“No, Mr. Britt, we just want the chance to be human beings!” cried a tense and piercing voice. The girl had reappeared in the door of the hut. Above the meek lamentations of those about her, her voice was as the scream of a young hawk above the baaing of sheep. She pushed her way through them and stood before the Honorable Pulaski, palpitating, glowing, splendid in her fury. But she propped her brown hands on her hips—a woman of the mob—and Wade noted the attitude, and flushed at the shamed thought of the likeness to Elva Barrett.
In this crisis, by right of her intelligence, her daring, her superiority, the girl seemed to take her place at the head of the pathetic herd.
“That’s what we want, Mr. Britt. You’re driving us down to the settlements again. And then some bow-legged old farmer will lose a sheep by bears or a hen by hawks, and we’ll be set upon and driven back once more to the woods. And then you’ll come and huff and puff and blow our house down and chase us away to the settlement. ‘The law! The law!’ you keep braying like a mule. You kick us one way; the settlements kick us another. Mr. Britt, I didn’t ask to be put on this earth! But now that I’m here I’ve a right to ground enough to set my feet on, and so have these people. We are using no more of your stolen ground here than we’d be using in another place, and here we stay!” She stamped her foot.
“You young whippet,” snorted the Honorable Pulaski, “don’t sneer to me about the law when I’ve got eviction-papers in my pocket and the high sheriff of this county at my back.”
“How about the law that makes wild-land owners pay squatters for improvements to land?” demanded the girl. “I know some law, too.”
“Do you call those hog-pens improvements?” He swept his fat hand at the huts.
“You may pay some one a dollar an acre for that blue sky above us and claim that, too. You may claim all of God’s open country here in the big woods. But I know that you can’t shut even paupers out from the lakes and the streams any more than you can take away the sunlight from us.”
“I don’t know where you got your law, young woman, but I’d advise you to get better posted on the difference between right of way to State waters and squatting on private land. Now, I ain’t got time to—”
“We’ll not go back to the settlement—not one of us.” She set her feet apart and bent a fiery gaze on him.
Britt looked away from her to his circle of supporters. The deputies stooped over their gun-barrels to hide furtive grins at sight of the timber baron thus baited by a girl on his preserves. Even the broad face of the sheriff was crinkled suspiciously. The tyrant flamed with the quick passion for which he was noted in the north country.