My land was paid for, such as it was; but when the people who, like me, had drailed out across the prairies with the last year’s rush, came and asked me to join the Settlers’ Club to run these intruders off, it appeared to me that it was only a man’s part in me to stand to it and take hold and do.  I felt the old urge of all landowners to stand together against the landless, I suppose.  What is title to land anyhow, but the right of those who have it to hold on to it?  No man ever made land—­except my ancestors, the Dutch, perhaps.  All men do is to get possession of it, and run everybody else off, either with clubs, guns, or the sheriff.

I did not look forward to all the doings of the Settlers’ Club, but I joined it, and I have never been ashamed of it, even when Dick McGill was slangwhanging me about what we did.  I never knew, and I don’t know now, just what the law was, but I thought then, and I think now, that the Settlers’ Club had the right of it.  I thought so the night we went over to run the claim-jumper off Absalom Frost’s land, within a week of my joining.

It was over on Section Twenty-seven, that the claim-jumper had built a hut about where the schoolhouse now is, with a stable in one end of it, and a den in which to live in the other.  He was a young man, with no dependents, and we felt no compunctions of conscience, that dark night, when two wagon-loads of us, one of which came from the direction of Monterey Centre, drove quietly up and knocked at the door.

“Who’s there?” he said, with a quiver in his voice.

“Open up, and find out!” said a man in the Monterey Centre crowd, who seemed to take command as a matter of course.  “Kick the door open, Dutchy!”

As he said this he stepped aside, and pushed me up to the door.  I gave it a push with my knee, and the leader jerked me aside, just in time to let a charge of shot pass my head.

“It’s only a single-barrel gun,” said he.  “Grab him!”

I was scared by the report of the gun, scared and mad, too, as I clinched with the fellow, and threw him; then I pitched him out of the door, when the rest of them threw him down and began stripping him.  At the same time, some one kindled a fire under a kettle filled with tar, and in a few minutes, they were smearing him with it.  This looked like going too far, to me, and I stepped back—­I couldn’t stand it to see the tar smeared over his face, even if it did look like a map of the devil’s wild land, as he kicked and scratched and tried to bite, swearing all the time like a pirate.  It seemed a degrading kind of thing to defile a human being in that way.  The leader came up to me and said, “That was good work, Dutchy.  Lucky I was right about its being a single-barrel, ain’t it?  Help get his team hitched up.  We want to see him well started.”

“All right, Mr. McGill,” I said; for that was his name, now first told in all the history of the county.