The street lamp made his room like day and as he lay wide-eyed in the white light listening to the clatter of hoofs over the pavement, he recalled his childish ambition to buy up all the old horses in the world when he was big—he smiled now at the size of the contract—all the horses he could find that were stiff and sore, and half dead on their feet from straining on preposterous loads; the horses that were lashed and cut and cursed because in their wretched old age they could not step out like colts. He meant to turn them into a pasture where the grass was knee-deep and they could lie with their necks outstretched in the sun and rest their tired legs.
He had explained the plan to his mother and he remembered how she had assured him gravely that it was a fine idea indeed. It was from her that he had inherited his passionate fondness for animals. Cruelty to a dumb brute hurt him like a blow.
On the trip out from Ore City an overworked stage horse straining on a sixteen per cent. grade and more had dropped dead in the harness—a victim to the parsimony of a government that has spent millions on useless dams, pumping plants, and reservoirs, but continues to pay cheerfully the salaries of the engineers responsible for the blunders; footing the bills for the junkets of hordes of “foresters,” of “timber-inspectors” and inspectors inspecting the inspectors, and what not, yet forcing the parcel post upon some poor mountain mail-contractor without sufficient compensation, haggling over a pittance with the man it is ruining like some Baxter street Jew.
Like many people in the West, Bruce had come to have a feeling for some of the departments of the government, whose activities had come under his observation, that was as strong as a personal enmity.
He put the picture of the stage-horse, staggering and dying on its feet, resolutely from his mind.
“I never will sleep if I get to thinking of that,” he told himself. “It makes me hot all over again.”
From this disquieting subject his thought reverted to his own affairs, to “Slim’s” family and his self-appointed task, to the placer and Sprudell. Nor were these reflections conducive to sleep. More and more he realized how much truth there was in Sprudell’s taunts. Without money how could he fight him in the Courts? There were instances in plenty where prospectors had been driven from that which was rightfully theirs because they were without the means to defend their property.
Squaw Creek was the key to the situation. This was a fact which became more and more plain. However, Sprudell was undoubtedly quite as well aware of this as he was himself and would lose no time in applying for the water right. The situation looked dark indeed to Bruce as he tossed and turned. Then like a lost word or name which one gropes for for hours, days, weeks perhaps, there suddenly jumped before Bruce’s eyes a paragraph from the state mining laws which he had glanced over carelessly in an idle moment. It stood out before him now as though it were in double-leaded type.
“If it isn’t too late! If it isn’t too late!” he breathed excitedly. “Dog-gone, if it isn’t too late!”