1,99 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 1,99 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 1,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Acres of Unrest," Max Brand weaves a gripping narrative set against the rugged backdrop of the American West, exploring themes of conflict, loyalty, and the unyielding spirit of humanity. His prose blends realistic dialogue with evocative descriptions, creating an immersive atmosphere that captures the complexities of frontier life. Brand, known for his distinctive style that often incorporates elements of adventure and psychological depth, deftly examines the moral ambiguities faced by his characters, revealing their inner turmoils amid external challenges. This novel fits within the larger literary context of early 20th-century Western fiction, which frequently interrogates the ideals of heroism and the meaning of justice in a lawless land. Max Brand, the pen name of Frederick Schiller Faust, was a prolific author whose extensive career spanned various genres, including Westerns, romance, and screenwriting. His personal experiences'—ranging from a tumultuous childhood to a fascination with the Old West'—greatly influenced his storytelling. Moreover, his commitment to portraying authentic emotions within the rugged landscapes of his narratives underscored his belief in the intrinsic struggle for identity and purpose in a rapidly changing society. "Acres of Unrest" stands as an essential read for enthusiasts of Western literature and anyone intrigued by the intricacies of human nature. Brand's compelling storytelling and character development invite readers to reflect on their own ideals and the moral dilemmas faced in pursuit of fulfillment. This novel not only entertains but also provokes thought, making it a significant contribution to the canon of American literature. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
Ähnliche
Acres of Unrest
Table of Contents
Introduction
Across a stretch of uneasy country, the pressure of unrest forces people to decide what they stand for, revealing how quickly private loyalties and public order collide when belonging and survival are at stake.
Acres of Unrest is a novel by Max Brand, the widely read pen name of Frederick Schiller Faust, whose work shaped much of early twentieth-century popular fiction. Brand became synonymous with frontier narratives and adventure tales published in the pulp magazines and later in book form during the 1910s through the 1940s. Situated within that tradition, this book draws on the conventions that made his name enduring: a landscape defined by distance and danger, communities negotiating fragile peace, and protagonists tempered by ordeal. The publication context reflects an era of briskly paced storytelling crafted for broad readership and vivid, immediate engagement.
Without delving into spoilers, the premise orients readers to a community in which calm proves deceptive and conflict gathers momentum. The narrative tightens around individuals whose choices ripple across a larger social fabric, so that personal stakes and collective consequences remain inseparable. Expect a story that moves with steady propulsion, balancing action with moral pressure and a watchful attention to setting. The mood is tense yet lucid, the voice direct rather than ornate, and the arc shaped by escalating tests that measure character against circumstance. In that sense, it offers a classic pulp-era immersion tuned to contemporary readability.
Key themes emerge from the friction between self-reliance and shared responsibility. The book probes what it means to hold a code in a place where law can be distant or contested, and how reputations form, stick, and sometimes betray the people who carry them. Questions of land and livelihood serve as a backdrop for meditations on trust, loyalty, and the cost of decisive action. Unrest is not merely social but also inward, drawing attention to the way fear, pride, and hope can alternately guide and misguide. Power, vulnerability, and conscience are placed in continual, revealing conversation.
Max Brand’s craftsmanship lies in an economical style that privileges momentum and clarity while leaving space for inference. Scenes tend to pivot on gestures, silences, and abrupt turns, allowing readers to sense the weight of choice without heavy exposition. The prose favors rhythmic, forward motion; the dialogue, spare and purposeful; the description, selective and telling. Even as the plot keeps pressure on, the narration invites a steady reckoning with ambiguity. Brand’s broader body of work often blends archetypal situations with nuanced interior stakes, and this novel aligns with that approach, matching mythic outlines to immediate, human-scale feeling.
For readers today, the book resonates as a study in how communities manage conflict, especially when institutions feel fragile and the burden of judgment falls on individuals. It engages recurring questions about who gets to decide what is fair, how far one goes to protect a claim or a neighbor, and what peace is worth when bitterness lingers. Its emotional appeal lies in the ache of contested belonging; its intellectual appeal in the examination of authority, legitimacy, and consent. By charting how unrest accumulates, it offers a lens on escalation, responsibility, and the possibility—never guaranteed—of restoration.
