high on the front seat. They drove up beside our wagon.
Fastened on the back of their load was a chicken coop, and as they
stopped a rooster stuck its head out and crowed.

The girl was Rosie Carrigan. The boy was her brother. And the rooster
was the first of his kind to settle on the reservation. They had been
delayed by footsore horses. But no land-grabbers, no one except
ourselves, ever knew that Rosie Carrigan did not establish residence at
ten minutes before midnight.

Not long after this, a rough-looking stranger rode up to an old man's
shack and took some papers out of his pocket. "There's some mistake
here, pardner," he said. "Looks like you're on the wrong quarter. This
is section--" he read the description, "and it happens to be mine."

"But that's the number of the claim I filed on at the Drawing," the old
man assured him.

After much arguing and bullying, with the old man contending he was
right, the stranger ordered him off the land.

"You don't pull that stuff on me, pardner; you'd better vacate."

"Now keep your shirt on, stranger," the old man said, with a twitching
of his long white mustache, inviting him in for a bite to eat while he
hunted up his land receipts.

"I'm all crippled up with the rheumatiz," he groaned as he hobbled back
into a corner of the room to get the papers. "A pore way for the
gov'ment to open up land, I says.

"Now down in the Oklahomy Run we used speed and brains to stake a claim,
beating the other fellow to it. But it was a tough bunch down there, and
sometimes, stranger, we--" he turned and pointed a gun straight at the
man seated at the table, "we used a gun."

The old man who had stood leaning on his cane at the Drawing,
complaining that neither legs nor brains counted in winning a claim,
used his ingenuity to hold one.

During those last days of settling, Ida Mary and I lived in a state of
tension and suspense. We watched our land plat and often rode out over
the prairie to watch for the arrival of settlers whose land was being
spotted. After a few of our deceptions, the claim jumpers became wary of
the newspaper and cursed "that snip of a newspaper woman." And the girl
who ran the post office was a government employee.

Here was a job for _The Wand_. In the next issue there appeared a
black-headline article. It began:

"It has been reported that owing to the swift settlement of the Brule,
Secret Service Agents from the Federal Land Department are being sent