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 to
Paradise Valley, and sent them letters urging them to return to
Denver. Ben had arrived, and after a talk with Sibyl, and another with
Mary, he had induced Mary to send a pressing invitation to Lucy
Davison to visit her for a few days.
Meanwhile, Justin was trying to find himself. The violence and
virulence of party and factional feeling astonished him. He had not
known that men could be so rabid and unreasonable. He was as
bewildered by the discovery, and by the furious assaults made on him
by men and newspapers, as he had been by the surprising fact of his
election. He could not have been assailed more vindictively if he had
been a criminal. To hold an honest opinion honestly seemed to be
considered a crime by those whom it antagonized.
Candor had ever been impressed on him as a cardinal virtue. It brought
a shock to discover that it was anything but a virtue in this
political world to which he was so new. Concealment, duplicity, the
accomplishment of a purpose by fair means or foul, these seemed to be
the things that had value. It was true that a certain faction in
Denver agreed with him, but the agreement was for pecuniary and
material reasons. He could see that if their interests lay in the
other direction they would oppose him as heartily. Even these men
could not keep from pointing out to him how much he was to gain. They
thought to stiffen his courage by assuring him that he was on the side
that must win. As if that would move him now! No man seemed able to
understand that the opinions he held and expressed had no root in a
desire to advance himself or enrich himself.
With these discoveries came a temporary weakening of his faith. He was
no Sir Oracle, and had never pretended to be, and he began to doubt
himself and his conclusions. He wanted to do right, but what was
right? Was it an abstraction, after all? He had never before
questioned the certainty of those inner feelings on which he had
always relied for guidance. Was conscience but a thing of education? A
man had told him so but the day before.
As there was no help outwardly he had to burrow for it inwardly. The
stimulating wine of memory lay inward, and he drew on it for strength,
recalling those hours and even days of quiet thought and talk with
Clayton which followed the election. Before him in all its pristine
beauty rose that dream of Peter Wingate, that the desert, by which
Wingate meant Paradise Valley, should blossom as the rose. Wingate’s
hopeful and prophetic sermons had made a deep impression on the
plastic mind of the boy who heard them. Though Justin scarcely knew
it, that dream of a redeemed desert, working slowly through the years,
had become his own. It had long been merely a vague desire, holding at
first the form given to it by the minister, that settlers might come
in and till the land. But Justin had long since seen that if settlers
came in, they must go out again if water was not to be had, and that
irrigation alone possessed the transforming power which could make the
dream a reality.
The farmers now in Paradise Valley were irrigating as well as they
could. They had little money and their devices were of a make-shift
character. Yet wherever they could induce water to flow the desert
bloomed. Justin had come to sympathize with them in their struggle
against adverse conditions the more perhaps because he had so long
held that guilty knowledge of the fact that Ben Davison had cut their
dam.
In thus surveying the field before him and choosing between the
cattlemen and the irrigationists, as they were represented in the
valley of Paradise, which was the only world he knew well, Justin had
a growing comprehension of that large truth, that if he who makes two
blades of grass to grow where but one grew before is a benefactor, a
still greater one is the man who changes a cattle range, where ten
acres will hardly support a cow, to an irrigated land where five acres
will sustain a home. This was the thing indefinitely and faultily
foreshadowed in Peter Wingate’s dream.
The conditions in Paradise Valley were duplicated in many places
throughout the state. Should the struggling farmers give way to the
cattlemen, or should they be assisted? If the farmers held the
irrigable lands there would be plenty of range left; for there were
millions of acres which could never be touched by water, where cattle
could graze undisturbing and undisturbed. But the cattlemen coveted
the rich valleys where water could be secured without the expense of
pumps and windmills, as well as the dry, bunch-grass uplands.
To hold the land they now occupied but did not own, they had allied
themselves with the political party which promised a senator whose
influence at Washington should favor them. If the agriculturalists
won, the illegal fences stretched on every league of grazing land
would have to come down, and that would be a serious if not fatal blow
to the ranch industry as it was then conducted. Already there were
threats and warnings from Washington.
All this Justin included in his wide survey of the conditions which
confronted him. A poll of the votes to be cast had shown that he held
in his hand the deciding ballot. If he says it to the cattlemen their
candidate for United States senator would be elected, and would use
his influence to keep the government from interfering with the illegal
fences; the farmers would have to continue their unequal struggle, and
perhaps would be forced ultimately out of the country; present ranch
conditions would be maintained, and each winter would witness a
recurrence, in a greater or less degree, of that terrible tragedy of
the unsheltered range, where helpless animals perished by hundreds in
the pitiless storms.
Influenced by Clayton and by the circumstances and incidents of his
ranch life, Justin could not help feeling that the open range stood
for barbarous cruelty, and agriculture for the reverse. He was the
thrall of the past. As often as that memory of the unsheltered range
came back to him, and out of the swirling snows starving and freezing
cattle looked at him with hungry eyes, while his ears caught their low
meanings mingled with the death song of the icy wind, he felt that his
intuitions were right, and his doubts fled away.
Then would come the conviction that he had been led, until he stood
where he was now. Was it not a strange thing, he reflected at such
times, 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 of
the range, who from the first had sympathized with the farmers even as
Wingate had sympathized with them, should stand where he stood now? In
his hand lay great issues. If he proved true, he would become, without
design or volition on his part, the sword of the irrigationists. The
question which he faced was whether or not he should be true to that
dream of a blossoming desert and to the teachings of Clayton.
Harkness had assured him, with much vehemence, that there were “no
strings on him;” the cowboys had given him their votes because they
desired to testify thus to their admiration of his bravery and their
detestation of the conduct of Ben Davison. Yet Justin knew there were
“strings on him,”—influences, friendships, feelings, hopes and
desires, which he could nether forget nor ignore. No longing for place
or power could have moved him now that he had taken his stand, and
anything approaching the nature of a bribe would have filled him with
indignation. But these other things bade him pause and consider; they
even forced him to doubt. And with Justin, doubt weakened the very
foundations of the structure of belief which at first he had thought
so stable.