Approached on its own terms, Acres of Unrest promises a taut, absorbing experience rooted in landscape, character, and choice. It rewards readers who enjoy the cadence of classic popular fiction as well as those interested in moral complexity carried by action rather than abstraction. As part of Max Brand’s long-standing legacy, it stands at the crossroads of entertainment and inquiry, asking what kind of order people can make when certainty is scarce. Read for its urgency, its clear lines, and its enduring questions; stay for the quiet moments when conviction, doubt, and courage meet on uncertain ground.
Synopsis
The story opens on a troubled stretch of range where neighboring outfits eye one another across fencelines and watercourses. Drought, shifting boundaries, and the spread of barbed wire have strained old understandings. Small ranchers and larger cattle interests compete for grass and access to the creek, while the circuit judge is far away and the local law works with limited authority. Riders move by night, sign disappears on hard ground, and tempers rise with the heat. Against this unsettled backdrop, rumors of organized mischief turn ordinary grievances into dangerous feuds, and every corral or canyon might shelter the spark that sets the valley ablaze.
Into this uneasy landscape comes a quiet, capable rider who wants an honest job and a measure of peace. He keeps his past close and his gun holstered, preferring steady work to loud talk. Soon he finds a place with a hard-pressed outfit whose fortunes depend on keeping their herd intact and their water rights respected. The foreman wants action, the bookkeeper wants figures to add up, and the owner needs a reliable hand who does not rattle. The newcomer listens more than he speaks, reads sign on the trail, and earns cautious trust by doing the hard tasks without complaint.
Trouble announces itself through small incidents that leave large echoes: a night gate unlatched, a fence wire clipped, cattle drifting where they should not. A line cabin is ransacked with nothing obvious missing, and a messenger rides in from the flats with a tale of shadows slipping across the ridges. Whispered talk names old grudges and new ambitions, but nothing that would explain the pattern. The new hand watches, marks details, and learns faces in town and on the range: a patient lawman doing his best, a preacher urging calm, and riders who prefer answers to come from the muzzle of a gun.
A meeting meant to cool tempers does the opposite. Men argue over survey stakes and the memory of open range. Someone slams a chair, a pistol flashes, and by luck rather than judgment no one falls. Afterward, the valley fragments into wary clusters. The newcomer sees that each side carries a piece of the truth: fear of losing a livelihood, resentment over past losses, pride that will not bend. He begins to suspect the unrest is being coaxed and steered, not simply boiling over. Out on the ridgelines, he follows faint tracks and finds signs of riders who leave no brand behind.
The first real blow lands at night. Hooves thunder, a corral post splits, and a frightened mob surges toward a ravine. Quick work and cool heads keep disaster from becoming tragedy, but the message is plain: someone is willing to damage stock to tighten the screw. In the smoke and shouting, the newcomer pulls a trapped rider clear and earns a debt that will matter later. The outfit doubles guards and talks of hunting parties. Some demand swift payback. Others argue for the law. The newcomer, feeling the stakes deepen, resolves to learn whether the hand guiding events lies within or without.
A trail of half-clues sharpens into a direction: forged notes, a brand iron left cooling, a horse with a distinctive stride seen where it should not be. An easy scapegoat is offered to the town, and the crowd is ready to accept the name. The newcomer refuses the simple answer and rides to the line shack where the puzzle’s missing piece might be found. A quiet exchange becomes a brutal scuffle; a warning shot breaks the night; and a cryptic hint points him back toward men he has begun to trust. He weighs duty against survival, restraint against the urge to strike first.
With talk failing and tempers shortening, the newcomer proposes a measured plan that depends on patience and position. A narrow pass, a false trail, and a lantern’s signal are arranged to draw out the hand behind the unrest. Riders who would not sit the same table agree to share a ridge for one night. When the moment comes, nerves tighten and fingers hover near leather. A face emerges from shadow that forces hard reckonings about loyalty and greed. The newcomer must decide whether to press the trigger or hold the line for the law, knowing both choices carry lasting costs.
