The Long Shadow

by B. M. Bower

Dill, looking to Billy longer and lanker and mere melancholy than ever, caressed his chin meditatively and regarded Billy in his wistful, half-deprecating way. With the bitter knowledge that his castle, and with it Dill's fortune, was toppling, Billy could hardly bear to meet that look. And he had planned such great things, and had meant to make Dilly a millionaire!

"What would you advise, William, under the present unfavorable conditions?" asked Dill hesitatingly.

"Oh, I dunno. I've laid awake nights tryin' to pick a winning card. If it was me, and me alone, I'd pull stakes and hunt another range—and I'd go gunning after the first damn' man that stuck up a post to hang barb-wire on. But after me making such a rotten-poor job uh running the Double-Crank, I don't feel called on to lay down the law to anybody!"

"If you will permit me to pass judgment, William, I will say that you have shown an ability for managing men and affairs which I consider remarkable; quite remarkable. You, perhaps, do not go deep enough in searching for the cause of our misfortunes. It is not bad management or the hard winter, or Mr. Brown, even—and I blame myself bitterly for failing to read aright the 'handwriting on the wall,' to quote scripture, which I seldom do. If you have ever read history, William, you must know—even if you have not read history you should know from observation—how irresistible is the march of progress; how utterly futile it is for individuals to attempt to defy it. I should have known that the shadow of a great change has fallen on the West—the West of the wide, open ranges and the cattle and the cowboy who tends them. I should have seen it, but I did not. I was culpably careless.

"Brown saw it, and that, William, is why he sold the Double-Crank to me. He saw that the range was doomed, and instead of being swallowed with the open range he very wisely changed his business; he became allied with Progress, and he was in the front rank. While we are being 'broken' on the wheel of evolutionary change, he will make his millions—"

"Damn him!" gritted Billy savagely, under his breath.

"He is to be admired, William. Such a man is bound in the very nature of things to succeed. It is the range and—and you, William, and those like you, that must go. It is hard—no doubt it is extremely hard, but it is as irresistible as—as death itself. Civilization is compelled to crush the old order of things that it may fertilize the soil out of which grows the new. It is so in plant life, and in the life of humans, also.

"I am explaining at length, William, so that you will quite understand why I do not think it wise to follow your suggestion. As I say, it is not Brown, or the fences, or anything of that sort—taken in a large sense—which is forcing us to the wall. It is the press of natural progress, the pushing farther and farther of civilization. We might move to a more unsettled portion of the country and delay for a time the ultimate crushing. We could not avoid it entirely; we might, at best, merely postpone it.

"My idea is to gather everything and sell for as high a price as possible. Then—perhaps it would be well to follow Mr. Brown's example, and turn this place into a farm; or sell it, also, and try something else. What do you think, William?"

But Billy, his very soul sickening under the crushing truth of what Dill in his prim grammatical way was saying, did not answer at all. He was picking blindly, mechanically at the splinter, his face shaded by his worn, gray hat; and he was thinking irrelevantly how a condemned man must feel when they come to him in his cell and in formal words read aloud his death-warrant. One sentence was beating monotonously in his brain: "It is the range—and you, William, and those like you—that must go." It was not a mere loss of dollars or of cattle or even of hopes; it was the rending, the tearing from him of a life he loved; it was the taking of the range—land—the wide, beautiful, weather-worn land—big and grand in its freedom of all that was narrow and sordid, and it was cutting and scarring it, harnessing it to the petty uses of a class he despised with all the frank egotism of a man who loves his own outlook; giving it over to the "nester" and the "rube" and burying the sweet-smelling grasses with plows. It was—he could not, even in the eloquence of his utter despair, find words for all it meant to him.