they would avoid trouble with "jumpers." Not all the homeseekers were
women. There were men, plenty of them; a few of them were wholly lacking
in experience it is true, but perhaps the more greedy for land because
of their ignorance. The old farmers had looked askance at the high, dry
prairie land, where even drinking water must be hauled in barrels
from some deep-set creek whose shallow gurgling would probably cease
altogether when the dry season came on the heels of June. The old
farmers had asked questions that implied doubt. They had wanted to know
about sub-soil, and average rainfall, and late frosts, and markets. The
profusely illustrated folders that used blue print for emphasis here and
there, seemed no longer to satisfy them.

The Happy Family did not worry much about the old farmers who knew the
game, but there were town men who had come to see the fulfillment of
their dreams; who had burned their bridges, some of them, and would
suffer much before they would turn back to face the ridicule of their
friends and the disheartening task of getting; a fresh foothold in the
wage-market. These the Happy Family knew for incipient enemies once
the struggle for existence was fairly begun. And there were the
women--daring rivals of the men in their fight for independence--who
had dreamed dreams and raised up ideals for which they would fight
tenaciously. School-teachers who hated the routine of the schools, and
who wanted freedom; who were willing to work and wait and forego the
little, cheap luxuries which are so dear to women; who would cheerfully
endure loneliness and spoiled complexions and roughened hands and broken
nails, and see the prairie winds and sun wipe the sheen from their
hair; who would wear coarse, heavy-soled shoes and keep all their pretty
finery packed carefully away in their trunks with dainty sachet pads
for month after month, and take all their pleasure in dreaming of the
future; these would fight also to have and to hold--and they would fight
harder than the men, more dangerously than the men, because they would
fight differently.

The Happy Family, then, having recognized these things and having
measured the fighting-element, knew that they were squarely up against
a slow, grim, relentless war if they would save the Flying U. They knew
that it was going to be a pretty stiff proposition, and that they would
have to obey strictly the letter and the spirit of the land laws, or
there would be cont