The confrontation yields answers and consequences without easing every hurt. The law steps in where it can, and the range settles into a more stable pattern: grazing schedules are set, water rights are counted, and men who rode apart begin to nod again in the street. Fences still stand, but they no longer buzz with the expectation of gunfire. The newcomer keeps no trophies, knowing quiet is an achievement best left unremarked. He considers the road ahead, a little richer in trust and a little poorer in certainty. The valley remains itself: hard country, but now less likely to erupt.
Across these events, the book tracks the fragile boundary between order and violence in a land where work, pride, and survival intersect. It emphasizes how unrest can be orchestrated from small slights and hidden deals, and how steadiness can check a stampede of suspicion. Its turns are driven less by spectacle than by choices made under pressure: when to speak, when to ride, when to wait. The message is clear without sermon: peace requires resolve and compromise; justice matters only if it outlasts a shot. Within that frame, the acres of unrest become ground where honor can stand and hold.
Historical Context
Max Brand situates Acres of Unrest in the waning years of the open-range West, roughly the 1880s to early 1900s, in a ranching landscape of high plains and mountain basins where cattle outfits, small homesteads, and nascent rail towns collide. The place evokes Wyoming, Montana, or the Intermountain West: sagebrush valleys, rimrock, and river-fed meadows whose value depends on access to grass, water, and trails. County seats dominated by stock associations, sparse deputy forces, and long distances foster extra-legal methods of settling disputes. Brand, writing in the 1920s–1930s, looks back on this contested geography to stage conflicts over land, legitimacy, and power that defined the historical frontier’s final decades.
The Homestead Act of 1862 offered 160 acres to settlers who lived on and improved the land for five years, later complemented by the Timber Culture Act (1873) and Desert Land Act (1877). These statutes pushed hundreds of thousands into the Great Plains and the arid West, often beyond what 160 acres could sustain without irrigation. Speculation and fraudulent entries were common, and overlapping claims sparked litigation and violence. In Acres of Unrest, quarrels over surveyed lines, proving-up requirements, and the sheer insufficiency of small allotments mirror these realities. The novel’s disputes over who has the right to occupy and fence specific acres track directly with the homestead-era legal framework.
Barbed wire, patented by Joseph F. Glidden in 1874 in DeKalb, Illinois, rapidly transformed Western property regimes. By the early 1880s, large outfits fenced immense tracts, sometimes including public land, severing historic trails and water access. The Texas Fence-Cutting Wars (1883–1884) saw armed bands severing wire in response; the Texas Legislature criminalized fence cutting in 1884, while President Grover Cleveland’s administration (1885) ordered the removal of illegal fences from federal lands. Acres of Unrest channels this crucible: property lines become instruments of power rather than mere markers, and the violence around gates, drift fences, and right-of-way reproduces the era’s bitter contest between open-range custom and privatized space.
The Johnson County War (Wyoming, April 1892) epitomized range conflict. Leaders of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association assembled roughly 50 hired gunmen, many from Texas, to eliminate alleged rustlers and intimidate small ranchers. After killing Nick Ray and Nate Champion at the KC Ranch on April 9, the invaders were besieged at the TA Ranch until the U.S. Cavalry from Fort McKinney, dispatched by President Benjamin Harrison at Governor Amos Barber’s request, intervened. Indictments followed, but few convictions. Acres of Unrest echoes this pattern: wealthy cattle interests deploy private violence, local juries and officials are compromised, and smallholders face collective punishment, capturing the political economy of intimidation that shadowed Wyoming in the 1890s.
The catastrophic winter of 1886–1887, remembered as the Great Die-Up, devastated open-range herds across the Northern Plains. Overgrazed ranges, a summer drought in 1886, and blizzards from late 1886 into early 1887 killed an estimated 40–60 percent of cattle regionally, with some outfits losing upward of 90 percent. British and Eastern investors pulled out, and surviving ranches pivoted to fenced pastures, haying, and smaller, managed herds. The economic contraction tightened credit and intensified competition for the best meadows and water. In the novel’s world, desperate measures—claim jumping, foreclosure pressure, and hired guns—emerge from precisely this post-crash environment, when livelihoods hinged on a few salvageable sections of grass.
