“Who dares say I done wrong?” demanded the mountaineer.  “Look here!  Why does the Government pick on me and try to drive me off’n my little place where I’m living, and leave these other fellows be?  What right or justice is there in that?”

“I don’t know the ins and out of it all,” Bob reminded him.  “As I said before, I’m no lawyer.  But they’ve at least conformed with the forms of the law, as far as the Government has any evidence.  You have not.  I imagine that’s the reason your case has been selected first.”

“To hell with a law that drives the poor man off his home and leaves the rich man on his ill-got spoils!” cried Samuels.

The note in this struck Bob’s ear as something alien.  “I wonder what that echoes from!” was his unspoken thought.  Aloud he merely remarked: 

“But you said yourself you have money and a home in Durham.”

“That may be,” retorted Samuels, “but ain’t I got as much right to the timber, I who have been in the country since ’55, as the next man?”

“Why, of course you have, Mr. Samuels,” agreed Bob heartily.  “I’m with you there.”

“Well?”

“But you’ve exercised your rights to timber claims already.  You took up your timber claim in ’89, and what is more, your wife and her brother and your oldest son also took up timber claims in ’90.  As I understand it, this is an old homestead claim, antedating the others.”

Samuels, rather taken aback, stared uncertainly.  He had been lured from his vantage ground of force to that of argument; how he scarcely knew.  It had certainly been without his intention.

Bob, however, had no desire that the old man should again take his stand behind the impenetrable screen of threat and bluster from which he had been decoyed.

“We’ve all got to get together, as citizens, to put a stop to this sort of thing,” he shifted his grounds.  “I believe the time is at hand when graft and grab by the rich and powerful will have to go.  It will go only when we take hold together.  Look at San Francisco—­” With great skill he drew the old man into a discussion of the graft cases in that city.

“Graft,” he concluded, “is just the price the people are willing to pay to get their politics done for them while they attend to the pressing business of development and building.  They haven’t time nor energy to do everything, so they’re willing to pay to have some things taken off their hands.  The price is graft.  When the people have more time, when the other things are done, then the price will be too high.  They’ll decide to attend to their own business.”

Samuels listened to this closely.  “There’s a good deal in what you say,” he agreed.  “I know it’s that way with us.  If I couldn’t build a better road with less money and less men than our Supervisor, Curtis, does, I’d lie down and roll over.  But I ain’t got time to be supervisor, even if anybody had time to elect me.  There’s a bunch of reformers down our way, but they don’t seem to change Curtis much.”