He said to himself that it was fancy. “All this trouble ez I hev hed along o’ Nate Griggs hev mighty nigh addled my brains.”
The name recalled his resolve.
“I’ll git even with him, though. I’ll git even with him yit,” he reiterated as he plodded on heavily down the path, his mind once more busy with all the details of his discovery, his misplaced confidence, and the wreck of his hopes.
It seemed so hard that he should never before have heard of “entering land,” and of that law of the State according priority to the finder of mineral. The mine was his, but he had hid the discovery from all but Nate, who claimed it himself, and had secured the legal title.
“But I’ll git even with him,” he said resolutely between his set teeth.
He had thought it a lucky chance to remember, in his reverie before the fire-lit hearth, that peg in the shed at the tanyard on which Tim had hung his brother’s coat. Somehow the episode of the afternoon had left so vivid an impression on Birt’s mind that hours afterward he seemed to see the dull, clouded sky, the sombre, encircling woods, the brown stretch of spent tan, the little gray shed, and within it, hanging upon a peg, the butternut jeans coat, a stiff white paper protruding from its pocket.
That grant, he thought, had taken from him his rights. He would destroy it - he would tear it into bits, and cast it to the turbulent mountain winds. It was not his, to be sure. But was it justly Nate’s? - he had no right to enter the land down the ravine.
And so Birt argued with his conscience.
Now wherever Conscience calls a halt, it is no place for Reason to debate the question. The way ahead is no thoroughfare.
Birt did not recognize the tearing of the paper as stealing, but he knew that all this was morally wrong, although he would not admit it. He would not forego his revenge - it was too dear; he was too deeply injured. In the anger that possessed his every faculty, he did not appreciate its futility.