Western water law hardened around prior appropriation—first in time, first in right—during the late nineteenth century. The Carey Act (1894) encouraged state-facilitated irrigation, and the Reclamation Act (1902) created the U.S. Reclamation Service, launching projects like the Shoshone Project near Cody, Wyoming (Buffalo Bill Dam, authorized 1904, completed 1910). Ditches, headgates, and decreed flows became more valuable than dry acreage. Conflicts flared when upstream diversions or private ditch companies constrained downstream rights. Acres of Unrest reflects this hydrological politics: control of a headgate or ditch easement confers economic sovereignty, and the novel’s power struggles over irrigation mirror the historical consolidation of land value around adjudicated water claims.
Railroads reconfigured Western economies and land tenure. The First Transcontinental Railroad met at Promontory Summit in 1869; the Northern Pacific reached completion in 1883. Railheads like Abilene (established as a cattle-shipping point in 1867 by Joseph McCoy), Dodge City, and later Amarillo redirected the Texas cattle trade, while Kansas quarantine laws in 1885 restricted longhorn drives due to Texas fever, hastening the end of trail herding. Checkerboard land grants fueled speculation and town formation, and freight rates could make or break ranchers. In Acres of Unrest, the arrival or promised spur of a railroad inflates prices, invites syndicates, and sharpens class conflict, reproducing the historical leverage rail companies wielded.
As social and political critique, the book exposes how legal forms—homestead patents, fence statutes, water decrees—were weaponized by capital-rich actors to dispossess or discipline small operators. It interrogates county-level patronage systems in which stock associations capture sheriffs, juries, and newspapers, normalizing vigilantism while invoking the language of order. By dramatizing extra-legal raids, coerced sales, and selective prosecutions, the narrative challenges frontier myths of equal opportunity. It highlights how monopolized water, strategic fencing, and speculative rail promises stratified communities along class lines. The portrait is not nostalgic; it is diagnostic, revealing a political economy that privileged consolidation over common use and law over justice.
Acres of Unrest
CHAPTER I
This was the day of Ross Hale. The whole county knew it. When he got up that morning—and he had slept very little the night before. you may be sure—he looked at himself in the mirror and decided that he would now take ten years off his age and grow young once more.
He put on his best suit. scowling when he saw how shiny it was at the elbows. Then he went out and hitched his only team to the buckboard. It was a sorry pair, incurably thin, incurably down-headed, hardly fit to drag their feet along the road with the old buckboard trailing them, although Ross Hale forced them to carry him across the hills when he had to ride range.
Ross was desperately ashamed to go in for the great occasion in such a guise as this; nevertheless, he was mildly comforted by the knowledge that everyone understood. The whole county knew the wager that had been made between Ross and Andy Hale eleven years before, and the whole county was burning with excitement now that the decision was about to be made.
Eleven years before—to tell all briefly—the wives of Ross and Andy Hale were caught in a fire that broke out in the house of Andy. They were burned to death in spite of the great effort made to save them, The two brothers were left in exactly the same condition. They were of the same age, for they were twins, they were widowers, and they had each a boy of the same age.
In the winter that followed, when they talked over what the world might hold for each of them and for their boys, they laid their schemes, in their own ways, for the development of the young lives. To Andy Hale there was only one existence under the stars that was worthwhile. His argument ran something like this:
"Nobody but a fool would want to live in the city, if he could get away from it. No, everybody with good sense prefers to live in the country. Why? Because he ain't so crowded, in the country. He's got elbow room and breathing space. And that's the reason that he goes out from the cities. Well, if he goes to the country for that reason, where in the world will he find more elbow room than right here in this county? Where will he find better mountains or more of them? Where will he find better grass for his horses and his cows? Tell me, partner?"
Andy Hale, who was so exactly suited by this world that he found around him, decided that he would raise his son to follow in his footsteps and do exactly as he had done. He took pains that young Charlie Hale should attend the same tumble-down shack of a school where he himself had learned his letters. He also took care that Charlie did not remain in the school a minute longer than his father had remained before him.
