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Somebody had sold him forty thousand acres of land in a body for three dollars an acre. It began at the river and ran back to the hills for a matter of twenty miles. Philbrook bought the land on the showing that it was rich in coal deposits. Which was true enough. But he was not geologist enough to know that it was only lignite, and not a coal of commercial value in those times.
Here Philbrook had fenced in certain lands which all men agreed he had been cheated in buying, and here uprose those who scorned him for his gullibility, and lay in wait to murder him for shutting them out of his admittedly worthless domain. It was a quarrel beyond reason to a thinking man.
"Yes, sir?" said Lambert, not quite taking him for granted, no intention of letting him pass on with that explanation. "Miss Philbrook said I'd run across you up this way." The officer produced his badge, his commission, his card, his letterhead, his credentials of undoubted strength. On the proof thus supplied, Lambert shook hands with him.
A fence in the Bad Lands was unknown outside a corral in those days. When carloads of barbed wire and posts began to arrive at Glendora men came riding in for miles to satisfy themselves that the rumors were founded; when Philbrook hired men to build the fence, and operations were begun, murmurs and threats against the unwelcome innovation were heard.
It was not a shying start, but a stiffening of attitude, a leap out of laxity into alertness, with a lifting of the head, a fixing of the ears as if on some object ahead, of which it was at once curious and afraid. Lambert was all tension in a breath. Ahead a little way the road branched at the point of the hill leading to the Philbrook house.
He was so wrapped in his new and pleasant fancies that he did not hear the approach of a horse on the slope of the rise until its quickened pace as it reached the top brought Vesta Philbrook suddenly into his view. "Who is that?" she asked, ignoring his salutation in her excitement. "I think it must be Miss Kerr; she belongs to that family, at least." "You caught her cutting the fence?"
Their pride was pleasant to see, and Hildegarde smiled back at them, saying to herself that the dear little faces would look charming in anything, however, hideous. Soon more children came, and yet more: Vesta Philbrook and Martha Skeat, Philena Tabb and Susan Aurora Bulger, twelve children in all, and every child there before the stroke of four.
Philbrook pushed the work to conclusion, unmindful of the threats, moved now by the intention of founding a great, baronial estate in that bleak land. His further plan of profit and consequence was to establish a packing-house at Glendora, where his herds could be slaughtered and dressed and shipped neat to market, at once assuring him a double profit and reduced expense.
"To be sure, dearie! to be sure!" acquiesced Mrs. Lankton with alacrity. "'T is a fine game, and anncient, as you may say. Why, my grandmother taught me to play 'The Highland Gates' when I was no bigger than you, Vesta Philbrook. Ah! many's the time I played it with my sister Salome, and she died just about your age." "Well, Mrs. Lankton," said Hildegarde, encouragingly.
She could handle firearms with speed and accuracy equal to any man on the range, where she had been bearing a man's burden since her early girlhood. All this information pertaining to the history of Milton Philbrook and his adventures in the Bad Lands, Orson Wood, the one-armed landlord at the hotel in Glendora told Lambert on the evening of the travelers' arrival there.
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