had been so ever since he grew out of his awkward cowhide boots into that proud and arrogant cane-bearing stride that carried him through so many tight spots since.

It was one of the dog days of August, the earth dry and baked, but this man had been in hot sun before. One summer noontime back when he was twelve and restless under the hand of his second stepmother, he had suddenly thrown down the tedding fork, wiped the clinging dust of the Ohio hay-field from his sweating face with his sleeve and left to find an easier way to make a living. He got away before his father’s astonished anger could remind him of his duty as a son and as a member of a good, God-fearing family.

Since that day the man had never looked back. His high-bridged nose, the elegant goatee he grew, and his long slender fingers had led him through years on river boats, out upon the ocean to South America, around to California and back through the gold camps of the western mountains. He had worked the plushier cars of the railroads of all the nation, too, including the one whose tracks passed him here on the prairie. During the years his fingers had become so agile, so swift, or, as he preferred to think, his eye so shrewd across the card table, that one house of chance after another had barred him, particularly from faro.

“You don’t buck the tiger around here no more,” some told him, some of the cruder western element. But the more polite, “Not for you, sir,” he had heard from New York to San Francisco and down the middle waters of the nation was just as final.

Today, however, his thoughts were far from the cards his fingers liked to caress in solitary hours. Today the man’s handsome boots were grayed with the fine dust of the old Platte River trail and he barely noticed the occasional grasshopper heavy with late summer whirring up, to fall back into the yellowed grass. He did see the prairie chicken squatted in the shade of a telegraph pole under the humming song of the wire, panting in the heat, bill open, wings held away to catch any breeze. The man too was hot in his broadcloth. He drew a square of white linen from his pocket, brushed it down his gaunted cheeks and over his mustache and goatee. Thoughtfully he wiped his high pinkening forehead and then ran the folds around the inside of his hat while the sun shone upon his dark hair and burned in the intensity of his black eyes.

The man liked to think of himself as lucky: Lucky John J. Gozad. Others of his calling had nicknames, like the chicken-headed little Canada Bill, with the half-witted way of twisting his ropy hair between his fingers to toll the slickers. Or Rattlesnake Jack, the favorite partner of another Ohio boy grown up on the river boats—the cardsharp, George Devol.

But somehow nobody nicknamed John Cozad, perhaps because he seemed lucky at larger stakes, larger sometimes than the $50,000 he was said to have picked up at faro this summer between trains at Omaha. Never given to talk about cards after the deck was folded away, he did not commit himself beyond saying, “It is true that the stopover at Omaha proved pleasant. I predict that city will become a great river metropolis.”

Important, too, was John Cozad’s luck with women, including his beautiful Virginia-born wife, who gave him two sons to survive the ills and epidemics that swept off the other three babies, along with most of the neighboring children. The sons were growing into fine boys, the father thought, particularly the younger, Robert, favoring the Cozads, and Johnny, the elder too, poised and soft-spoken like his gentle mother. Somewhere here on the open sunlit prairie he would build a vigorous new community for them, free from so many things that he, the father, had to see.

Perhaps this was the great day of luck for John Cozad, yet he had been lucky right from the start, from the days when a rope at a bridge or perhaps a waterfront gin pole might stop an overly successful gambler. He had seen a mob grab the man who had befriended him, back when he was a frightened boy of twelve on his first trip down the Ohio, and started him in faro. He had to hear the dark murmur of the gathering crowd, listen to the anger rise into a roar.

“Hang the jack leg! String him up!”

He had tried to stand against them with his bare hands and was knocked off into the water as the mob dragged the man away to a pole and jerked him up, to dance the air. Even now, after more than twenty-five years, the apologetic, forward-tilted head of a hanging man anywhere, perhaps barely glimpsed from a swaying stagecoach or a roaring express train, always brought back that first time to John J. Cozad, made him want to run, run as he did at the sight of his friend, so long ago. Or to jerk out the revolver always under his coattail now, send bullets into the faces of the lynchers, perhaps even from the little pearl-handled extra pistol that fitted so neatly inside his waistcoat and had kept him alive a time or two.

But the luck that John Cozad courted most was not the gambler’s at the card table or escape from lead and the lyncher’s noose. His grandfather, the Reverend Job Cozad, had pushed into the remote western wilds of the Virginia colony to start a settlement. His son Henry moved on to lay out his town in Ohio, where young John later deserted the hayfield. But John Cozad had located a community in Ohio too, one of several attempts scattered as far as South America. Unfortunately his Cozaddale had been very close to the booming city of Cincinnati, much too close. The town was still on the maps but the builder had moved on.