"What made a man of me is going to make a man of my boy," he announced to the world at large—and particularly to his brother, for there was a great contest on between them.
The views of Ross Hale's differed materially from those of his twin brother's. Ross could not tell just what was wrong with the range. He did not mind riding range; he was a cowboy of sorts—so good with a gun that he could have made a living as a professional hunter, if nothing better had come to his hand. On the whole, although he thought that this life might be well enough, he dimly recognized the faint horizon of another universe, a sort of Milky Way that streaked thinly across his sky. And that other universe was the world of mind and soul.
In just what fashion the human brain might expand and flower, Ross Hale did not know. But he knew that he was extremely eager that his son should wander through the unknown spaces where his own feet had never trod. So he came to the great decision that young Peter Hale should he sent to a school where he could be prepared for a great Eastern university.
He consulted the rich rancher, Crowell, on the subject, and Crowell, in his usual positive manner, said: "There is only one place in the world where an American boy may be properly prepared to enter a great American university. That place is Huntley School[1]. Furthermore, there is only one great American university. But that I need not tell you, because, if your boy attends the Huntley School, he will be sure to know the name of the only real university before he gets out of the doors."
The matter was thus settled for the rancher, but when he began to look into the matter, he found that this was a staggering thing. Education was not a gift in the Eastern states; it was something that had to be paid for, and often paid for through the nose. However, Anthony Crowell had spoken. And upon such matters no man on the range would dare to question his opinion, however little Crowell apparently knew about cows, poor fellow. Thus, it never came into Ross's mind that he might be able to provide for his son more reasonably.
He had to clean up his savings in cash at the bank in order to provide for the very first year at Huntley School. But he made the provision, and, after that, he could not resist the desire to redeem the money he had already spent by completing the work that he had begun. And each succeeding year was more expensive than the one before.
Since he could not afford to spend $200 on a trip East to see his boy, he could not afford to spend the same amount of money in bringing his boy West to see him. Therefore the years slid along, one after the other, with more and more money departing from the packet of Ross Hale, and never a glimpse of his boy, Peter, in the flesh.
Peter himself, even when he was only fourteen, realized that he must be a heavy drain, and he wrote home to say that there were various ways of picking up quite a bit of pocket money and arranging matters so that, when he got to the college age, he would be able to provide his own board and lodging—if his father could only manage the tuition fee. This letter gave a ray of hope to the rancher. He carried it to his educational oracle, Mr. Anthony Crowell.
The latter said instantly: "Education serves two purposes, Hale.[1q] In the first place, it gives a youngster mental discipline and it pours a certain quantity of facts into his mind, together with the knowledge of how to go about collecting new facts about new subjects, even after he has left school. But on the other hand, education gives a boy a prolonged childhood. It gives him a longer season during which the burden of the weary world is removed from his shoulders, Hale. He plays out in the sun without a bit of thought for the shadows that are to come. His body grows straight and his muscles grow strong. And his mind opens its gates and gathers in impressions. But if you make a poor lad work his way through school, the weight of the world is introduced, and it crushes flat that play existence that should fill the school from wall to wall. School is not for work only. It is primarily a social experience and a place where the boy can remain a child until he is actually forced to take on the duties of a man... until he yearns to take them on, Hale. That's the great thing."
Ross Hale did not understand a great part of this speech, and what was clear to him was really hardly more than that Anthony Crowell did not advise allowing a boy to work his way through a school. This was enough. Of these matters, Ross Hale knew nothing, and he was such a frank and honest man that he never dreamed of pretending an opinion in matters where he was not learned by experience.
He went back home and wrote to his boy in the very spirit of the lecture that had just been read to him. He wrote, in effect:
Spread your elbows at the board, and do not regard any reasonable expense. The ranch is doing very well. I want you to have a good time, along with your studies!
Then he went down to see his brother Andy and sold him the southeast forty- acre field that Andy had been yearning for all these many, many years.
