various cases to the trial, she felt that Willock was, in a way,
dealing with her personal history, for had she not been named Lahoma
in honor of that country which her step-father had seen only to
loose? Time and again the colonists swarmed over the border,
finding their way through Indian villages and along desolate trails
to the land that belonged to the public, but was enjoyed only by the
great cattlemen; as many times, they were driven from their
newly-claimed homes by federal troops, not without severity, and
their leaders were imprisoned.

But, at last, April the twenty-second, 1889, had been appointed as
the day on which the Oklahoma country was to be opened up to
settlement, and it was to meet this event that Wilfred Compton had
left Greer County. He was a unit in that immense throng that waited
impatiently for the hour of noon--a countless host, stretching along
the north on the boundary of the Cherokee Strip, on the south, at
the edge of the Cherokee Nation; on the east, along the Kickapoo and
Pottawatomie reservations; and on the west, blackening the extremity
of the Cheyenne and Arapaho countries. He was one of those who, at
the discharge of the carbines of the patrolling cavalrymen, joined
in the deafening shout raised by men of all conditions and from
almost every state in the Union--a shout as of triumph over the
fulfillment of a ten-years' dream. And, leaning forward on his
pony, he was one of the army of conquest that burst upon the desert,
on foot, on horseback, and in vehicles of every description, in the
mad rush for homes in a land that had never known the incense of the
hearth or the civilizing touch of the plow.

At noon, a wilderness, at night, a land of tents, and on the morrow,
a settled country of furrowed fields. "Pioneer work is awful quick,