“John Cozad shook the dust of it from his expensive boots quick enough when some fellows that got whacked over the head by his gold cane started paying him back with hard dirty fists,” one of the neighboring Pearsons recalled later.

Nobody said this to the community builder’s face, but the failure of the town was plain even to him. Too little space and too much competition, he believed, and so now, at forty-two, John J. Cozad had better and bigger plans, plans that would tax his dexterity of mind and fingers between trains, at Omaha, say. And other and larger places too. He would start one more community, one of many thousands of people, in a vast region fresh and new as an unbroken deck of cards. And clean, clean as the meadowlark watching him from a thistle, the black V sharp on the yellow breast that was bright as new-minted gold, but yellower.

Yes, he would build a strong, a spreading and prosperous settlement centered by a city of wide, tree-lined streets, an open and happy city, with a fine home for his family, a home finer than anything his wife could have dreamed even in the romantic fancy of her Southern girlhood, back before the war. He would display her like a diamond set by Tiffany’s and it would be somewhere along the railroad running past his feet here, on the forty thousand acres he had arranged to buy.

When John Cozad was well out of sight of the men back at the little boxcar station, the west-coast express came roaring past, stringing wood smoke over the lone walker and letting out one apologetic, or taunting, blast of the whistle for him. After the rails stopped their humming, the man slowed a little and clipped the tall browning head from an occasional sunflower with his cane as he looked to the northern horizon, edged by hazy bluffs cut into folds that must be brush and scrub timber tucked into breaks and canyons. A mile or so to the south of him a low line of brushy trees marked the Platte River, and farther on a hazier line of bluffs, even and flat-topped as a great mesa, stretched all along the horizon. Between these two bluff lines lay the fertile valley of the Platte, fifteen to twenty miles wide and stretching westward from back at the Missouri River out across Nebraska to the Forks and beyond, deep into Colorado and Wyoming—long slender fingers grasping at the Continental Divide.

Except an occasional freight outfit few wheels cut the old trail this far west since the railroad went through, but the homeseekers would come soon. The Union Pacific Railroad had twelve million acres for sale strung through the Platte valley, a part of the government subsidy for building the tracks. Their land lay in mile-square sections* alternating with government sections in a strip twenty miles wide along each side of the right-of-way, a great checkered, forty-mile belt of U.P. prairie lands stretching westward across the public domain.

Somewhere in this vast empire, open, much of it free for the taking, John J. Cozad planned to make a good life for all who would join him. Here his sons would grow up without the lung weakness, the consumption, that still shadowed their father as it had so many generations of Cozads, sent so many to early graves. Here the sons would become the fine men his colonizing ancestors were, with some of the sound sturdiness of their mother’s people—grow up strong and handsome, free from sickness and the evils of the waterfronts, a credit and an honor to their parents.

The man had been heading steadily westward, plodding, his jauntiness gone now that there was apparently no living thing to observe it, lost in his plans. Then a sudden whirring at his feet made him jump. He knew the sound—a rattlesnake. It was a big one, mottled and thick as his wrist, coiled, the great broad arrow of its head poised to strike. But the man did not raise his cane and after a long moment’s lidless defiance, the snake slid off the road and away.

The gambler touched his hat. “You are a gentleman, sir,” he said, and watched the grass shake a little, slowly, deliberately, with watchful pauses.

Before the man started on again he heard a faint yell far off somewhere and saw a deer start up from the brush below the tracks. The buck stopped, looked off southward, and was gone. The yihoos grew plainer and a rumble of hoofs rose on the light wind. The smudging of dust along the south horizon spread and after a while a dark string of cattle appeared, widened into a large herd that came spilling toward the river on a hard run, the cowboys riding to hold them down.

John Cozad slipped along a dry creek bed toward the Platte and stopped in a clump of brush. Spreading his handkerchief out neatly on a little cut bank, he seated himself to peer out. He saw the wide-horned lead steers hit the river edge, hesitate, and then leap the low bank before the push of bawling young Longhorns that crowded them into the shallow stream, but thrusting their dusty noses into the water even as they were shoved along. A couple of head were trampled down, but the cowboys worked to spread the running herd to avoid more piling up, whooping and whipping the dusty backs with their down ropes. They managed to line them out both ways along the bank for a quarter of a mile, the lazy water jammed with thirsty stock. Finally they let their faunching horses in too, the jingle of bridle bits plain as they nuzzled the water. Then, with outstretched heads, they drank.