The resolution, which Andy and Ross had taken, of developing their boys according to their own views, had put Andy on his honor. He had changed his old way of living, ceased being a happy-go-lucky, free-swinging individual, without that understrain of seriousness that had always been a shadow in the life of his twin brother. But when he saw Ross settling down and making great sacrifices for his boy, Andy changed his own way of life, little by little. A certain number of years hence—so the agreement between Ross and Andy went—they were to produce their sons to Will Nast, the sheriff. And they would then accept the verdict that the sheriff might pronounce as to which was the finer man and the more valuable citizen.
This was a contest upon which a great deal depended. There was no doubt but that Peter Hale would come from his education a fine lad, and Charlie Hale would need a great deal to compete against him and keep from being disgraced. So Andy Hale did two things. In the first place, he seriously impressed on his boy the necessity of doing all things well that are expected from a cowpuncher and a range rider. In the second place, he set about building up a respectable property, for his dream was that, at the end of the probation period, Charlie might appear as the prospective proprietor of a fine bit of land and cows. That would give point and emphasis to all the qualifications that Charlie might possess as a cowpuncher.
So Andy, from being a free spender, became a most thrifty and saving soul, and, as the years went on, his place began to show all the effects that industry and care and forethought could present. He had good fortune, also, and what he turned his hand to prospered exceedingly. His cattle were free from sickness and plagues. When he tried his hand at crop raising, he got bumper returns of wheat and barley. And he always managed to sell at the top of the market and buy everything at the bottom.
"I dunno how it is," said Andy Hale, marveling at himself.
"Everything seems to turn out well."
There was one touch of learning in Ross Hale. He used it now: "You've sold yourself for the touch of Midas," he said.
CHAPTER II
Andy did not know what the touch of Midas[2] might be. But he gathered from the sneering tone of his brother that it was something rather disgraceful, and he returned a hot answer. Humility was not the chief virtue of Ross Hale, and so one word led to another until they parted from each other in passion and never again returned to the former kindly footing.
No doubt, Ross Hale should have been big enough of soul to look upon the waxing prosperity of Andrew without jealousy, but he could not control himself. About this time, too, Andrew took a second wife, and for some reason Ross felt that this was an indubitable token of the other's prosperity, for, after all, wives cost money. Ross Hale felt that his brother was getting money to burn. Moreover, on his way to and from town, the road passed close to the house of Andrew, and Ross could see, with almost every trip, some new token of the comfort of his brother.
There was either a new bit of fencing, or else a new brand of cattle among those in the fields—for Andrew had taken to buying up the run—down and starveling stock of the neighborhood. Perhaps there was a new coat of paint on house or barn—fancy wasting paint on barns!—or the roof of some brand-new shed piercing the horizon. Andrew's ranch was beginning to extend itself, too. Andrew needed more land, and yet more land. He was renting great acres of alfalfa among the irrigated little valleys among the foothills and he was carting the produce of alfalfa to his ranch. Then he bought up, in the dreary winter of the year, half-starved stock from far ranges, where the winter offered wretched pittance to the grazing cows. Yet these cattle, almost too thin to be driven to his ranch, soon grew plump. They were wretched poor strains, most of them, but they sold at so much a pound, once they were fattened, and Andrew always knew just when to take his stock to market to get the top prices.
His fields were expanding, therefore, to meet his requirements. He did not buy rashly, but a little here and a corner there, when one of his neighbors was in a desperate need of hard cash. Clever Andrew was so well established by now that the banks in town were fighting to get his business, and they were more than willing to lend him money, all the money that he could use, at six percent.
"Someday it'll be the ruin of him," said Ross Hale darkly and bitterly, "usin' money like this, because the money sharks'll swaller him. It ain't gonna be for the lack of my advice to keep him from it!"
He dressed himself in his best clothes—that he might pass the inspection of the wife of Andrew—and rode over to offer that advice and, incidentally, to see if it were true that Andy was laying out the foundations for a barn that would hold 300 tons of hay. It was true; he found Andy assisting the workers to sink the foundations. Part of those foundations had been dug already and laid, and the building was to be built upon—concrete piles!
Ross Hale stared with wonder and sharp envy gnawing at his heart. Standing there, he spoke out his heart to his brother and gave his warning against the money sharks, as he had conceived it. Andrew listened with an intent frown, at first, then shaking his head and smiling. At last he laid his hand upon Ross's shoulder.
