“Thank you,” she said, simply. “I am so glad they did not hurt you much that day in the court-room. We worried—Mary and I.”
“Thank you. There was not the least danger. They were merely venting their spite on me. They would not have dared more.”
There is always a crowd at the Velpen station for outgoing or incoming trains. This meeting of trains is one of the dissipations of its people—and an eminently respectable dissipation. It was early—the eastbound leaves at something past eight—yet there were many people on the platform who did not seem to be going anywhere. They were after such stray worms as always fell to the lot of the proverbial early bird. The particular worm in question that morning was the new girl court reporter, homeward bound. Many were making the excuse of mailing belated letters. Mary was standing guard over the suit-case and umbrella near the last car. She seemed strangely alone and aloof standing there, the gravity of the silent prairie a palpable atmosphere about her.
“There’s my brakeman,” said Louise, when she and Gordon had found a seat near the rear. Mary had gone and a brakeman had swung onto the last car as it glided past the platform, and came down the aisle with a grin of recognition for his “little white lamb.”
“How nice it all seems, just as if I had been gone months instead of days and was coming home again. It would be funny if I should be homesick for the range when I get to Wind City, wouldn’t it?”
“Let us pray assiduously that it may be so,” answered Gordon, with one of his rare smiles. He busied himself a moment in stowing away her belongings to the best advantage. “It gets in one’s blood,—how or when, one never knows.”
They rode in silence for a while.
“Tell me about your big fight,” said Louise, presently. The road-bed was fairly good, and they were spinning along on a down grade. He must needs bend closer to hear her.
She was good to look at, fair and sweet, and it had been weary years since women had come close to Gordon’s life. In the old college days, before this hard, disappointing, unequal fight against the dominant forces of greed, against tolerance of might overcoming right, had begun to sap his vitality, he had gone too deeply into his studies to have much time left for the gayeties and gallantries of the social side in university life. He had not been popular with women. They did not know him. Yet, though dubbed a “dig” by his fellow-collegians, the men liked him. They liked him for his trustworthiness, admired him for his rugged honesty, desired his friendship for the inspiration of his high ideals.
The memory of these friendships with men had been an ever-present source of strength and comfort to him in these later years of his busy life. Yet of late he had felt himself growing calloused and tired. The enthusiasm of his younger manhood was falling from him somewhat, and he had been but six years out of the university. But it was all so hopeless, so bitterly futile, this moral fight of one man to stay the mind-bewildering and heart-sickening ceaseless round of wheels of open crime and official chicanery. Was the river bridged? And what of the straw? His name was a joke in the cattle country, a joke to horse thief, a joke to sheriff. Its synonym was impotency among the law-abiders who were yet political cowards. What was the use? What could a man do—one man, when a fair jury was a dream, when ballots were so folded that the clerk, drawing, might know which to select in order to obtain a jury that would stand pat with the cattle rustlers? Much brain and brawn had been thrown away in the unequal struggle. Let it pass. Was there any further use?