narrative lost nothing in the telling, for Brick Willock understood
the people and the instincts that moved them, and though Wilfred
Compton might differ from all in his motives and plans, he shared
with all the same hardships, the same spur to ambition.

It was now ten years since the discovery had been made that in the
western part of Indian Territory were fourteen million acres that
had never been assigned to the red man and which, therefore, were
public land, subject to homestead settlement. As long as the
western immigrants could choose among the rich prairie-lands of
Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota, Dakota and Kansas--and the choice was
open to all, following the agreement of the plains tribes to retire
to reservations,--it was not strange that the unassigned lands of
Indian Territory should have escaped notice, surrounded as they were
by the Cherokee Strip, the Osage and Creek countries, the Chickasaw
Nation, the Wichita, Cado, Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes.

But other public lands were now scarce, or less inviting, and as
far back as 1879, when Lahoma was five years old, colonies had
formed in Kansas City, in Topeka and in Texas, to move upon the
Oklahoma country. The United States troops had dispersed the
"boomers," but in the following year the indefatigable Payne
succeeded in leading a colony into the very heart of the coveted
land. It was in order to escape arrest--for again the United States
cavalry had descended on settlers--that several wagons, among them
that of Gledware's, had driven hastily toward the Panhandle, to come
to grief at the hands of ruffians from No-Man's Land.

As Brick Willock told of Payne's other attempts to colonize the
Oklahoma country, of his arrests, of his attempts to bring his