ecessors!
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.

"Now, look down this side! Do you know a quarter section of that big
timber is worth from $10,000 to $40,000 to its owners, the people of
the United States? Do you know you can build a cottage of six rooms
out of one tree, the very size a workman needs? The workmen who vote
own those trees! Do you know the Smelter Lumber Company takes all for
nothing, half a million of it a year? Do you know that Smelter,
itself, is built on two-thousand acres of coal lands--stolen--stolen
from the Government as clearly as if the Smelter teams had hauled it
from a Government coal pit?