Читать книгу The Freebooters of the Wilderness - Agnes C. Laut - Страница 6

"Well," she asked, "are you going to straddle or fight?"

How like a woman, how like a child, how typical of the outsider's shallow view of any struggle! As if all one had to do—was stand up and fight! Mere fighting—that was easy; but to fight to the last ditch only to find yourself beaten! That gave a fellow pause about bucking the challenge of everyday life.

Wayland punched both fists in the jacket pockets of his sage-green Service suit, and kicked a log back to the camp fire that smouldered in front of his cabin. If she had been his wife he would have explained what a fool-thing it was to argue that all a man had to do was fight. Or if she had belonged to the general class—women—he could have met her with the condescending silence of the general class—man; but for him, she had never belonged to any general class.

She savored of his own Eastern World, he knew that, though he had met her in this Western Back of Beyond half way between sky and earth on the Holy Cross Mountain. Wayland could never quite analyze his own feelings. Her presence had piqued his interest from the first. When we can measure a character, we can forfend against surprises—discount virtues, exaggerate faults, strike a balance to our own ego; but when what you know is only a faint margin of what you don't know, a siren of the unknown beckons and lures and retreats.

She had all of what he used to regard as culture in the old Eastern life, the jargon of the colleges, the smattering of things talked about, the tricks and turns of trained motions and emotions; but there was a difference. There was no pretence. There was none of the fire-proof self-complacency—Self-sufficiency, she had, but not self-righteousness. Then, most striking contra-distinction of all to the old-land culture, there was unconsciousness of self—face to sunlight, radiant of the joy of life, not anaemic and putrid of its own egoism. She didn't talk in phrases thread-bare from use. She had all the naked unashamed directness of the West that thinks in terms of life and speaks without gloze. She never side-stepped the facts of life that she might not wish to know. Yet her intrusion on such facts gave the impression of the touch that heals.

The Forest Ranger had heard the Valley talk of MacDonald, the Canadian sheep rancher, belonging to some famous fur-trade clans that had intermarried with the Indians generations before; and Wayland used to wonder if it could be that strain of life from the outdoors that never pretends nor lies that had given her Eastern culture the red-blooded directness of the West. To be sure, such a character study was not less interesting because he read it through eyes glossy as an Indian's, under lashes with the curve of the Celt, with black hair that blew changing curls to every wind. Indian and Celt—was that it, he wondered?—reserve and passion, self-control and yet the abandonment of force that bursts its own barriers?

She had not wormed under the surface for some indirect answer that would betray what he intended to do. She had asked exactly what she wanted to know, with a slight accent on the—you.

"Are you going to straddle or fight?"

Wayland flicked pine needles from his mountaineering boots. He answered his own thoughts more than her question.

"All very well to say—fight; fight for all the fellows in the Land and Forest Service when they see a steal being sneaked and jobbed! But suppose you do fight, and get licked, and get yourself chucked out of the job? Suppose the follow who takes your place sells out to the enemy—well, then; where are you? Lost everything; gained nothing!" She laid her panama sunshade on the timbered seat that spanned between two stumps.

"Men must decide that sort of thing every day I suppose."

"You bet they must," agreed the Ranger with a burst of boyishness through his old-man air, "and the Lord pity the chap who has wife and kiddies in the balance—"

"Do you think women tip the scale wrong?"

"Of course not! They'd advise right—right—right; fight—fight—fight, just as you do; but the point is—can a fellow do right by them if he chucks his job in a losing fight?"

The old-mannish air had returned. She followed the Ranger's glance over the edge of the Ridge into the Valley where the smoke-stacks of the distant Smelter City belched inky clouds against an evening sky.

"Smelters need timber," Wayland waved his hand towards the pall of smoke over the River. "Smelters need coal. These men plan to take theirs free. Yet the law arrests a man for stealing a scuttle of coal or a cord of wood. One law for the rich, another for the poor; and who makes the law?"

They could see the Valley below encircled by the Rim-Rocks round as a half-hoop, terra-cotta red in the sunset. Where the river leaped down a white fume, stood the ranch houses—the Missionary's and her Father's on the near side, the Senator's across the stream. Sounds of mouth organs and concertinas and a wheezing gramaphone came from the Valley where the Senator's cow-boys camped with drovers come up from Arizona.

"Dick," she asked, "exactly what is the Senator's brand?"

"Circle X."

"A circle with an X in it?"

The Ranger stubbornly permitted the suspicion of a smile.

"So if the cattle from Arizona have only a circle, all a new owner has to do is put an X inside?"

"And pay for the cattle," amplified Wayland.

"Or a circle with a line, put another line across?"

"And hand over the cash," added the Ranger.

"Or a circle dot, just put an X on top of the dot?"

"And the Senator has all the appointments to the Service out here?"

"No—disappointments," corrected Wayland.

They were both watching the grotesque antics of a squirrel negotiating the fresh tips of a young spruce. The squirrel sat up on his hind legs and chittered, whether at the Senator's brands or their heresy it would be hard 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 to homestead free land, about the Federal Government putting up a fence to keep the settler off. That fellow—that fellow in the first shack can't speak a word of English. Smelter brought a train load of 'em in here; and they've all homesteaded the big timbers, a thousand of 'em, foreigners, given homesteads in the name of the free American citizen. Have you seen anything about it in the newspaper? Well—I guess not. It isn't a news feature. We're all full up about the great migration to Canada. We like to be given a gold brick and the glad hand. Of course, they'll farm that land. One man couldn't clear that big timber for a homestead in a hundred years. Of course, they are not homesteading free timber for the big Smelter. Of course not! They didn't loot the redwoods of California that way—two hundred thousand acres of 'em—seventy-five millions of a steal. Hm!'" muttered Wayland. "Calls himself Moyese—Moses! Senator Smelter! Senator Thief! Senator Beef Steer—"

She laughed. "I like your rage! Look! What's that mountain behind the cabin doing?"

"Shine on pale moon, don't mind me," laughed Wayland; but suddenly he stopped storming.

The slant sunlight struck the Holy Cross Mountain turning the snow gullies pure gold against the luminous peak. Just for a moment the white cornice of snow forming the bar of the apparent cross flushed to the Alpine glow, flushed blood-red and quivering like a cross poised in mid-air. An invisible hand of silence touched them both. The sunset became a topaz gate curtained by clouds of fire and lilac mist; while overhead across the indigo blue of the high rare mountain zenith slowly spread and faded a light—ashes of roses on the sun altar of the dead day.