“Oh, you’re Irish! I was in hopes the new ranger would understand and sympathize with the people of the Stillwater District, but if you’re Irish, I suppose you’ll want to fight over nothing, like all the rest.”
“Not necessarily, Miss Boyce. Your father ordered me off the ranch, when all I wanted to do was give him a cordial shake of the hand and say I hoped we might be friends. I merely expostulated a bit against the discourtesy. I could not fail to understand him, but as for sympathizing—— Well, I’d first like to know what’s wrong with him.”
“The same thing that’s wrong with all the rest of the Stillwater people, Mr. O’Neill. All you rangers seem to have overlooked the fact that this is an isolated country, where it’s very difficult to keep a fine sense of values. This world in here is bounded by cows, horses, crops and kids. The men are only servants to their live stock, and the women are slaves to the men. No one seems able to take a day off, to get out of the rut. They live in shacks, for the most part, and life is a monotonous grind of the very things that have made them so narrow and sordid.
“Even my father,” she continued, “though he is intelligent and educated and can look back upon worth-while things, has grown as narrow as the rest. They are bored to death, and don’t even know it, so they hate themselves and each other, and squabble over trifles that——”
“Well, they needn’t take out their spite on the forest service,” Pat grumbled, just to keep her going.
“Oh, but they do!” she came back at him eagerly, her eyes alight with interest in her subject. “You’re—meaning the forest service—the only thing they can all band together to fight, don’t you see? Once you take that community spirit away from them, I don’t know what would happen. It’s the primitive impulse of self-preservation, working out in a normal, primitive way. It requires a common enemy—hunger, the menace of some terrible creature of the wild, protection against some element that would destroy, and which no one man is strong enough to conquer alone; just as the cave men gathered on the cliffs and rolled rocks down upon the saber-toothed tiger. We call it community spirit, in our psychology classes—that’s where I learned it.
“Here, they have plenty to sustain life according to their standards, and there aren’t any saber-toothed tigers, so—they pretend to themselves that the forest service is a menace, and they band together for the fight. He’s an outlet for their emotions, Mr. O’Neill. A psychological safety valve. Also,” she added, forestalling an Irish rebellion which she may have seen rising in his eyes, “it’s misdirected energy, of course. But it explains my father’s awful conduct, doesn’t it?”
Patrick O’Neill gave her a keen look. “It explains your father,” he admitted, “but sure, and it don’t change the temper of him, divil a bit!” Then he laughed. “So the answer seems to be, Miss Boyce, that since they are bored with the monotony of their existence and must have some excitement, I’m to wallop the livin’ daylights out of the lot of them! And it’s not so sorry a prospect as you might suppose,” he added dryly.
“I don’t mean that at all, and you know it!” she flashed, showing a hint of her father’s temper—though she showed it very prettily, O’Neill thought. “You seem intelligent. Why don’t you use your personality——”
“I will, Miss Boyce, and my fists along with it!”