He had asked her to watch Rafe Gadbeau. How much did he mean? Why should he have said this to her? Would it not have been better to have warned some of the men that were associated with him in his fight? And what was there to be feared? She laughed at the idea of physical fear in connection with Jeffrey. Why, nothing ever happened in the hills, anyway. Crimes of violence were never heard of. It was true, the lumber jacks were rough when they came down with the log drives in the spring. But they only fought among themselves. And they did not stop in the hills. They hurried on down to the towns where they could spend their money.
What had Jeffrey to fear?
Yet, he must have meant a good deal. He would not have spoken to her unless he had good reason to think that something might happen to him.
Withal, Ruth was not deceived. She knew the temper of the hills. The men were easy-going. They were slow of speech. They were generally ruled by their more energetic women. But they 78 or their fathers had all been fighting men, like her own father. And they were rooted in the soil of the hills. Any man or any power that attempted to drive them from the land which their hands had cleared and made into homes, where the bones of their fathers and mothers lay, would have to reckon with them as bitter, stubborn fighting men.
Jeffrey Whiting was just coming to the bare top of the ridge. In another moment he would drop down the other side out of sight. She wondered whether he would turn and wave to her; or had he forgotten that she would surely be standing where he had left her?
He had not forgotten. He turned and waved briskly to her. Then he stepped down quickly out of sight. His act was brusque and businesslike. It showed that he remembered. He could hardly have seen her standing there in all the green by the pond. He had just known that she was there. But it showed something else, too. He had plunged down over the edge of the hill upon a business with which his mind was filled, to the exclusion, almost, of her and of everything else.
The girl did not feel any of the little pique or resentment that might have been very natural. It was so that she would wish him to go about the business that was going to be so serious for all of them. But it gave her a new and startling flash of insight into what was coming.
She had always thought of her hills as the place where peace lived. Out in the great crowded market places of the world she knew men fought each other for money. But why do that in the hills? There was a little for all. And a man could only get as much as his own labour and good judgment would make for him out of the land.
Now she saw that it was not a matter of hills or of cities. Wherever, in the hills or the city or in the farthest desert, there was wealth or the hope of wealth, there greedy men with power would surely come to look for it and take it. That was why men fought. Wealth, even the scent of wealth whetted their appetites and drew them on to battle.