"Getting the last of your timber!" exclaimed Kent.
"Yes, the law lets 'em get the 'dead and down' stuff and who's going to swear it's fresh stuff that he cut this summer and will get out next winter?"
"Do you mean he's up cutting your pines now?" cried Lydia, aghast.
"No! No!" impatiently. "His half breeds do that."
"But how does he come to be taking your wood? Why don't you go to see him yourself?" asked Kent.
"I can't answer either of those questions," replied Charlie, sullenly.
The two young whites thought of the attack on Levine, and looked at each other apprehensively.
"Won't the Indian Agent stop him?" asked Lydia.
"He! Why, he's deep in the mire himself with Dave Marshall. My God, Margery Marshall went to New York on a blind Indian boy's pines! Lydia, save my pines for me! They belong to my tribe. My father kept them and so did his father for his people. As long as they had those miles of pines, they had a place for the tribe to live. Father was going to Washington three years ago to tell the president about the graft when they shot him from ambush. If I put up a fight, they'll shoot me. My father wanted me to learn white ways so I could protect the tribe. And the more I learn of white ways the more I realize I'm helpless. Lydia, won't you help us?"
Neither Kent nor Lydia ever had seen Charlie thus before. He was neither arrogant nor sullen. He was pleading with a tragic hopelessness that moved his two hearers profoundly.
"Oh, Charlie! I _will_ try," cried Lydia. "I truly will."
"I knew you would," said Charlie, huskily, and he turned back abruptly to the camp.
"Gee!" exclaimed Kent. "Chapter number two!"
Lydia stamped her foot. "How can you speak so, Kent! It's a frightful thing!"
"Sure it's frightful, but it can't be helped. The whites have got to have this land. Might's right."
"What makes the whites so crazy for it?" asked Lydia.
Lydia stared about her. Supposing, she thought, that she owned a hundred acres of this pine land. She forgot Kent and concentrated every force of her mind on sensing what land ownership would mean. And suddenly there woke in her, her racial hunger for land. Suddenly there stirred within her a desire for acreage, for trees, soil, stream and shrub, a wide demesne that should be hers and her children's forever. She was still too young to trace the hunger back to its primal source, the desire for permanency, the yearning to possess that which is the first and the last of existence, which neither moth nor dust can corrupt nor thieves break through and steal. But somewhere back in her still childish mind a lust for a wide domain of pine land bestirred itself to begin battle with the sense of right and justice that her heart of hearts told her Levine was outraging.