el of evolutionary change, he will make his
millions--"

"Damn him!" gritted Billy savagely, under his breath.

"He is to be admired, William. Such a man is bound in the very nature
of things to succeed. It is the range and--and you, William, and those
like you, that must go. It is hard--no doubt it is _extremely_
hard, but it is as irresistible as--as death itself. Civilization is
compelled to crush the old order of things that it may fertilize the
soil out of which grows the new. It is so in plant life, and in the
life of humans, also.

"I am explaining at length, William, so that you will quite understand
why I do not think it wise to follow your suggestion. As I say, it is
not Brown, or the fences, or anything of that sort--taken in a large
sense--which is forcing us to the wall. It is the press of natural
progress, the pushing farther and farther of civilization. We might
move to a more unsettled portion of the country and delay for a time
the ultimate crushing. We could not avoid it entirely; we might, at
best, merely postpone it.

"My idea is to gather everything and sell for as high a price as
possible. Then--perhaps it would be well to follow Mr. Brown's
example, and turn this place into a farm; or sell it, also, and try
something else. What do you think, William?"

But Billy, his very soul sickening under the crushing truth of what
Dill in his prim grammatical way was saying, did not answer at all. He
was picking blindly, mechanically at the splinter, his face shaded by
his worn, gray hat; and he was thinking irrelevantly how a condemned
man must feel when they come to him in his cell and in formal words
read aloud his death-warrant. One sentence was beating monotonously
in his brain: "It is the range--and you, William, and those like
you--that must go." It was not a mere loss of dollars or of cattle or
even of hopes; it was the rending, the tearing from him of a life
he loved; it was the taking of the range--land--the wide, beautiful,
weather-worn land--big and grand in its freedom of all that was
narrow and sordid, and it was cutting and scarring it, harnessing it
to the petty uses of a class he despised with all the frank egotism
of a man who loves his own outlook; giving it over to the "nester"
and the "rube" and burying the sweet-smelling grasses with plows. It
was--he could not, even in the eloquence of his utter despair, find
words for all it meant to him.

"I should, of course, leave the detail