“Damn him!” gritted Billy savagely, under his breath.

“He is to be admired, William.  Such a man is bound in the very nature of things to succeed.  It is the range and—­and you, William, and those like you, that must go.  It is hard—­no doubt it is extremely hard, but it is as irresistible as—­as death itself.  Civilization is compelled to crush the old order of things that it may fertilize the soil out of which grows the new.  It is so in plant life, and in the life of humans, also.

“I am explaining at length, William, so that you will quite understand why I do not think it wise to follow your suggestion.  As I say, it is not Brown, or the fences, or anything of that sort—­taken in a large sense—­which is forcing us to the wall.  It is the press of natural progress, the pushing farther and farther of civilization.  We might move to a more unsettled portion of the country and delay for a time the ultimate crushing.  We could not avoid it entirely; we might, at best, merely postpone it.

“My idea is to gather everything and sell for as high a price as possible.  Then—­perhaps it would be well to follow Mr. Brown’s example, and turn this place into a farm; or sell it, also, and try something else.  What do you think, William?”

But Billy, his very soul sickening under the crushing truth of what Dill in his prim grammatical way was saying, did not answer at all.  He was picking blindly, mechanically at the splinter, his face shaded by his worn, gray hat; and he was thinking irrelevantly how a condemned man must feel when they come to him in his cell and in formal words read aloud his death-warrant.  One sentence was beating monotonously in his brain:  “It is the range—­and you, William, and those like you—­that must go.”  It was not a mere loss of dollars or of cattle or even of hopes; it was the rending, the tearing from him of a life he loved; it was the taking of the range—­land—­the wide, beautiful, weather-worn land—­big and grand in its freedom of all that was narrow and sordid, and it was cutting and scarring it, harnessing it to the petty uses of a class he despised with all the frank egotism of a man who loves his own outlook; giving it over to the “nester” and the “rube” and burying the sweet-smelling grasses with plows.  It was—­he could not, even in the eloquence of his utter despair, find words for all it meant to him.

“I should, of course, leave the details to you, so far as getting the most out of the stock is concerned.  I have been thinking of this for some little time, and your report of range conditions merely confirms my own judgment.  If you think we would better sell at once—­”

“I’d let ’em go till fall,” said Billy lifelessly, snapping the splinter back into place and reaching absently for his tobacco and papers.  “They’re bound to pick up a lot—­and what’s left is mostly big, husky steers that’ll make prime beef.  With decent prices yuh ought to pull clear uh what yuh owe Brown, and have a little left.  I didn’t make anything like a count; they was so thin I handled ’em as light as I could and get the calves branded—­what few there was.  But I feel tolerable safe in saying you can round up six—­well, between six and seven thousand head.  At a fair price yuh ought to pull clear.”