LITMIR.BIZ

      Table of Contents

       Chapter I. The Beginning of it

       Chapter II. The Vigilantes

       Chapter III. The Thing they Called Justice

       Chapter IV. What Happened at the Oak

       Chapter V. Hospitality

       Chapter VI. The Valley

       Chapter VII. The Lord of the Valley

       Chapter VIII. Don Andres Wants a Majordomo

       Chapter IX. Jerry Simpson, Squatter

       Chapter X. The Finest Little Woman in the World

       Chapter XI. An Ill Wind

       Chapter XII. Potential Moods

       Chapter XIII. Bill Wilson Goes Visiting

       Chapter XIV. Rodeo Time

       Chapter XV. When Camp-Fires Blink

       Chapter XVI. "For Weapons I Choose Riatas"

       Chapter XVII. A Fiesta we Shall Have

       Chapter XVIII. What is Love Worth?

       Chapter XIX. Anticipation

       Chapter XX. Lost! Two Hasty Tempers

       Chapter XXI. Fiesta Day

       Chapter XXII. The Battle of Beasts

       Chapter XXIII. The Duel of Riatas

       Chapter XXIV. For Love and a Medal

       Chapter XXV. Adios

Chapter I. The Beginning of it

       Table of Contents

      If you would glimpse the savage which normally lies asleep, thank God, in most of us, you have only to do this thing of which I shall tell you, and from some safe sanctuary where leaden couriers may not bear prematurely the tidings of man's debasement, watch the world below. You May See Civilization Swing Back With A Snap To Savagery And Worse—Because Savagery Enlightened By The Civilization Of Centuries Is A Deadly Thing To Let Loose Among Men. Our Savage Forebears Were But Superior Animals Groping Laboriously After Economic Security And A Social Condition That Would Yield Most Prolifically The Fruit Of All The World'S Desire, Happiness; To-Day, When We Swing Back To Something Akin To Savagery, We Do It For Lust Of Gain, Like Our Forebears, But We Do It Wittingly. So, If You Would Look Upon The Unlovely Spectacle Of Civilized Men Turned Savage, And See Them Toil Painfully Back To Lawful Living, You Have But To Do This:

      Seek a spot remote from the great centers of our vaunted civilization, where Nature, in a wanton gold-revel of her own, has sprinkled her river beds with the shining dust, hidden it away under ledges, buried it in deep canyons in playful miserliness and salved with its potent glow the time-scars upon the cheeks of her gaunt mountains. You have but to find a tiny bit of Nature's gold, fling it in the face of civilization and raise the hunting cry. Then, from that safe sanctuary which you have chosen, you may look your fill upon the awakening of the primitive in man; see him throw off civilization as a sleeper flings aside the cloak that has covered him; watch the savages fight, whom your gold has conjured.

      They will come, those savages; straight as the arrow flies they will come, though mountains and deserts and hurrying rivers bar their way. And the plodding, law-abiding citizens who kiss their wives and hold close their babies and fling hasty, comforting words over their shoulders to tottering old mothers when they go to answer the hunting call—they will be your savages when the gold lust grips them. And the towns they build of their greed will be but the nucleus of all the crime let loose upon the land. There will be men among your savages; men in whom the finer stuff outweighs the grossness and the greed. But to save their lives and that thing they prize more than life or gold, and call by the name of honor or friendship or justice—that thing which is the essence of all the fineness in their natures—to save that and their lives they also must fight, like savages who would destroy them.

      There was a little, straggling hamlet born of the Mission which the padres founded among the sand hills beside a great, uneasy stretch of water which a dreamer might liken to a naughty child that had run away from its mother, the ocean, through a little gateway which the land left open by chance and was hiding there among the hills, listening to the calling of the surf voice by night, out there beyond the gate, and lying sullen and still when mother ocean sent the fog and the tides a-seeking; a truant child that played by itself and danced little wave dances which it had learned of its mother ages agone, and laughed up at the hills that smiled down upon it.

      The padres thought mostly of the savages who lived upon the land, and strove earnestly to teach them the lessons which, sandal-shod, with crucifix to point the way, they had marched up from the south to set before these children of the wild. Also came ships, searching for that truant ocean-child, the bay, of which men had heard; and so the hamlet was born of civilization.

      Came afterwards noblemen from Spain, with parchments upon which the king himself had set his seal. Mile upon mile, they chose the land that pleased them best; and by virtue of the

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