The Freebooters of the Wilderness eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 400 pages of information about The Freebooters of the Wilderness.

The Freebooters of the Wilderness eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 400 pages of information about The Freebooters of the Wilderness.

It was the cry of the primal man beneath all the culture of the schools that disprove Hell; the cry of human red-blooded manhood against all the white-corpuscled sickly sentimentality that ever sacrifices innocence on the altar of guilt.

While the Law marked time, the swift feet of crime had not paused nor slackened pace.  While the Law argued, learnedly, disputatiously, with the handing up and the handing down of inane decisions, Crime scored; and Who or What tallied?  The men round the fire the night before in the cow-camp, the men of “the bunco game” had stacked cards and played trump; but unfortunately, they had jumbled the white-vested fighter’s orders about the boy.  The cattlemen had taken care of themselves after a code not honored by the law of nations.

Also, they had gone into the fight together:  the one who saw the right but did not understand the fight; the one who understood the fight but sometimes lost his vision of the right; and the one who saw in the fight for right, not the quarrel of a Valley, or a Faction, or a Ring, but the saving of the Nation, the repudiation of a world lie, the welding of right and might into an eternal harmony.

CHAPTER VIII

A VICTIM OF LAW’S DELAY

For years, Eleanor could not let herself remember the details of that night.  We like to persuade ourselves that by some miraculous chance, some trickery of fate, good may come in a vague somehow out of evil; contrary to the proofs from the beginning of time that good fruit never yet grew from evil seed.  The girl was too honest for such fetish faith.  She could not turn up the whites of her eyes in a pious resignation that it had been the will of God evil should triumph.  So she shut out the details of the horror from mind’s memory and set her teeth, knowing well that when lewd horrors triumph it is not because the God of the Universe is a fool but because the powers for right have not fought valiant as the powers for evil.

She remembered the Ranger had tossed a revolver to the old frontiersman and Matthews had gone tearing up the slippery clay of the Mesa road ripping out oaths of his unregenerate days that he would have “the scoundrels’ scalps if he had to tear them off with his own hands.”  Somehow, Wayland had headed the draggled horses round on the narrow Rim Rock trail.

“Go down and break the news to his mother.  I’ll get the body,” he had said; and she had driven the buckboard down with her foot on the wheel brake.  Not a soul appeared around the Senator’s place as she passed the white square of fenced buildings.  All the mosquito doors were hooked.  Everything looked deserted; branding irons lying in disorder round the k’raal.  The River had swollen too turbulent for fording and she had crossed the white bridge—­she remembered she had crossed at a gallop contrary to the little notice tacked on the board railing.  Then, the

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
The Freebooters of the Wilderness from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.