racticed it in those days was founded on selfishness and defended at the
mouth of the pistol. We were all pensioners on Uncle Sam, and fighting to
keep the other fellow off from having a share of his bounty. It was all
wasteful, half-savage. We didn't want settlement, we didn't want law, we
didn't want a State. We wanted free range. We were a line of pirates from
beginning to end, and we're not wholly, reformed yet."

He was talking to the whole table now, for all were listening. No other
man on the range could say these things with the same authority, for Hugh
Redfield was known all over the State as a man who had been one of the
best riders and ropers in his outfit--one who had started in as a common
hand at herding, and who had been entirely through "the war."

Lee Virginia listened with a stirring of the blood. Her recollections of
the range were all of the heroic. She recalled the few times when she was
permitted to go on the round-up, and to witness the breaking of new
horses, and the swiftness, grace, and reckless bravery of the riders, the
moan and surge of herds, the sweep of horsemen, came back and filled her
mind with large and free and splendid pictures. And now it was passing--or
past!

Some one at the table accused Redfield of being more of a town-site boomer
than a cattle-man.

He was quite unmoved by this charge. "The town-site boomer at least
believes in progress. He does not go so far as to shut out settlement. If
a neat and tidy village or a well-ordered farmstead is not considered
superior to a cattle-ranch littered with bones and tin cans, or better
than even a cow-town whose main industry is whiskey-selling, then all
civilized progress is a delusion. When I was a youngster these
considerations didn't trouble me. I liked the cowboy life and the careless
method of the plains, but I've some girls growing up now, and I begin to
see the whole business in a new light. I don't care to have my children
live the life I've lived. Besides, what right have we to stand in the way
of a community's growth? Suppose the new life _is_ less picturesque than
the old? We don't like to leave behind us the pleasures and sports of
boyhood; but we grow up, nevertheless. I'm far more loyal to the State as
Forest Supervisor than I was when I was riding with the cattle-men to
scare up the nester."

He uttered all this quite calmly, but his ease of manner, his absolute
disregard of consequences, joined with his wealth and