“No one can know, or dream, how inexpressibly dear the old home is to my heart.  If I had to give it up,” sez he, “it would be like tearin’ out my very heart-strings, and partin’ with what seems like a part of my own life.”

The man looked very earnest and sincere when he said this, and even agitated.  He meant what he said, no doubt on’t.

And then Krit sez, “How would you like it if you were ordered to leave it at a day’s notice—­leave it forever—­leave it so some one else, some one you hated, some one who had always injured you, could enjoy it—­

“Leave it so that you knew you could never live there again, never see a sun rise or a sun set over the dear old fields, and mountains, and river, you loved so well—­

“Never have the chance to stand by the graves of your fathers, and your children, that were a-sleepin’ under the beautiful old trees that your grandfathers had set out—­

“Never see the dear old grounds they walked through, the old rooms full of the memories of their love, their joys, and their sorrows, and your loves, and hopes, and joys, and sadness?

“What should you do if some one strong enough, but without a shadow of justice or reason, should order you out of it at once—­force you to go?”

“I should try to kill him,” sez the man promptly, before he had time to think what to say.

“Well,” sez Krit, “that is what the Injuns try to do, and the world is horrified at it.  Their homes are jest as dear to them as ours are to us; their love for their own living and dead is jest as strong.  Their grief and sense of wrong and outrage is even stronger than the white man’s would be, for they don’t have the distractions of civilized life to take up their attention.  They brood over their wrongs through long days and nights, unsolaced by daily papers and latest telegraphic news, and their famished, freezin’ bodies addin’ their terrible pangs to their soul’s distress.

“Is it any wonder that after broodin’ over their wrongs through long days and nights, half starved, half naked, their dear old homes gone—­shut up here in the rocky, hateful waste, that they must call home, and probably their wives and daughters stolen from them by these agents that are fat and warm, and gettin’ rich on the food and clothing that should be theirs, and receivin’ nothing but insults and threats if they ask for justice, and finally a bullet, if their demands for justice are too loud—­

“What wonder is it that they lift their empty hands for vengeance—­that they leave their bare, icy huts, and warm their frozen veins with ghost-dances, haply practisin’ them before they go to be ghosts in reality?  What wonder that they sharpen up their ancestral tomahawk, and lift it against their oppressors?  What wonder that the smothered fires do break out into sudden fiery tempests of destruction that appall the world?

“You say you would do the same, after your generations of culture and Christian teaching, and so would I, and every other man.  We would if we could destroy the destroyers who ravage and plunder our homes, deprive us of the earnings of a lifetime, turn us out of our inheritance, and make of our wives and daughters worse than slaves.