Justin Wingate, Ranchman

by John Harvey Whitson

  CHAPTER VIII

  THE THRALL OF THE PAST

  Sibyl Dudley searched for both Curtis Clayton and William Sanders.When she could not find them, she reasoned that they had gone back toParadise Valley, and sent them letters urging them to return toDenver. Ben had arrived, and after a talk with Sibyl, and another withMary, he had induced Mary to send a pressing invitation to LucyDavison to visit her for a few days.

  Meanwhile, Justin was trying to find himself. The violence andvirulence of party and factional feeling astonished him. He had notknown that men could be so rabid and unreasonable. He was asbewildered by the discovery, and by the furious assaults made on himby men and newspapers, as he had been by the surprising fact of hiselection. He could not have been assailed more vindictively if he hadbeen a criminal. To hold an honest opinion honestly seemed to beconsidered a crime by those whom it antagonized.

  Candor had ever been impressed on him as a cardinal virtue. It broughta shock to discover that it was anything but a virtue in thispolitical world to which he was so new. Concealment, duplicity, theaccomplishment of a purpose by fair means or foul, these seemed to bethe things that had value. It was true that a certain faction inDenver agreed with him, but the agreement was for pecuniary andmaterial reasons. He could see that if their interests lay in theother direction they would oppose him as heartily. Even these mencould not keep from pointing out to him how much he was to gain. Theythought to stiffen his courage by assuring him that he was on the sidethat must win. As if that would move him now! No man seemed able tounderstand that the opinions he held and expressed had no root in adesire to advance himself or enrich himself.

  With these discoveries came a temporary weakening of his faith. He wasno Sir Oracle, and had never pretended to be, and he began to doubthimself and his conclusions. He wanted to do right, but what wasright? Was it an abstraction, after all? He had never beforequestioned the certainty of those inner feelings on which he hadalways relied for guidance. Was conscience but a thing of education? Aman had told him so but the day before.

  As there was no help outwardly he had to burrow for it inwardly. Thestimulating wine of memory lay inward, and he drew on it for strength,recalling those hours and even days of quiet thought and talk withClayton which followed the election. Before him in all its pristinebeauty rose that dream of Peter Wingate, that the desert, by whichWingate meant Paradise Valley, should blossom as the rose. Wingate'shopeful and prophetic sermons had made a deep impression on theplastic mind of the boy who heard them. Though Justin scarcely knewit, that dream of a redeemed desert, working slowly through the years,had become his own. It had long been merely a vague desire, holding atfirst the form given to it by the minister, that settlers might comein and till the land. But Justin had long since seen that if settlerscame in, they must go out again if water was not to be had, and thatirrigation alone possessed the transforming power which could make thedream a reality.

  The farmers now in Paradise Valley were irrigating as well as theycould. They had little money and their devices were of a make-shiftcharacter. Yet wherever they could induce water to flow the desertbloomed. Justin had come to sympathize with them in their struggleagainst adverse conditions the more perhaps because he had so longheld that guilty knowledge of the fact that Ben Davison had cut theirdam.

  In thus surveying the field before him and choosing between thecattlemen and the irrigationists, as they were represented in thevalley of Paradise, which was the only world he knew well, Justin hada growing comprehension of that large truth, that if he who makes twoblades of grass to grow where but one grew before is a benefactor, astill greater one is the man who changes a cattle range, where tenacres will hardly support a cow, to an irrigated land where five acreswill sustain a home. This was the thing indefinitely and faultilyforeshadowed in Peter Wingate's dream.

  The conditions in Paradise Valley were duplicated in many placesthroughout the state. Should the struggling farmers give way to thecattlemen, or should they be assisted? If the farmers held theirrigable lands there would be plenty of range left; for there weremillions of acres which could never be touched by water, where cattlecould graze undisturbing and undisturbed. But the cattlemen covetedthe rich valleys where water could be secured without the expense ofpumps and windmills, as well as the dry, bunch-grass uplands.

  To hold the land they now occupied but did not own, they had alliedthemselves with the political party which promised a senator whoseinfluence at Washington should favor them. If the agriculturalistswon, the illegal fences stretched on every league of grazing landwould have to come down, and that would be a serious if not fatal blowto the ranch industry as it was then conducted. Already there werethreats and warnings from Washington.

  All this Justin included in his wide survey of the conditions whichconfronted him. A poll of the votes to be cast had shown that he heldin his hand the deciding ballot. If he says it to the cattlemen theircandidate for United States senator would be elected, and would usehis influence to keep the government from interfering with the illegalfences; the farmers would have to continue their unequal struggle, andperhaps would be forced ultimately out of the country; present ranchconditions would be maintained, and each winter would witness arecurrence, in a greater or less degree, of that terrible tragedy ofthe unsheltered range, where helpless animals perished by hundreds inthe pitiless storms.

  Influenced by Clayton and by the circumstances and incidents of hisranch life, Justin could not help feeling that the open range stoodfor barbarous cruelty, and agriculture for the reverse. He was thethrall of the past. As often as that memory of the unsheltered rangecame back to him, and out of the swirling snows starving and freezingcattle looked at him with hungry eyes, while his ears caught their lowmeanings mingled with the death song of the icy wind, he felt that hisintuitions were right, and his doubts fled away.

  Then would come the conviction that he had been led, until he stoodwhere he was now. Was it not a strange thing, he reflected at suchtimes, that he, who as a boy had sickened at the branding of a calf,who later had suffered heart-ache with Clayton over the tragedies ofthe range, who from the first had sympathized with the farmers even asWingate had sympathized with them, should stand where he stood now? Inhis hand lay great issues. If he proved true, he would become, withoutdesign or volition on his part, the sword of the irrigationists. Thequestion which he faced was whether or not he should be true to thatdream of a blossoming desert and to the teachings of Clayton.

  Harkness had assured him, with much vehemence, that there were "nostrings on him;" the cowboys had given him their votes because theydesired to testify thus to their admiration of his bravery and theirdetestation of the conduct of Ben Davison. Yet Justin knew there were"strings on him,"--influences, friendships, feelings, hopes anddesires, which he could nether forget nor ignore. No longing for placeor power could have moved him now that he had taken his stand, andanything approaching the nature of a bribe would have filled him withindignation. But these other things bade him pause and consider; theyeven forced him to doubt. And with Justin, doubt weakened the veryfoundations of the structure of belief which at first he had thoughtso stable.