“Yeah. Wait till they see how we aim to do it,” snickered Young Jess. “We’ll be rakin’ in the gold whilst they’re still standin’ around with their mouths open.”
Peter had fallen into a taciturn, grim mood, staring somber-eyed at the river. Beside him, Nevada leaned chin upon her cupped palm and stared also. Several thousand men, working for eight years! That was as long as the years back to her first sight of the convent where Peter took her to be educated. Thousands of men working all that time—thousands! Was it, then, so deceptively vast, that river? Would the cliffs they had undermined fall in and be swept disdainfully away? Did it really belong to the government, that river, so that no man living all his life on its bank might say what should be done with it? Had Uncle Peter, and Young Jess and her grandfather been children, playing all these years beside a stream they must not touch or tamper with?
“It sounds as big as the stars,” she observed vaguely. “As if we had been waving a handkerchief at Mars, down here by the river, and then some one comes along and pushes us back and says, ‘Here, here, you must stand back. You are obstructing the view. The President wants to wave his handkerchief. You annoy him.’ Do you think,” she flashed at Rawley, “it is going to make any difference to the river—who dams it first?”
“You don’t get the point,” Rawley protested. “I am not responsible because the undertaking is so stupendous that it is beyond any private enterprise. You can’t shoot a lot of rock into the river and call that a dam. And if you could, you must not. Don’t you see? The welfare of too many thousands of people are involved. It’s a job for the government. You can’t take it for granted that, just because you have lived beside it all your lives, and because it doesn’t seem to belong to anybody, any more than the clouds belong, that you can claim it, or even claim the right to do as you please with it. There’s a right that goes away beyond the individual—”
“The gold down there is ours,” Old Jess cried fiercely. “We own placer claims on both sides of the river, and the lines run across. We’ve got a right to placer the gold in the river bed. It’s ours. We got a right to git it any way we kin! The gov’ment can’t stop us, neither.”
“Oh, yes, it can!” Rawley rashly contradicted. “When you come down to fine points, the government owns this river. It owns the river bed and whatever gold is there. By ‘right of eminent domain’, if you ever heard of that.”
“Right of eminent hell!” Young Jess got up and stood over Rawley threateningly. “Tell me a bunch uh swell-heads back in Wash’n’ton, that never seen this river, can set and tell us what we can do an’ what we can’t do? We own claims both sides the river, and we got a right to what’s in the river. You can’t come here and tell us, this late day, ’t we got to quit, and lose our time an’ money, because the gov’ment or somebody wants to build a dam. Hell, we ain’t stoppin’ nobody! They better nobody try an’ stop us, neither!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“TAKE THIS FIGHTING SQUAW AWAY!”
Never before had Rawley seen Young Jess in a rage. A surly, ignorant fellow he knew him to be, and not too intelligent. A dangerous fellow, Rawley believed him; quite capable of killing any man who thwarted him or roused his fury. But Rawley did not move or attempt to placate him. He had learned that some natures must blow up a great storm before they can yield. He hoped that this was the case with Young Jess.
The old vulture craned his neck forward, his eyes piercingly malevolent.