"Dunne is a fool!" rasped Farwell. Never guarded in speech, his instinctive hostility flared into hot words. "He won't get the chance again. He's one man we won't buy."
"I'm another," McCrae retorted swiftly. "Look here, Mr. Farwell, I was in this country when its only crop was buffalo hides and bad Indians. Land!—you couldn't give it away. I can show you a town with hotels and banks and paved streets and electric lights—a fine little town. Twenty-odd years ago I was offered the section that town now stands on, for a team and a two weeks' grubstake for a man and his wife. They wanted to get out, and they couldn't. I gave 'em the grub, and told 'em it was worth the price of it to me not to own the land. Yes, sir—and I meant it. I was that shortsighted. So were others. We thought the country would never fill up, just as we thought the buffalo would never be killed out, and we kept on drifting. When I woke up, the cheap lands were about gone. And then, ten years late, I made my grab for a piece of what was left. I hiked for this country that I knew ahead of everybody, and I picked out the best bunch of stuff there was in it, and I sat down to wait for the rush to catch up to me. Now it's caught me and the rest of us who came in early. And now you people tell me I've got to move off my reservation, and go away somewhere and begin again. I won't do it—I tell you I won't! And, what's more, don't you crowd me too hard—me and the rest of the boys—or there'll be hell a-popping right here. Now, you mind what I'm telling you."
He spoke deliberately, evenly, without raising his voice. His manner, even more than his words, expressed fixed determination. Farwell lifted his eyebrows, and puckered his lips in a silent whistle. His diplomacy was turning out badly, and he repressed an inclination to retort.
"Well, I'm sorry," he said. "I hoped we could fix this up. Think it over, anyway."
"I've done my thinking."
"But, man, you're on the wrong side of the fence, and you know it. The railway is too strong for you. What's the sense of bucking it?"
"Not much, maybe. I guess you mean well, and I take it friendly, but this ain't a question of sense."
"Of what, then?"
"Of a man's right to keep what he's worked for, and to live on the land he owns." McCrae replied. "That's the way I look at it."
It was the old question once more—older than the country, older than the Mayflower, older than the Great Charter wrested from John the King——the eternal battle between the common man and class or privilege. Here, in the new country, in place of the divine right of kings and the hereditary power of nobles, was substituted the might of money, the power of the corporate body, itself a creation of law, overriding the power which created it.