Whereupon the struggle began.
Shonto was a powerful man and a determined man. He had small hopes of winning, but there was always a chance and he made the most of his strength. Unable to use his hands, nevertheless he whipped about, butted with his head, tripped with his feet, turned and squirmed, and hurled himself into the kidnappers until the three were about the busiest men in several counties.
But the outcome was inevitable. The lariat did not loosen, and Shonto’s huge hands did not come into play. Time and again they bore him to the ground, and, eventually, by reason of one of them having rested while the other engaged the rebellious prisoner, they wore the doctor down. Utterly exhausted, he remained passive while they lifted him to the back of his own horse and confined his ankles again by passing a rope from one to the other under the animal’s belly. Then they mounted, urged the burros forward, and, with Morley leading the doctor’s horse and Leach riding behind to see that nothing happened, they struck off down the line of buttes. Out on the open desert, they headed into the southwest in the direction of Tanburt’s Ranch.
CHAPTER XXIV
MARY CHOOSES A SEAT
DR. INMAN SHONTO was a prisoner in a little adobe hut back of the corrals at Tanburt’s Ranch. The dun walls were a foot in thickness, the door of solid slabs of oak securely bolted, and the lone window was less than ten inches square. This hut had once been used as a place to keep milk and butter cool, and in that day was adjacent to the first house that Gus Tanburt had built on his property. The old house had been wrecked in time and a new one built, but the old adobe buttery had withstood the years.
There was no escape; the thick walls and tiny window made imprisonment therein effectual. Shonto paced the floor, smoked his pipe and cigarettes, and tried to hold his temper. He had written the message, and either Leach or Morley had gone with it to the nearest telegraph station. A day and a night had passed, and Shonto had seen nobody but a halfbreed cowpuncher, who brought his meals regularly and thrust them in through the ten-inch opening. He had blankets and a couch, and was fairly comfortable. But, with the exception of the halfbreed, no one paid any attention to him.
He smiled bitterly as he paced about, strong hands clasped behind his back. Up in the mountains a young man soon would be facing a grinning spectre that threatened to ruin his life, and the girl who loved him would be looking on in horror, unable to save him, forced to witness the ghastly thing that was taking place before her eyes. Close at hand an ignorant old man waited for the doctor to perform a trifling operation that promised renewed vigor and the semblance of youth, which would place at the mercy of his selfish desire a ripe girl-woman, pulsing with the warm springtime of maturity.
He had not yet set eyes on this old gargoyle of a man, but he pictured him uncouth, cunning, repulsive, terrifying, as he gloated over his defenceless and shrinking prey. What right had this old monster to demand of life the replenished fires of youth which he had quenched in the soul-warping fight for wealth? Was it consistent with progress that this old man, because he had the means, should be allowed to regain his physical vigour, and perhaps perpetuate his kind in a world already hampered with such as he? Sheep glands substituted for his own worthless organs would not serve to purge his corroded soul nor wipe from his fading mind the cobwebs of superstition and ignorance and prejudice that put him out of step in the march of progress. Such as he should be left to die and be forgotten; it seemed a crime to help him to perpetuate himself, and bring into the world stupid offspring handicapped by heredity from the very start! No, the hope of progress lay in new blood. Let the old generation, with its ignorance and its out-of-tune ideas, become extinct. Let science better the youth of the age, if possible, but refrain from prolonging the life of that arch enemy of Youth and Advancement—Old Age!
The scientist was not only a strong advocate of birth control, but at times he went even further and longed to see the race die out entirely. This, of course, in his bitterest moments, when he realized what a fiasco man had made of life. War and slavery; disease and pestilence; poverty and greed; the stupidity of Labour and the tyranny of Capital; the arrogance of the Church and the cowardice of thinkers; Science devoted to the problem of disassociating atoms one from another so that the world need not search for new oil and coal fields, but neglecting to discover cures for pyorrhea and catarrh; people suffering for the want of food and clothes in a world filled to overflowing with the necessities of life; the timber on a million hills laid low and wasted in a few short years, and families without shelter for their heads!—why prolong this hideous nightmare of confusion? Let the race die out; let the old world groan once more in the travail of a new upheaval; and when it cooled, let protoplastic man be born again in the slime and begin all over from the bottom!
Then thought of his lifelong work with the glands would soothe him, and his kindly eyes would smile. He never could untwist the brains of the generation with his efforts, he knew, but he could lay a foundation for his successors to build upon.