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.

The Ranger had dismounted and was prodding the ash-heap with his heavy boot sole.  Then, he gave the embers a smart flap with his whip.  The blackened hub of a wheel went circling out.  Suddenly, Wayland turned away his face, white and nauseated, hardened to resolution granite as the rocks.  Eyeless sockets of a skeleton face protruded from the ashes; and on the ground were stains which the rains had not washed out.  It was then Wayland noticed the bloody thumb marks round the canvas front of the wagon seat where the driver had been dragged down.

For a little time neither man spoke.  But, was it not the natural ending of brutality unleashed of law; of crime left alone by the good?

“To mutilate thousands of sheep was damnable enough,” said Wayland; “but—­this?”

The old frontiersman had picked up coat and boots flung aside the night before.  He stood holding by his horse’s mane looking down.  “And this is a white man’s land,” he said.  “To this have y’ prostituted freedom bought by th’ blood of saints an’ martyrs?  Not in th’ heat o’ passion, but for filthy gain, has a free people come to this? The heads o’ kings fell on the bloody block for less crime in days not so soft spoken as these.  Is y’r freedom, freedom to right or to wrong?  Is it to send y’r Nation smash over the precipice?  Wayland, is this Democracy?”

The Ranger did not answer for a moment.

“No,” he said quietly, “it isn’t Democracy any more than your Robber Barons were Monarchy!  Don’t you make that mistake; this is Anarchy, the Anarchy of unrestrained greed!  You fought it in your plundering Scotch Robber Barons long ago!  We have to fight it to-day in our plundering plutocrats!”

CHAPTER XII

THE MAJESTY OF THE LAW VEILS ITSELF

“Do you mean me to believe,” the old frontiersman drew himself up to the full height of British superiority to everything outside the island of its own circumscribed knowledge, “do you mean me to believe that if any of these poor herders had escaped as witnesses, we’d not have been able to send these blackguard murderers to the gallows?”

The Ranger had signalled for some of the road gang to ascend from below the battlements to keep guard till the coroner could come.  The little pack mule to the fore, Wayland and Matthews were picking the way slowly down the terra cotta trail of the Rim Rocks.

“It does not make the slightest difference in the world what you or I believe, Sir!  The facts are unless you could offer a witness money enough to take him out the United States and to keep him for the rest of his life, he would develop a good-forgetter, or else the same old gag—­’been blind folded,’ ‘didn’t see,’ and so on, and on, and on; you can’t blame them!  I’ll bet if every one of the herders had escaped instead of festering there in the ash heap, they’d all be legging it out of the country far and fast as they could go.”

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