After a while the men whooped the leaders on as fast as possible through a stretch of old quicksand and out upon the rich seed-topped grasses of the bottoms, the young cows belly deep and grabbing mouthfuls as those behind still came crowding. Gradually they spread out and fed for an hour, leaving the bottoms trampled, eaten down like summer range. Then they were strung out northward behind the chuckwagon that had crossed the loose-bottomed stream behind the settling hoofs of the herd.

After a moment of anger at this destruction of the fine deep meadow grass, free grass, perhaps even his grass, John J. Cozad watched the cattle go with satisfaction. The Union Pacific land pamphlets weren’t exaggerating. Settlers better come in fast, for men who knew bovine husbandry were certainly taking over the free range and would try to hold it with gun and lyncher’s rope, probably, as they did in Texas, if one could believe the stories. Most of the herd had been breeding stock, with around seventy-five young bulls of moderate horn plodding along behind, the rest of the two thousand or so mostly young cows and heifers.

With the last bellow of bull and dust of hoof gone the man with the silk hat rose stiffly, brushed his coattails, and hurried on. He must select his site and push the settlement, making everything as easy as possible for the colonists. He would put up an Emigrant House immediately to provide beds and meals for the homeseekers, and a livery stable with horses for rent—saddle or rig.

Weary from the unaccustomed walk of seven, eight miles in the growing wind and the blistering sun, John J. Cozad shaded his eyes to look ahead along the glistening tracks, impatient now. Finally, not far beyond a scummy little creek, he discovered the place described back at Coyote station that morning. There was, of course, not even a shack or dugout but the big sign stood wide and high, between two tall poles: The 100 TH MERIDIAN. Here the West began.

He stopped and, taking off his dusty hat, wiped his brow once more.

“I came along here a dozen times,” he said, speaking to the sign as he would to the cards when he was working them alone, talking to them as to friends. “Here you are, so bold and plain and yet I never saw you. Too busy, I guess,” he added apologetically.

From beside the sign as from the side of a trusted friend he considered the wide Platte valley. Most of the mile to the brush line of the river was a fine sweep of hay-length grass running in the wind like some green and shadowed sea along the bottoms but tawnier, and russet in seed toward the higher ground where he stood.

Gradually a quivering rose in the man, swelling until it seemed as powerful as the gusts of wind that shook the shaggy old willows at the river and ran over the great spreading cottonwoods standing alone out on the bottoms. But it was mostly inside, like the eagerness of a bird dog at a brush patch or the excitement that ran through the gambler when a good prospect for the faro box came up the plank at Memphis, or when cattle drovers appeared, their pockets arrogant with the heft of fat new beef money that had not yet taken time to root.

He felt that this day, at this sign, marked a sort of hundredth meridian in the life of John Cozad too, and eventually in that of hundreds, thousands of others. He could see a fine young city sprouting up here, with sweep of depot and loading pens far along the tracks, and rows of grain elevators craning their necks over the fields that now were only yellowed prairie. There would be factories, flour mills, and a packing plant, with greenhouses and a spreading nursery off at the far outskirts for the trees his city must have. In the center on the little rise, and facing toward the cheerful timber of the Platte, would be a fine white mansion, a mansion with pillars, perhaps, and a sweep of park before it. To each side in a sort of arc would be pleasant buildings of brick and stone, including stores, schools, churches, even the county courthouse eventually, although the station back east fifteen miles called Plum Creek was the temporary county seat now.

Of course that would soon be changed, as the prairie here would change to the wide streets of a growing city, streets filled with prancing horses, dashing carriages, gay, lively people moving along the walks under the green fountains of summer elm, the red and gold of oak and maple in the fall. And just a little above it all would be that great white house of John J. Cozad, community builder, and nowhere in all the city would even one gambling spot be tolerated.

 

In the sentimental moment he permitted himself to think of one more thing. For years newspapers and the halls of Congress had echoed with periodic roaring, like buffalo bulls in rutting time, from those wanting to move the national capital west to the Mississippi valley. John Cozad had heard men like Sumner and Seward speak earnestly for this. Even the New York Tribune complained that locating the capital on the Potomac was a blunder “which even the great name of Washington can not hide.” and predicted that a move was inevitable as the power of the West grew.

Now suddenly this year of 1872 brought a capital boom for Fort Kearny, not over forty miles down the Platte from him here. It was the railroad point nearest the center of the country; the military reservation, miles larger than the District of Columbia, lay at the vast public domain, with enough government land close by to finance an excellent New Washington, with a capitol building of unmatched beauty and eminence.

