"It's all very well to preach right--right--right, Eleanor; and fight--fight--fight; and 'He who fights and runs away, _May_ live to fight another day'; but what are you going to do about it? I sweat till I lay the dust thinking about it; but we never seem to get anywhere. When we had Wild Bills in the old days, we formed Vigilant Committees, and went out after the law breakers with a gun; but now, we are a law-abiding people. We are a law-abiding age, don't you forget that! When you skin a skunk now days, you do it according to law, slowly, judiciously, no matter what the skunk does to you meantime, even tho' it get away with the chickens. Fact is, we're so busy straining at legal gnats just now that we're swallowing a whole generation of camels. We don't risk our necks any more to put things right--not we; we get in behind the skirts of law, and yap, yap, yap, about law like a rat terrier, when we should be bull dogs getting our teeth in the burglar's leg. "You know whose drovers are rustling cattle up North from Arizona? You know who pays the gang? So do I! You don't know whose cattle those are: so don't I! To-morrow when they are branded fresh, they'll be the Senator's; and what are you sheep people going to do with this crowd coming in from the outside? The law says--equal rights to all; and you say--fight; but who is going to see that the law is carried out, unless the people awaken and become a Vigilant Committee for the Nation? Tell Sheriff Flood to go out and round up those rustlers: he'll hide under the bed for a week, or 'allow he don't like the job.' Senator Moyese got him that berth. He's going to hang on like a leech to blood. "Now, look down this side! Do you know a quarter section of that big timber is worth from $10,000 to $40,000 to its owners, the people of the United States? Do you know you can build a cottage of six rooms out of one tree, the very size a workman needs? The workmen who vote own those trees! Do you know the Smelter Lumber Company takes all for nothing, half a million of it a year? Do you know that Smelter, itself, is built on two-thousand acres of coal lands--stolen--stolen from the Government as clearly as if the Smelter teams had hauled it from a Government coal pit? Do you know there isn't a man in the Land Office who hasn't urged and urged and urged the Government to sue for restitution of that steal, and headquarters pretend to be doubtful so that the Statute of Limitations will intervene?" On the inner side, the Ridge dropped to an Alpine meadow that billowed up another slope through mossed forests to the snow line of the Holy Cross Mountains. What the girl saw was a sylvan world of spruce, then the dark green pointed larches where the jubilant rivers rioted down from the snow. What the man saw was--a Challenge.