Neither Kent nor Lydia ever had seen Charlie thus before. He was neither arrogant nor sullen. He was pleading with a tragic hopelessness that moved his two hearers profoundly.
"Oh, Charlie! I will try," cried Lydia. "I truly will."
"I knew you would," said Charlie, huskily, and he turned back abruptly to the camp.
"Gee!" exclaimed Kent. "Chapter number two!"
Lydia stamped her foot. "How can you speak so, Kent! It's a frightful thing!"
"Sure it's frightful, but it can't be helped. The whites have got to have this land. Might's right."
"What makes the whites so crazy for it?" asked Lydia.
"Money," returned Kent.
Lydia stared about her. Supposing, she thought, that she owned a hundred acres of this pine land. She forgot Kent and concentrated every force of her mind on sensing what land ownership would mean. And suddenly there woke in her, her racial hunger for land. Suddenly there stirred within her a desire for acreage, for trees, soil, stream and shrub, a wide demesne that should be hers and her children's forever. She was still too young to trace the hunger back to its primal source, the desire for permanency, the yearning to possess that which is the first and the last of existence, which neither moth nor dust can corrupt nor thieves break through and steal. But somewhere back in her still childish mind a lust for a wide domain of pine land bestirred itself to begin battle with the sense of right and justice that her heart of hearts told her Levine was outraging.
"Are you really going to talk to Levine?" Kent roused her from her reverie.