“No—­disappointments,” corrected Wayland.

They were both watching the grotesque antics of a squirrel negotiating the fresh tips of a young spruce.  The squirrel sat up on his hind legs and chittered, whether at the Senator’s brands or their heresy it would be hard to tell; but they both laughed.

“Have you room on the Grazing Range for so many cattle?”

“Not without crowding—­”

“You mean crowding the sheepmen, off,” she said.

“What is the use of talking?” demanded Wayland petulantly.  “Neither you nor I dare open our mouths about it!  Tell the sheriff; your ranch houses will be burnt over your ears some night!  Everybody knows what has happened when a sheep herder has been killed in an accident, or hustled back to foreign parts; but speak of it—­you had better have cut your tongue out!  Fight it:  you know what happened to my predecessors!  One had a sudden transfer.  Another got what is known as the bounce—­you English people would call it the sack.  The third got a job at three times bigger salary—­down in the Smelter.

“It’s all very well to preach right—­right—­right, Eleanor; and fight—­fight—­fight; and ’He who fights and runs away, May live to fight another day’; but what are you going to do about it?  I sweat till I lay the dust thinking about it; but we never seem to get anywhere.  When we had Wild Bills in the old days, we formed Vigilant Committees, and went out after the law breakers with a gun; but now, we are a law-abiding people.  We are a law-abiding age, don’t you forget that!  When you skin a skunk now days, you do it according to law, slowly, judiciously, no matter what the skunk does to you meantime, even tho’ it get away with the chickens.  Fact is, we’re so busy straining at legal gnats just now that we’re swallowing a whole generation of camels.  We don’t risk our necks any more to put things right—­not we; we get in behind the skirts of law, and yap, yap, yap, about law like a rat terrier, when we should be bull dogs getting our teeth in the burglar’s leg.

“You know whose drovers are rustling cattle up North from Arizona?  You know who pays the gang?  So do I!  You don’t know whose cattle those are:  so don’t I!  To-morrow when they are branded fresh, they’ll be the Senator’s; and what are you sheep people going to do with this crowd coming in from the outside?  The law says—­equal rights to all; and you say—­fight; but who is going to see that the law is carried out, unless the people awaken and become a Vigilant Committee for the Nation?  Tell Sheriff Flood to go out and round up those rustlers:  he’ll hide under the bed for a week, or ‘allow he don’t like the job.’  Senator Moyese got him that berth.  He’s going to hang on like a leech to blood.