A flush beyond any disease rose to the cheeks of John Cozad. His 40,000 acres could make more than a hundred broken faro hanks for him, more in cash, and bring signal honor to him and his family. With a great country estate and an elegant capital mansion his Theresa could be the capital’s great hostess, his sons in highest position.

But John Cozad knew that he must shake all this off. The whole business was plainly too chancy for any gambler’s eye. He must face the deck as it lay in the box now.

Today there were only the large sign here and the bit of siding for trains to pass on the single-track line. The late afternoon sun brought a little life. A small bunch of antelope, perhaps scared by the cattle herd, circled past the man and, leaping the tracks, were gone to the river. A flock of cackling wild fowl, prairie chicken or grouse, headed northward for the bluffs. Plainly it was also time for man to seek out food and water and a spot to stretch himself for the night. The timetable showed a train due about dark, but unless it took to the siding to let another pass it would not stop, not for the wave of a hat, even a silk hat by a famous hatter. Not today, but perhaps the time would come.

By now John J. Cozad was at least eight, nine miles from Coyote, the station there without accomodations and too far away for tonight. But his pocket map showed another stop up ahead about five miles, with, he hoped, something besides a boxcar set out at the siding and dirty soogans on the floor for any stopovers who spurned the old buffalo robes usually crawling with graybacks. Yet even that much, with a little fried deermeat and squaw bread, would be better than nothing, and welcomed.

Doggedly the man struck out toward the sun already lengthening his shadow on the old trail behind him. Footsore, leg-weary, and hungry, he stopped at a little creek where chokecherry bushes hung thick and glistening black with sprays of the sweet, puckerish fruit. Farther on he saw a thicket rosy with golden, red-cheeked wild plums, their warm sweetness honey to the tongue. He ate without disturbing the wasps working busily on the down fruit, and then lined his hat with grape leaves and filled it with plums for the road. Once more he set out westward, really plodding now, weary, free from observation, and with nothing more to anticipate.

After a while he noticed a soft hum in the rails beside him. It grew, became the racket of light wheels on steel—a handcar coming up behind him, two men pumping hard, hurrying. At sight of the black-clothed figure beside the track they slowed down.

“Hou, Doc! Where’s the pill sack?”

“Maybe he’s one a them walking sky pilots—”

Usually John J. Cozad ignored such familiarity, but here on the empty prairie and so near sundown it seemed less offensive.

“I am looking for a location, gentlemen,” he offered.

“Oh, a landseeker! Going to Willow Island? Hop on,” the older man said, moving over a foot or so.

Pulling his coattails up, with his cane tucked under his arm, the hat, emptied, back on his head, John J. Cozad, Esquire, of Cozaddale, Cincinnati, and the wide world, hopped on. Almost before he was settled, the handcar started off with a jolly little rrurrh, rhurr, rhurr, as the men pumped it swiftly along.

 

Back at home in Cincinnati, John J. Cozad was greeted with proper formality but with warmth by his wife, her color heightened by his gift in a gold initialed mother-of-pearl box, a ring he had designed for her, the diamond like a great drop of sun-struck morning dew set in the imperishable gleam of platinum.

“Jewel of the Platte, I call it, for my Theresa in our new home,” he murmured into her ear, and the wife of John Cozad was no less happy for the knowledge that the burning in his eyes was as much from the new dream he bore as from his love. A dream he must have, and if this lasted to an actual move to the wilderness, perhaps her parents could accompany her.

She took pleasure now in the excitement of the sons in their father’s return from far places. True, Johnny was at the trying age, with a growing stiffness toward his father, and almost openly pleased by his many departures. But the boy was always happy to see him come home and was admiring the intricacies of the braided belt of dyed horsehair straight out of the wild west. The younger boy, the seven-year-old Robert, resembled his father more each time—the same thin temples, the dark glossy hair, the short chin, and the same intensity of eye. He had some of the Cozad excitability. Now he hugged his present, moccasins crusted in white and blue Sioux beading, and ran to fetch a drawing he made, showing his father sticking his head out of the train to watch a great herd of buffaloes streaming past the smoking engine, buffaloes that looked like humpbacked milk cows.

“The lines of your tracks and trains aren’t very straight, dear,” the mother said gently, apologetically. “Have you lost your ruler?”

Slowly the boy went back to his room. Slowly, too, he tore his drawing straight across and then broke his drawing pencils, one after another, and hid the pieces back behind his stack of underdrawers.

Nothing was said all evening about moving out to this wild west the boys heard so much about, the west of the pictures they collected from Frank Leslie’s and Harper’s Weekly. But it was not proper to interrogate one’s parents and so the brothers whispered about it long after all the house except their mother’s bedroom was dark and quiet.

