“I’ve got to move a negative,” he said. “It would be better if you handed him to the Sheriff.”
There was astonishment in most of the faces, and somebody said, “The Sheriff! He’d let him go right off. The cattle-men have got the screw on him.”
“Well,” said Larry quietly, “he has done his duty so far, and may do it again. I figure we ought to give him the chance.”
Exclamations of dissent followed, and a man with a grim, lean face stood up. He spoke tolerable English, but his accent differed from that of the rest.
“The first man put it straight when he told you there was only one cure—the one they found out in France a hundred years ago,” he said. “You don’t quite realize it yet. You haven’t lived as we did back there across the sea, and seen your women thrust off the pavement into the gutter to make room for an officer, or been struck with the sword-hilt if you resented an insult before your fellow citizens. Will you take off your hats to the rich men who are trampling on you, you republicans, and, while they leave you the right of speech, beg them to respect your rights and liberties? Do that, and sit still a little, and they’ll fasten the yoke we’ve groaned under on your necks.”
“I don’t know that it isn’t eloquent, but it isn’t business,” said somebody.
The man laughed sardonically. “That’s where you’re wrong,” he said. “I’m trying to show you that if you want your liberties you’ve got to fight for them, and your leader doesn’t seem to know when, by hanging one man, he can save a hundred from misery. It’s not the man who laid the kindling you’re striking at, but, through him, those who employed him. Let them see you’ll take your rights without leave of them. They’ve sent you warning that if you stay here they’ll burn your homesteads down, and they’re waiting your answer. Hang their firebug where everyone can see him, in the middle of the town.”
It was evident that the men were wavering. They had come there with the law behind them, but, from their youth up, some following visions that could never be realized, had hated the bureaucrat, and the rest, crippled by the want of dollars, had fought with frost and drought and hail. It was also plain that they felt the capture of the incendiary had given them an opportunity. Then, when a word would have turned the scale, Grant stood up at the head of the table, very resolute in face.
“I still move a negative and an amendment, boys,” he said. “First, though that’s not the most important, because I’ve a natural shrinking from butchering an unarmed man. Secondly, it was not the cattle-men who sent him, but one of them, and just because he meant to draw you on it would be the blamedest bad policy to humour him. Would Torrance, or Allonby, or the others, have done this thing? They’re hard men, but they believe they’re right, as we do, and they’re Americans. Now for the third reason: when Clavering meant to burn Muller’s homestead, he struck at me, guessing that some of you would stand behind me. He knew your temper, and he’d have laughed at us as hot-blooded rabble—you know how he can do it—when he’d put us in the wrong. Well, this time we’ll give the law a show.”
There was discussion, but Larry sat still, saying nothing further, with a curious gravity in his face, until a man stood up again.