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faded to slate blue, and the stars came out? The English hills are
rounded and green and curried, and the sky is near, and the stars only
a few miles up. And do you recollect that dark night when old Loco and
his warriors were camped at the base of Cochise's Stronghold, and we
crept down through the velvet dark wondering when we would be
discovered, our mouths sticky with excitement, and the little winds
blowing?"
He walked up and down a half-dozen times, his breast heaving.
"It's all very well for the man who is brought up to it, and who has
seen nothing else. Case can exist in four walls; he has been brought
up to it and knows nothing different. But a man like me--
"They wanted me to canter between hedge-row,--I who have ridden the
desert where the sky over me and the plain under me were bigger than
the Islander's universe! They wanted me to oversee little farms--I who
have watched the sun rising over half a world! Talk of your ten thou'
a year and what it'll buy! You know, Harry, how it feels when a steer
takes the slack of your rope, and your pony sits back! Where in
England can I buy that? You know the rising and the falling of days,
and the boundless spaces where your heart grows big, and the thirst of
the desert and the hunger of the trail, and a sun that shines and fills
the sky, and a wind that blows fresh from the wide places! Where in
parcelled, snug, green, tight little England could I buy that with ten
thou'--aye, or an hundred times ten thou'? No, no, Harry, that fortune
would cost me too dear. I have seen and done and been too much. I've
come back to the Big Country, where the pay is poor and the work is
hard and the comfort small, but where a man and his soul meet their
Maker face to face."
The Cattleman had finished his yarn. For a time no one spoke.
Outside, the volume of rain was subsiding. Windy Bill reported a few
stars shining through rifts in the showers. The chill that precedes
the dawn brought us as close to the fire as the smouldering guano would
permit.
"I don't know whether he was right or wrong," mused the Cattleman,
after a while. "A man can do a heap with that much money. And yet an
old 'alkali' is never happy anywhere else. However," he concluded
emphatically, "one thing I do know: rain, cold, hunger, discomfort,
curses, kicks, and violent deaths included, there isn't one of you
grumblers who would hold that gardening job you spoke of three days!"
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