The Freebooters of the Wilderness | Page 4

to tell; but they both laughed.
"Have you room on the Grazing Range for so many cattle?"
"Not without crowding--"
"You mean crowding the sheepmen, off," she said.

"What is the use of talking?" demanded Wayland petulantly. "Neither
you nor I dare open our mouths about it! Tell the sheriff; your ranch
houses will be burnt over your ears some night! Everybody knows what
has happened when a sheep herder has been killed in an accident, or
hustled back to foreign parts; but speak of it--you had better have cut
your tongue out! Fight it: you know what happened to my predecessors!
One had a sudden transfer. Another got what is known as the
bounce--you English people would call it the sack. The third got a job
at three times bigger salary--down in the Smelter.
"It's all very well to preach right--right--right, Eleanor; and
fight--fight--fight; and 'He who fights and runs away, May live to fight
another day'; but what are you going to do about it? I sweat till I lay the
dust thinking about it; but we never seem to get anywhere. When we
had Wild Bills in the old days, we formed Vigilant Committees, and
went out after the law breakers with a gun; but now, we are a
law-abiding people. We are a law-abiding age, don't you forget that!
When you skin a skunk now days, you do it according to law, slowly,
judiciously, no matter what the skunk does to you meantime, even tho'
it get away with the chickens. Fact is, we're so busy straining at legal
gnats just now that we're swallowing a whole generation of camels. We
don't risk our necks any more to put things right--not we; we get in
behind the skirts of law, and yap, yap, yap, about law like a rat terrier,
when we should be bull dogs getting our teeth in the burglar's leg.
"You know whose drovers are rustling cattle up North from Arizona?
You know who pays the gang? So do I! You don't know whose cattle
those are: so don't I! To-morrow when they are branded fresh, they'll be
the Senator's; and what are you sheep people going to do with this
crowd coming in from the outside? The law says--equal rights to all;
and you say--fight; but who is going to see that the law is carried out,
unless the people awaken and become a Vigilant Committee for the
Nation? Tell Sheriff Flood to go out and round up those rustlers: he'll
hide under the bed for a week, or 'allow he don't like the job.' Senator
Moyese got him that berth. He's going to hang on like a leech to blood.
"Now, look down this side! Do you know a quarter section of that big

timber is worth from $10,000 to $40,000 to its owners, the people of
the United States? Do you know you can build a cottage of six rooms
out of one tree, the very size a workman needs? The workmen who
vote own those trees! Do you know the Smelter Lumber Company
takes all for nothing, half a million of it a year? Do you know that
Smelter, itself, is built on two-thousand acres of coal
lands--stolen--stolen from the Government as clearly as if the Smelter
teams had hauled it from a Government coal pit? Do you know there
isn't a man in the Land Office who hasn't urged and urged and urged
the Government to sue for restitution of that steal, and headquarters
pretend to be doubtful so that the Statute of Limitations will
intervene?"
On the inner side, the Ridge dropped to an Alpine meadow that
billowed up another slope through mossed forests to the snow line of
the Holy Cross Mountains. What the girl saw was a sylvan world of
spruce, then the dark green pointed larches where the jubilant rivers
rioted down from the snow. What the man saw was--a Challenge.
"See those settlers' cabins at an angle of forty-five? Need a sheet
anchor to keep 'em from sliding down the mountain! Fine farm land,
isn't it? Makes good timber chutes for the land looters! We've to pass
and approve all homesteads in the National Forests. You may not know
it; but those are homesteads. You ask Senator Moyese when he weeps
crocodile tears 'bout the poor, poor homesteader run off by the Forest
Rangers! If the homesteader got the profits, there'd be some excuse; but
he doesn't. He gets a hired man's wages while he sits on the homestead;
and when he perjures himself as to date of filing, he may get a five or
ten extra, while your $40,000 claim goes to Mr. Fat-Man at a couple of
hundreds from Uncle Sam's timber limits; and the Smelter City Herald
thunders about the citizen's right