Frontier and pioneer life -- West (U.S.) -- Fiction
Beneath the flare heading followed a statement of facts (more or less)
to the effect that in an altercation between the drovers of some
outside cattlemen and the herders belonging to the MacDonald ranch, the
sheep herd had been hustled--("I like your alliterations, Bat, it gives
flavor of quality," commented the news-man with a snap of his black
eyes,) too close to the edge of the Rim Rocks with the unintended and
tragical result that several hundred sheep had been shoved over the
battlements. ("What I like specially is what you don't give,"
commented the news-man.)
There was not a word about broken backs and slashed lambs and
disemboweled ewes; nor of what had been found on the Upper Mesas. As a
sort of addendum it was stated that a boy belonging to the Mission
school had lost his life in the melee.
"Anyway, we're in style! Way to tell a thing now adays is to turn all
around it, and not tell anything at all. Auto suggestion, eh, Bat?"
Bat's fat cheeks blew up in the explosion of a bursting paper bag.
"You bet it's auto all right. If you'd heard the old man talking all
the way down on the iniquity of the thing: he kept it going harder than
the buzz wagon."
"Better inform a breathlessly eager public that he's gone to
Washington?"
"Here, I've got that, too! He dictated that straight, 'for the express
purpose of taking up the whole question of eliminating the grazing
areas from the National Forests when it will be possible for the State
authorities to protect the live stock interests,'" Bat handed across
the second item.
"What in thunder have the National Forests to do with the Rim Rock
massacre?" The newsman looked up through his glasses.
"And who in thunder is going to ask that?"
Bat tapped the last item sharply with his pencil. "They'll read _that_
and they'll read the other, and I'll bet dollars to doughnuts nine men
out of ten will begin jawing and spouting and arguing that if there
were _no_ National Forests, there would be no Range Wars. If they draw
a false impression, that's the public's look out. If we weren't
dealing with damphools, we couldn't fool 'em."
"But it didn't happen on the National Forests."
"But it's only the tenth man who will stop to think that out. You put
in one of those big middle page cartoons--National Forests with the
Federal sign board, KEEP OFF, the sheep being massacred inside the sign
board and the State sheriff unable to go in and stop it--"
"But you didn't say massacred! You said they accidently went over the
edge."
"But it's only the tenth man will stop to think that. You run the
cartoon, see?" said Bat, and, though he asked it as a question, if
sounded final. The news-man went tearing back to the front editorial
rooms. Bat went whistling down stairs, two steps at a bounce. At the
half-way landing, he paused.
"Say," he yelled up, "you can use the same old cartoon; 'Keep Off the
Grass,' you know."
"Eh?--right," crossly from the front room.
"And say?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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