hrough. "Well, judging from y'r brass an' the up-and-coming kind of
it, A'm thinking y'r stakes would be pea-nuts under little shells!
'Tis bigger stakes I'd play for if I had m' life to live over--"

"What?" asked Wayland curiously.

Mr. Bat Brydges was revising his inventory of the old "duffer."
Wayland was laughing openly. The old man had become oblivious of both,
with a triangling of sharply intersected lines between his brows and
tense compression of the lips--

"The--fate--o'--this--land," he ripped out in hammer raps, "the fate of
this land, boys, with all time lookin' on since ever Time began! Y're
the fiery furnace of all the world's hopes and fears, of all earth's
people, of all poets' dreams; an' God only knows what a mess o' slag
y're turning out! Y'r muck rakers are belching y'r failures to the
four corners of earth! Justice perverted! Courts in fee to the
highest bidder! More murders--murders in this fresh new clean land
than all the stew pots o' filth the old nations have brewed in a
thousand years; and murders unpunished! Y'r Government--the great
world experiment--is it the wull o' the people, or the wull of a gilded
clique o' tricksters?"

The old man stretched out his hands above the Valley. "What are ye
doing with y'r freedom, the freedom that the children o' light prayed
for and fought for and died for? When there's one law for the rich and
another for the poor, when ye have to bribe y'r own self-elected rulers
to do y'r wull, where is y'r freedom different from the freedom in
France before the Revolution? Is it not written 'my house shall be for
all nations; but ye have made it a den of thieves?' Ye have what all
the nations of the earth have bled for, what prophets have prayed for,
and patriots died for; and all the world is looking on asking,
sneering, scoffing, saying ye pervert the Ark o' the Covenant of God,
saying lawlessness stalks under y'r banners, saying y' wrest the
judgment to the highest bidder, aye to the supreme fountain head o' y'r
courts! The fate o' this land, boys! Them's the stakes I'd play for,
if I had lusty blows to spare. I'd up--I'd up--I'd strip me naked of
every back-thought and expediency and self-interest and hold-back! I'd
hurl the lie--in the teeth--of a scoffing world--I'd show all nations
o' time that the people, the plain common good people, can keep the law
sound as the Ark o' the Covenant of God; and--and--I'd hurl y'r traitor
leaders--y'r Jud