Christian, no longer a Quiescent, no longer a Let Alone. She emerged
knowing that Democracy must become a joke, and Christianity the
laughing stock of the ages, unless Right could be made over into Might.

Then, she found the Ranger's note at her late breakfast--it was a
shockingly late breakfast, it was after the noon hour--the note saying
that he had set out on the Long Trail that the Nation must travel, the
trail of the Man behind the Thing, the Man Higher Up. It was as it had
been from the first with him, the meeting half-way of their thoughts
from different beginnings; and she kissed the signature with a gesture
that played havoc with the breakfast dishes and sent Calamity
snivelling and muttering from the kitchen. The ignorant half-breed's
knowledge of life among the miners of the Black Hills and the shingle
men of the Bitter Boot saw-mills didn't admit explanations of love that
kissed signatures and impelled tears.

And yet while revolution convulsed two souls you could have gone from
end to end of the Valley that week or to every cabin on the Homestead
Claim of the Ridge and not heard a living soul speak one word of the
tragedy on the Rim Rocks. Were they moral cowards? I don't think so.
Wasn't it more of that spirit of Let Alone? If you had mentioned the
terrible episode to a casual settler, he would have given you a blank
look and remarked "that he hadn't heard."

The story set down here, I could not myself have learned if a chance
ramble over the foot hills of the Rim Rocks had not led one day to a
solitary little grave, surrounded by a picket fence marked by the
figure of a kneeling child carved in rough sand stone. As the guest of
the Mission School, I made the mistake of asking the mother, herself,
whose grave that was. Women, who are neither politicians nor politic,
have a plain way of uttering harsh facts. She did not speak about the
author of her boy's death in soft words, that little white haired
mother. She used a term oftener heard in the purlieus of criminal
courts. "To think," she exclaimed bitterly, "to think that Fordie,
descended from generations of Williams who have pioneered and fought
for and built up this country since ever the first Williams landed in
Boston in 1666, was done to death by this murderer, this truckster,
this political trickster, this outcast from the European gutters, this
huckster of lazaretto morals and bawd houses, who is overturning our
Nation with his oi