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We got a little bunch o' cattle up in the park Uncle Sam's man is lookin' after 'em." She grinned. "Jackson kicked at the fee, but I says: 'Twenty cents a head is cheap pasture. We're lucky to get any grass at all, now that everybody's goin' in for sheep. 'Pears like the sheepmen air gettin' bolder and bolder in this free-range graft, and I'm a-bettin' on trouble." She rose.
As free-range monopolists you are cumberers of the earth, and all you represent must pass, before this State can be anything but the byword it now is. I didn't feel this so keenly ten years ago, but with a bunch of children growing up my vision has grown clearer. The picturesque West must give way to the civilized West, and the war of sheepmen and cattle-men must stop."
Jackson seemed a little disappointed, but she smoothed the dress over her sharp knees, and continued: "Right there the good old days ended for yore ma and for us. The cattle business has been steadily on the chute that is, the free-range business. I saw it comin', an' I says to Jackson, 'Camp on some river-bottom and chuck in the alfalfy, I says. An' that's what we did.
The truth is, this little village, sixty miles from the railway, still retained in its dives and shanties the lingering miasma of the old-time free-range barbarism. It trailed a dark history on its legal side as well as on its openly violent side, for it had been one of the centres of the Rustler's War, and one of the chief points of attack on the part of the cattle-barons.
Cordts rode into this wild free-range country, where he had been heard to say that a horse-thief was meaner than a poisoned coyote. Nevertheless, he became a horse-thief. The passion he had conceived for the Sage King was the passion of a man for an unattainable woman. Cordts swore that he would never rest, that he would not die, till he owned the King. So there was reason for Bostil's great fear.
"Free-range cattlemen!" said Higgins. "The same all over the world! A fence makes them see red. Barb wire is to 'em like a new steel trap to a wolf. Wonder if it was one of Garman's men?" "I don't know whether Garman's activities include cattle. What difference does it make? Our job is to put this fence up. The next move is up to them." "Here comes their first move!" said Higgins presently.
"It's a long lane that has no turn," he growled. Redfield resumed, in impersonal heat. "The cow-man was conceived in anarchy and educated in murder. Whatever romantic notions I may have had of the plains twenty-five years ago, they are lost to me now. The free-range stock-owner has no country and no God; nothing but a range that isn't his, and damned bad manners begging pardon, Miss Wetherford.
Though they certainly grew their own rich wheat on virgin semi-arid prairie soil, I'm sure the family bought white flour at the store for daily use. Still, there was a garden and a cow producing raw milk and free-range fertile eggs and chicken and other animals.
And as for this other business this free-range war in which the old man is mixed up I want you to know that I'm against it. Dad knows his day is short; that's what makes him so hot. But he's a bluff just a fussy old bluff. He knows he has no more right to the Government grass than anybody else, but he's going to get ahead of the cattle-men if he can." "Does he know who burned them sheep-herders?"
My own personal health problems had their genesis long before my own birth. Our diet was awful, with very little fresh fruit or vegetables. We normally had canned, evaporated milk, though there were a few rare times when raw milk and free-range fertile farm eggs were available from neighbors. Most of my foods were heavily salted or sugared, and we ate a great deal of fat in the form of lard.
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