"Not with all those children," said Wilbur. "She'd have to hire a block to keep them all."
"Those ain't her own children," replied the Ranger, "not a bit of it. If a youngster gits orphaned or laid up she just says 'Pork's plenty, send 'em to me.' An' I generally do. Other folks do, too, an' quite a few o' them hev been brought her by the 'little white lady' you've been hearing about. She's fonder o' children than any woman I ever saw, is Susan. But she won't talk kids, she'll only talk hogs."
"That's pretty fine work, I think," said the boy. "But I should imagine the youngsters wouldn't have much of a chance. It isn't any better than a backwoods life, away out there."
The old Ranger, usually so slow and deliberate in his movements, turned on him like a flash.
"The meanest thing in this world," he said, "is not bein' able to see or willin' to see what some one else has done for you. There ain't a home in all these here United States that don't owe its happiness to the backwoodsman. You can't make a country civilized by sittin' in an office an' writin' the word 'civilized' on the map. Some one has got to get out an' do it, an' keep on doin' it till it's done. It was the man who had nothin' in the world but a wife, a rifle, an' an ax who made America."
"I had forgotten for the moment," said the boy, a little taken off his feet by the sudden energy and the flashing speech of the usually impassive mountaineer.
"So does mighty near every one else 'forget for the moment.' But if the backwoodsman forgot for the moment he was likely to be missin' his scalp-lock, or if he tried to take a holiday it meant his family would go hungry. He never forgot his children or his children's children, but they're none too fond o' rememberin' him.
"Everythin' you have now, he first showed you how. If he wanted a house, he had to build it; if he wanted bread, he had to raise the grain, grind, an' bake it; if he wanted clothin', he had to get skins, cure, an' sew 'em. But he never had to hunt for honor an' for courage; he brought those with him; an' he didn't have to get any book-larnin' to teach him how to make his cabin a home, an' his wife an' his children were allers joys to him, not cares. They were men! An' what do you reckon made 'em men?"
"The hardships of the life, I suppose," hazarded Wilbur.
"Not a bit of it; it was the forest. The forest was their nurse in infancy, their playmate when they were barefooted kids runnin' around under the trees, their work by day, an' their home when it was dark. They lived right down with Nature, an' they larned that if she was rugged, she was kind. They became rugged an' kind, too. An' that's what the right sort of American is to this day."