Page:Ritchie - Trails to Two Moons.djvu/129

 man was soiling the wilderness. Near two spots of smoldering embers the earth was drinking up the blood of slaughtered sheep. Here and there on the illimitable sweep other blood spots marked the slaying of men from ambush. Because one clan of men, the pioneers in this clean land, who had come with their herds of longhorns from the South to fatten them on the free bounty of Nature and glean an easy increment of wealth, now found their Eden disputed by a second wave of adventurers, rank growths of hate were springing from the soil of the Big Country. Because the squatter and homesteader strung his webs of barbed wire—killer of man and beast in the night stampede—round precious water holes and along fat river bottoms, and because the possessors of sheep bands demanded their share of the range bounties, now the day of violence, of reprisals and resistance was come to blacken what the world's first day had left clean and unsullied.

The sun was westering when Uncle Alf, the evangelist, rode out from the dim sack of the Pass and drew rein on this shelf above the Big Country. The self-appointed scourge of God had been coursing the wilderness of the Basin,