The old frontiersman had picked up coat and boots flung aside the night before. He stood holding by his horse's mane looking down. "And this is a white man's land," he said. "To this have y' prostituted freedom bought by th' blood of saints an' martyrs? Not in th' heat o' passion, but for filthy gain, has a free people come to this? _The heads o' kings fell on the bloody block for less crime in days not so soft spoken as these_. Is y'r freedom, freedom to right or to wrong? Is it to send y'r Nation smash over the precipice? Wayland, _is this Democracy_?" The Ranger did not answer for a moment. "No," he said quietly, "it isn't Democracy any more than your Robber Barons were Monarchy! Don't you make that mistake; this is Anarchy, the Anarchy of unrestrained greed! You fought it in your plundering Scotch Robber Barons long ago! We have to fight it to-day in our plundering plutocrats!" CHAPTER XII THE MAJESTY OF THE LAW VEILS ITSELF "Do you mean me to believe," the old frontiersman drew himself up to the full height of British superiority to everything outside the island of its own circumscribed knowledge, "do you mean me to believe that if any of these poor herders had escaped as witnesses, we'd not have been able to send these blackguard murderers to the gallows?" The Ranger had signalled for some of the road gang to ascend from below the battlements to keep guard till the coroner could come. The little pack mule to the fore, Wayland and Matthews were picking the way slowly down the terra cotta trail of the Rim Rocks. "It does not make the slightest difference in the world what you or I believe, Sir! The facts are unless you could offer a witness money enough to take him out the United States and to keep him for the rest of his life, he would develop a good-forgetter, or else the same old gag--'been blind folded,' 'didn't see,' and so on, and on, and on; you can't blame them! I'll bet if every one of the herders had escaped instead of festering there in the ash heap, they'd all be legging it out of the country far and fast as they could go." The little mule came to a stand at a bend in the switch back; and the old evangelist sat ruminating silently on his broncho. "Y' have a sheriff?" Wayland laughed. "He's like the Indian flies; a no-see-him. He'll ride over the hills for weeks and if he tumbles over the top of his prisoner, he can't find his man!" The old Britisher looked doubtfully at Wayland, as much as to say, "I don't believe you." "You're no temptin' me to take the law into our own hands?" Again Wayland laughed. "My dear sir, you don't understand! I don't want to drag you into this at all! For ten years, _the powers that stand for law in this country have been marking time behind the firing line; while the other fellow got away with the goods_. They have been marking time while Crime scored, and what you call the Devil kept tally." The old man nodded his head approvingly. "That's all true!"