Page:Sheep Limit (1928).pdf/46

 ments, ambitions, became dwarfed in the immensity that mocked them. He was so suddenly revealed to himself in his insignificance that he was ashamed of the small things of the past, and began moving his feet at once to keep pace with the sudden enlargement of his horizon. Nature simply took hold of him and stretched a pigmy into a giant.

It was easier to understand Senator Galloway's fence in the light of this revelation. The man had grown so big through his mere association that he had enlarged to fit his environment. Hundreds of square miles under one unbroken fence did not seem extraordinary to him; the fact that it was not his land, nothing to trouble his conscience. A man naturally hardened as he broadened and grew immense.

That might explain the fencing-in of the public lands, but it did not justify it in any degree. In the vast territory held without warrant of leasehold or contract of any kind, hundreds of homeless families might find lodgment from their wandering quest. Rawlins pictured them as Clemmons had described them, driving on in eager hope, expecting to find this land open to homestead entry, only to bring up against that insolent fence like tumble weeds before the wind. Tumble weeds, uprooted by the winds of adversity from the soil in which they had grown, destined never to take root again.

So Rawlins rested there in the warm sun of noonday, his thoughts passing from one phase of speculation to another, imagination quickened by the strangeness of all that spread around him, and out of the distance one came riding across the fenced lands from the