"You mean me the best in the world, I hope," he said. "I wouldn't think that it was just envy of me that brung you over here, Ross. You mean me good, and that's why you warn me. And lemme tell you that sometimes you're right, and there's more than one man that's working for a bank and not for himself. But not me, Ross. No, not me. I've learned something, and I tell you that, so long as I got my wits about me, I'm gonna keep right on borrowing from the banks. Why? Because I need capital that I ain't got. I want to go out and buy when the season is right. When I hear that there's a bunch of a hundred worn-down, dying cows some place, I want to be able to ride right out and pay down the cash and snatch up that band. I can't do it with my own money. I could only bargain for a corner of that whole herd. Well, the bank lends me that money at six percent interest, but maybe I make hundreds of percent in the meantime. I give you an example... last November I heard of a batch of eighty dogies down in the Sawtrell Valley dying of hunger... no way to save them. Well, I borrowed money from the bank to buy them. Now look at what happened. Ten months later I sold off that batch. Eight of them had died. Too far gone for me to save them from starving to death. But seventy-two of them pulled through. The result was I cleaned up near twenty-five hundred dollars, old son! I paid back the bank a few days ago. Besides, I sank the twenty-five hundred in the vault, but not for long. I'm going to have that coin out again. It'll rot in the bank at a miserable rate of interest. I'll soon want that money out and working in my hands."
This was all a little bit beyond the ken of Ross Hale. He knew, however, that transactions that looked simply gigantic to him were as nothing in the capable hands of his brother, and he felt that time had transformed Andrew into a new and formidable force. To dare to gamble on such a scale—to clear $2,500 in cash in a single, simple transaction, and clearly to regard that transaction as a mere nothing. This was like handing fire to Ross Hale. He stared at Andrew with awe, and the spite of malice could not be kept a little from his eyes.
"Well, Andrew," he said, "I dunno that I understand all of these ways of doing business. But I wish you all kinds of luck."
"Thanks," said Andy, "and lemme give you a mite of advice... which is that, if you want to make money out of Durhams, you had ought to... "
"Curse the Durhams!" said Ross Hale. And well he might curse them, for disease was wasting his herd strangely and swiftly.
"Well," Andy said kindly, "you take care of your own business. How's things with Peter, though?"
A broad grin of triumph twisted the mouth of Ross Hale, and his eyes shone with triumph. He tried to make his voice casual and unimpressive. "I just heard from him, sort of indirect. Someone that knows him sent me along this clipping, but Peter himself, he wouldn't say nothing about it."
He took out a newspaper clipping, already well worn in the creases and the seams, telling the tale of how Huntley School, in its great annual football contest with Winraven School, had triumphed gloriously with two touchdowns to one, through the heroic work of young sixteen-year-old Peter Hale. His burly shoulders had burst through the line from his place at tackle, blocked a punt, and carried the ball to a touchdown. Again he had broken through and tackled a back, so hard that the fumbled ball was picked up by a fellow Huntley man, and so the second touchdown was achieved. There was not so very much about the game, but there was a great deal about Peter Hale. His name was in the big, flaring headline. And there was a whole long paragraph, at the beginning of the story, telling about the manner in which stars are born and made.
This missive was read through twice, from beginning to end, by Andy Hale, and his lips pinched a little as he handed it back.
"Curse it, Ross," he said frankly. "I really dunno whether to be proud of having that boy for a nephew, or to envy you for having such a son. Still, I ain't ashamed of my Charlie, only I don't think that he's any such headliner as all of this."
He turned his head to mark Charlie in person, big and bronzed, healthy and laughing and handsome, as he galloped his big, fast cow pony around the corner of the barn.
"He's sixteen, but he does a man's work," said Andy Hale. "Maybe he don't speak trimmed-up garden English, like your boy most likely does, but he can tell which side his bread is buttered on, and he knows how to ask for more. I ain't ashamed of my Charlie, even if he ain't made any touchdowns."
