Let them have it" 212
A war for the open road against an enemy whose only weapon was
his unswerving bulk 256
RAW GOLD.
CHAPTER I.
THE LONG ARM OF THE LAW.
How many of us, I wonder, can look back over the misty, half-forgotten
years and not see a few that stand out clear and golden, sharp-cut
against the sky-line of memory? Years that we wish we could live again,
so that we might revel in every full-blooded hour. For we so seldom get
the proper focus on things until we look at them through the clarifying
telescope of Time; and then one realizes with a pang that he can't
back-track into the past and take his old place in the passing show.
Would we, if we could? It's an idle question, I know; wise men and musty
philosophers say that regrets are foolish. But I speak for myself only
when I say that I would gladly wheedle old, gray-bearded _Tempus_ into
making the wheels click backward till I could see again the
buffalo-herds darkening the green of Northwestern prairies. They and the
blanket Indian have passed, and the cowpuncher and Texas longhorns that
replaced them will soon be little more than a vivid memory. Already the
man with the plow is tearing up the brown sod that was a stamping-ground
for each in turn; the wheat-fields have doomed the sage-brush, and
truck-farms line the rivers where the wild cattle and the elk came down
to drink.
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