“When this matter is once thoroughly understood by the people, then I know that no branch of the lawmaking power will dare make itself responsible for the passage of this bill.”
The Bishop stood a moment, waiting for further questions. When he saw that none were forthcoming, he thanked the committee and begged leave to retire.
As the Bishop passed out of the room the chairman arose and declared the public hearing 113 closed. Witnesses, spectators and reporters crowded out of the room and scattered through the corridors of the Capitol. Four or five reporters bunched themselves about the elevator shaft waiting for a car. One of them, a tow-haired boy of twenty, summed up the matter with irreverent brevity.
“Well, it got a fine funeral, anyway,” he said. “Not every bad bill has a bishop at the obsequies.”
“You can’t tell,” said the Associated Press man slowly; “they might report it out in spite of all that.”
“No use,” said the youngster shortly. “The Senate wouldn’t dare touch it once this stuff is in the papers.” And he jammed a wad of flimsy down into his pocket.
Three weeks of a blistering August sun had withered the grasses of the hills almost to a powder. The thin soil of the north country, where the trees have been cut away, does not hold moisture; so that the heat of the short, vicious summer goes down through the roots of the vegetation to the rock beneath and heats it as a cooking stone.
Since June there had been no rain. The tumbling hill streams were reduced to a trickle among the rocks of their beds. The uplands were covered with a mat of baked, dead grass. The second growth of stunted timber, showing everywhere 114 the scars of the wasting rapacity of man, stood stark and wilted to the roots. All roving life, from the cattle to the woodchucks and even the field mice, had moved down to hide itself in the thicker growths near the water courses or had stolen away into the depths of the thick woods.
Ruth Lansing reined Brom Bones in under a scarred pine on the French Village road and sat looking soberly at the slopes that stretched up away from the road on either side. Every child of the hills knew the menace that a hot dry summer brought to us in those days. The first, ruthless cutting of the timber had followed the water courses. Men had cut and slashed their way up through the hills without thought of what they were leaving behind. They had taken only the prime, sound trees that stood handiest to the roll-ways. They had left dead and dying trees standing. Everywhere they had strewn loose heaps of brush and trimmings. The farmers had come pushing into the hills in the wake of the lumbermen and had cleared their pieces for corn and potatoes and hay land. But around every piece of cleared land there was an ever-encroaching ring of brush and undergrowth and fallen timber that held a constant threat for the little home within the ring.