I'll be back. I just thought
of something!"

I made the trip from Presho to Ammons in record time, raced into the
post office and filled out a legal form with the numbers I had heard
through the thin wall. But I needed someone not already holding a claim
to sign it, and there wasn't a soul at the settlement who would do.

It was getting dark when Ida Mary finally announced jubilantly that
someone was coming from the direction of the rangeland. It was Coyote
Cal, thus called because "he ran from the gals like a skeered coyote."

Talking excitedly, I dragged him into the print shop to sign the paper.
"I don't want any doggone homestead pushed off onto me," he protested.

I thrust the paper into his hands. "It won't obligate you in any way," I
explained.

"All right," he agreed. He enjoyed playing jokes and this one amused
him. "But you're sure I won't get no homestead?"

Coyote poised the pen stiffly in his hand. "Let's see," he murmured in
embarrassment, "it's been so gosh-darn long since I signed my
name--danged if I can recollect--" the pen stuck in his awkward fingers
as he swung it about like a lariat.

Finally he wrote laboriously "Calvin Aloysius Bancroft."

With the signed paper in my hands I saddled Lakota and streaked off for
the thirty-five-mile trip to Pierre.

Late that night a tired horse and its rider pulled up in front of a
little hotel in Ft. Pierre. I routed a station agent out of bed and sent
a telegram to the young man who had left his claim.

Next morning when the U. S. Land Office at Pierre opened its door the
clerks found me backed up against it with a paper in my outstretched
hand. Half an hour later, when the morning mail was opened at the Land
Office, there was a contest in it filed at Presho. But I had slapped a
contest on the same quarter-section first, a contest filed by one Calvin
Aloysius Bancroft, a legal applicant for the claim.

In the mail I received a signed relinquishment for the land from the
young man, withdrew the contest and sold the relinquishment, which is
the filer's claim to the land, for $450. I had made enough on the deal
to meet our own emergencies and had saved $200 for the young man who
needed it badly.

And _The Wand_ was still safe. All around us the land was being
harnessed, a desert being conquered with plowshares as swords.

Scotty Phillips stopped in at the print shop on his way from Pierre,
where he lived, to his ranch. "The stockmen have been asleep,