However, Ross Hale felt, when he rode back home that night, that he had scored a great triumph. True he had sold the corner lot to Andrew. But he had been able to sit in the sun of Peter's glory and lord it over the others. That was enough. In the meantime, if he had to ride back to a cheerless house and to a cold kitchen, he felt that it was worth the agony. And that night he entered his damp bedroom and went to sleep well acclimated to his fate.
CHAPTER III
The scholastic reports were not so flattering as the athletic ones. In the fall, Peter roamed across the gridirons and did great, flashing things. In the winter he was a member of the ice hockey team for the school. In the spring he was on the baseball nine, and in the hot summer days he was straining his back over an oar in the Huntley eight. All of these things he did surpassingly well, and now and then a flattering note came like air from heaven to the eye of Ross Hale, far off in the mountain desert.
In his studies, Peter was just a bit above average—below that, at first—but making slow, sure progress. He had his stumbling blocks. Terse and uncommunicative as his letters always were, they once contained a wail on account of Latin, the bane of his soul. Immediately afterward a greater curse entered—clad in strange garments—Greek! Between them, they were nearly the undoing of poor Peter, but he managed to struggle through.
When he came into his seventeenth year, everything seemed much better to Peter. Studies went more easily. On the athletic field he was triumphant, and in his eighteenth year he completed his course in a blaze of glory—football captain—crew stroke. He stood on a peak even in brilliant Huntley School.
Then came the fall, and the heart of Ross Hale swelled with anticipation. He could not help writing to Peter:
Look here, Pete. I know that college is a place where you go to get an education. But I tell you what—I like to hear about you doing good in athletics. I can't understand what tackling a Greek verb may be like. But I can understand what smashing up a football line may be. I'm proud of your studies, Pete, my boy, but I'm a lot prouder of what you're doing in athletics—and most particular on the football field. Folks are reading a lot about you here in the papers—maybe you understand what I mean.
How hard it would have been for Peter really to understand. He could not know that another vast chunk of the old ranch had been sold to Andrew Hale, and that the remainder had been heavily mortgaged. And still there were three mortal years during which this education affair must be carried on.
The first college year brought more glory to Ross Hale. It was only freshman football; the Crimson would not take a player on the college eleven until his second year. But in that freshman team, Peter Hale roved up and down fields, breaking the hearts of opposing teams. They had made him an end. Eighteen-years- old and 190 pounds of him, but so lightning fast that he was always first down the field under a punt. And he was forever smashing through the other line to get at the ball carrier—to say nothing of the moments when he looped far out and speared passes out of the air, then zigzagging down the field, ripping the enemy apart as lightning divides the startled sky.
Track and crew also held his attention. He carved a name for himself in each. The heart of Ross Hale swelled big with expectation of the next fall, when his boy would stand in the varsity[3] eleven. Then real fame would come to him.
The fall came, and there were no press notices about Peter Hale—only this strange line in one paper:
The Crimson is not so strong in advancing the ball as it was expected. Simpson failed in his studies and cannot represent the Crimson on the gridiron this fall. Above all, the brilliant Hale, of whom so much was expected after his grand work on the freshman team, has been thrown out by a severe accident.
That was all.
It made Ross Hale ride half the night to get to town and send off a telegram:
Are you badly hurt, and when can you play again?
Father
He did not get a reply for two days. The answer read:
Out for a month or two. Nothing serious.
Pete
That somewhat allayed the anxiety of Ross Hale. Still, an accident that put a boy out for a month or two must be a rather bad one. He waited a week. Then he rode over to tell Crowell what was worrying him.
"Why," said Crowell, "don't you know what happened to your boy?"
"Good heavens," said the rancher, "you talk like it was serious, Mister Crowell!"
"Serious?" echoed Crowell, with a strange glance, Then he added hastily: "Now, I suppose it might have been worse."
"Yes," said the rancher, "it'll only keep him out for a month or two."
"Is that all he wrote to you?" Crowell asked.
"Yes," said Hale.
Crowell murmured something and looked hastily away. He seemed a little moved.
But Ross Hale rode back to his ranch and went on waiting.
Late October came—November—and still there was no word of Peter in the line-up.
