All the advantages ceased. The German news agency was prohibited from holding any intercourse with the English, French, or Russian organizations. Simultaneously, like commerce was interdicted in the other countries. The virtue of impartial news-gathering at once ceased to be quoted at par. Everywhere, in all of the warring lands the Biblical rule that "he that is not with me is against me," became the controlling view. Government telegrams were obviously very important and there was no time to consider anywhere any of the promised speed in sending our dispatches. Finally, censorships were imposed. This was quite proper in principle. Censorships are always necessary in time of war. But it is desirable, from every point of view, that they be intelligent, and that is not always the case.
Nevertheless, we have fared pretty well in the business of reporting this war. We have made distinct progress in teaching the belligerents that we hold no brief for any one of them, and, while each would much rather have us plead his cause, they are coming to see why we cannot and ought not do so. And our men are everywhere respected and accorded as large privileges as, perhaps, in the light of the tension of the hour, could be reasonably asked.
[signed] Melville E. Stone
Pan and the Pot-Hunter
They are not many who are privileged to learn that the forces of the Wilderness are as gods, distributing benefits, and, from such as have earned them, taking even handed reprisals. Only the Greeks of all peoples realized this in its entirety, and them the gods repaid with the pure joy of creation which is the special prerogative of gods.
But Greenhow had heard nothing of the Greeks save as a symbol of all unintelligibility, and of the gods not at all. His stock was out of England by way of the Tennessee mountains, drifting Pacific coastward after the war of the Rebellion, and he was a Pot Hunter by occasion and inclination. The occasion he owned to being born in one of the bays of the southerly Sierras where the plentitude of wild life reduced pot hunting to the degree of easy murder.
A Pot Hunter, you understand, is a business man. He is out for what he can get, and regards game laws as an interference with the healthful interactions of competition. Greenhow potted quail in the Temblors where by simply rolling out of his blanket he could bag two score at a shot as they flocked, sleek and stately blue, down the runways to the drinking places. He took pronghorn at Castac with a repeating rifle and a lure of his red necktie held aloft on a cleaning rod, and packed them four to a mule-back down the Tejon to Summerfield. He shot farrow does and fished out of season, and had never heard of the sportsmanly obligation to throw back the fingerlings. Anything that made gunning worth while to the man who came after you was, by Greenhow's reckoning, a menace to pot hunting.
There were Indians in those parts who could have told him better—notable hunters who never shot swimming deer nor does with fawn nor any game unaware; who prayed permission of the Wuld before they went to hunt, and left offal for their little brothers of the Wilderness. Indians know. But Greenhow, being a business man, opined that Indians were improvident, and not being even good at his business, fouled the waters where he camped, left man traces in his trails and neglected to put out his fires properly.
Whole hillsides where the deer had browsed were burnt off bare as your hand in the wake of the pot hunter. Thus in due course, though Greenhow laid it to the increasing severity of game laws framed in the interests of city sportsmen, who preferred working hard for their venison to buying it comfortably in the open market, pot hunting grew so little profitable that he determined to leave it off altogether an become a Settler. Not however until he had earned the reprisal of the gods, of whom in a dozen years he had not even become aware.
In the Spring of the year the Tonkawanda irrigation district was opened, he settled himself on a spur of San Jacinto where it plunges like a great dolphin in the green swell of the camissal, and throws up a lacy foam of chaparral along its sides. Below him, dotted over the flat reach of the mesa, the four square clearings of the Homesteaders showed along the line of the great canal, keen and blue as the cutting edge of civilization. There was a deep-soil level under the nose of San Jacinto—rabbits used to play there until Greenhow took to potting them for his breakfast—and a stream bubbled from under the hill to waste in the meadow.