Within a week a new office was opened in downtown Cincinnati, small but making big talk around the piers and in the larger gambling houses, where John Cozad was well known. Other frequenters of the palaces had deserted their gaslit crystal and dark red plush, but setting up a real estate office was something new for a slick-finger like John Cozad. Even Canada Bill and Devol seemed to be joking about it a little.

“More room for the rest of us to chaw and spit,” Canada said, but without giving John J. the customary rubish nudge in the ribs.

The new real estate broker had an assistant, Capt. William Ross, to promote business. Some of this the sons were allowed to see, particularly the folio of photographs from the Union Pacific and the colonization bulletins describing the western railroad lands offered for sale. They watched the two men work up the rough draft of a big dodger almost as long as a circus poster, with thick black letters across the top: HO FOR THE GREAT PLATTE VALLEY!

“No pictures,” young Robert said, in disappointment.

Soon there was only Capt. Ross around the little office. “Mr. Cozad is away on business,” everyone was told firmly, even after rumors got around that the real estate operator had not turned his back upon his original talent entirely but was keeping more to the farther regions—Denver and the gold camps of the west, building up what was a substantial account at the bank, at several banks.

During the winter the Cozad boys hopefully gathered a good-sized collection of material, mostly pictures of the Great Platte Valley, as their father called it, including Indians, buffaloes, covered wagons, trail herds, and gunmen, lots of gunmen. Robert hoarded every mention of the west as he did stories he had been told, from the very first by his mother. Now instead of retelling the stories to himself during the hours between his bedtime and Johnny’s, or when he must sit silent, as when his grandmother took him to church, he made up adventures with Indians, cowboys, buffaloes, and ravenous wolves and mountain lions.

Before long Robert suspected that his brother knew something that he didn’t, something about “in the spring.” He accused Johnny of this, but quietly, because their mother would have no loud or heated words between them.

“I will have no anger between my sons—” she had said, only once, that Robert could remember. But her face had been strained, her head proud as a great heavy blossom held sternly erect. He was only four then but he had not forgotten. Perhaps he had realized that there was already one swift and uncontrolled anger in the family.

“That’s a murderous man,” Robert once heard a loafer say to some others leaning against a building, “a violent and murderous man.”

Although he had not understood this very well, he did sneak a look up to his father’s face, and while he could see little except the goateed chin, somehow the teeth clenched, because the black bunch of hair stuck far out as the father held the boy down to the steady unhurried step.

Now, while Robert badgered Johnny a little about his secret, he brought it up gently, and repeatedly. “What is it that’s going to happen to us in the spring?”

Finally Johnny answered him. “That’s for me to know and you to find out,” he said, and escaped to his hour at dancing school.

Robert had wanted to beg but he didn’t, knowing his father’s anger if he overheard even a coaxing tone. “Have you no pride?” he had shouted once, and the boy still remembered how red his mouth looked when it sprang open between the mustache and the tufted chin to let the words out. So now Robert went to the window to look after Johnny hurrying along the street. He kept hidden behind the velvet curtains, wishing he dared to cry, knowing he was too old, too grown up, and so he comforted himself in the heavy folds and tried to content himself with the waiting he had learned long ago, waiting, always waiting.

Then one day John J. Cozad came home in high spirits. That week he took Robert down to the waterfront where a boat was unloading mustangs, wild horses from the west. There were bays, sorrels, chestnuts, grays, zebra duns with striped legs, and paints, including a couple of striking snow-patched blacks. It was these two that drew the boy’s adoring eyes. Cautiously, a little afraid, he moved closer to the pen where the young mustangs were held as they came galloping along the runway from the boat. He reached an aimless hand in between the planks as he watched the horses circle nervously around and around, seeking an escape from the enclosure, from the noise and strangeness, their heads up, nostrils flaring to the man smells, the enemy smells. Now and then they, stopped, snorting, and then ran again, their long manes flying. After a while a white-polled calico with great white-lashed eyes slowed near the boy, turned his head toward him, ears sharp, his head tossing, testing the air. He even took a step toward Robert, then another, and finally paused a moment to sniff at the reaching hand. Then he plunged away but stopped and looked back over his shoulder.

“I think he likes me,” the boy said, speaking foolishly loud in his joy and wonder.

“Would you want to go out near where these horses lived?”

For a moment the seven-year-old couldn’t speak. “Out on the Platte River, where you were?” he finally trusted himself to ask, making it sensible, quiet.

But he spoke too late. Already his father’s mind was far away.

*The eighteen odd-numbered sections of each township