“What else?” she asked, after a little, seeing that he walked slowly, his head up, his eyes far away on the purple distances of the night, as if he read a dream.
“I settled in this valley quite innocently, as others have done, before and after me, not knowing conditions. You’ve heard it said that I’m a rustler—”
“King of the rustlers,” she corrected.
“Yes, even that. But I am not a rustler. Everybody up here is a rustler, Miss Landcraft, who doesn’t belong to, or work for, the Drovers’ Association. They can’t oust us by merely charging us with homesteading government land, for that hasn’t been made a statutory crime yet. They have to make some sort of a charge against us to give the color of justification to the crimes they practice on us, and rustler is the worst one in the cattlemen’s dictionary. It stands ahead of murder and arson in 48 this country. I’m not saying there are no rustlers around the edges of these big ranches, for there are some. But if there are any among the settlers up our way we don’t know it—and I think we’d pretty soon find out.”
They turned and walked back toward the house.
“I don’t see why you should trouble about it; this plainly isn’t your place,” she said.
“First, I refused to be driven out by Chadron and the rest because the thing got on my mettle. I knew that I was right, and that they were simply stealing the public domain. Then, as I hung on, it became apparent that there was a man’s work cut out for somebody up here. I’ve taken the ready-made job.”
“Tell me about it.”
“There’s a monstrous injustice being practiced, systematically and cruelly, against thousands of homeless people who come to this country in innocent hope every year. They come here believing it’s the great big open-handed West they’ve heard so much about, carrying everything with them that they own. They cut the strings that hold them to the things they know when they face this way, and when they try to settle on the land that is their inheritance, this copper-bottomed combination of stockmen drives them out. If they don’t go, they shoot them. You’ve heard of it.”
“Not just that way,” said she, thoughtfully.