Defenders of Democracy Part 30

men, trained by long experience in its offices in this country.

This is done because, first, the organization is naturally anxious to view every country with American eyes; and, second, because a number of the agencies spoken of are under the influence of their Governments and, therefore, not always trustworthy. They are relied upon for a certain cla.s.s of news, as for instance, accidents by flood and field, where there is no reason for any misrepresentation on their part. But where it is a question which may involve national pride or interest, or where there is a possibility of partisanship or untruthfulness, the "A.P." men are trusted.

Now, a.s.sume that a fire has broken out in Benares, the sacred city of the Hindus, on the banks of the Ganges, and a hundred or a thousand people have lost their lives. Not far away, at Allahabad or at Calcutta, is a daily paper, having a correspondent at Benares, who reports the disaster fully. Some one on this paper sends the story, or as much of it as is of general rather than local interest, to the agent of the Reuter Company at Calcutta, Bombay, or Madras; and thence it is cabled to London and Hongkong, and Sydney and Tokio. At each of these places there are a.s.sociated Press men, one of whom picks it up and forwards it to New York.

The wide world is combed for news, and an incredibly short time is delivered and printed everywhere. When Pope [Leo] XIII died in Rome the fact was announced by an a.s.sociated Press dispatch in the columns of a San Francisco paper in nine minutes from the instant when he breathed his last. And this message was repeated back to London, Paris, and Rome, and gave those cities the first information of the event. When Port Arthur was taken by the j.a.panese in the war of 1896 it came to us in New York in fifty minutes, although it pa.s.sed through twenty-seven relay offices. Few of the operators transmitting it knew what the dispatch meant. But they understood the Latin letters, and sent it on from station to station, letter by letter.

When Peary came back from his great discovery in the Arctic Sea he reached Winter Harbor, on the coast of Labrador, and from there sent me a wireless message that he had nailed the Stars and Stripes to the North Pole. This went to Sydney, on Cape Breton Island, and was forwarded thence by cable and telegraph to New York.

The organization is cooperative in its character. As a condition of membership, each one belonging agrees to furnish to his fellow-members, either directly or through the a.s.sociation, and to them exclusively, the news of his vicinage, as gathered by him for his own paper. This const.i.tutes the large fountain from which our American news supply is drawn. But, as in the case of the foreign official agencies, if there be danger that an individual member is biased, or if the matter be one of high importance, our own trained and salaried staff men do the reporting. For this purpose, as well as for administrative work, there is a bureau in every leading city.

For the collection and interchange of this information we lease from the various telephone and telegraph companies, and operate with our own employees, something like fifty thousand miles of wires, stretching out in every direction through the country and touching every important center. To reach smaller cities, the telephone is employed. Everywhere in every land, and every moment of every day, there is ceaseless vigil for news.

People frequently ask what it costs thus to collect the news of the world. And we cannot answer. Our annual budget is between three and four million dollars. But this makes no account of the work done by the individual papers all over the world in reporting the matters and handling the news over to the agencies. Neither can we estimate the number of men and women engaged in this fashion.

It is easy to measure the cost of certain specific events; as, for instance, we expended twenty-eight thousand dollars to report the Martinique disaster. And the Russo-j.a.panese war cost us over three hundred thousand dollars.

Such is an outline of our activities in what we call normal times.

But these are not normal times. When the great European war broke on us, eighteen months ago, all of the processes of civilization seemed to go down in an hour. And we suffered in common with others. Our international relations for the exchange of news were instantly dislocated. We had been able to impress the governments abroad with the value of an impartial and unpurchasable news service, as opposed to the venal type of journalism, which was too common on the European continent. And in our behalf they had abolished their censorships. They had accorded us rules a.s.suring us great rapidity in the transmission of our messages over their government telegraph lines. They had opened the doors of their chancelleries to our correspondents, and told them freely the news as it developed.

All the advantages ceased. The German news agency was prohibited from holding any intercourse with the English, French, or Russian organizations. Simultaneously, like commerce was interdicted in the other countries. The virtue of impartial news-gathering at once ceased to be quoted at par. Everywhere, in all of the warring lands the Biblical rule that "he that is not with me is against me,"

became the controlling view. Government telegrams were obviously very important and there was no time to consider anywhere any of the promised speed in sending our dispatches. Finally, censorships were imposed. This was quite proper in principle. Censorships are always necessary in time of war. But it is desirable, from every point of view, that they be intelligent, and that is not always the case.

Nevertheless, we have fared pretty well in the business of reporting this war. We have made distinct progress in teaching the belligerents that we hold no brief for any one of them, and, while each would much rather have us plead his cause, they are coming to see why we cannot and ought not do so. And our men are everywhere respected and accorded as large privileges as, perhaps, in the light of the tension of the hour, could be reasonably asked.

[signed] Melville E. Stone

Pan and the Pot-Hunter

They are not many who are privileged to learn that the forces of the Wilderness are as G.o.ds, distributing benefits, and, from such as have earned them, taking even handed reprisals. Only the Greeks of all peoples realized this in its entirety, and them the G.o.ds repaid with the pure joy of creation which is the special prerogative of G.o.ds.

But Greenhow had heard nothing of the Greeks save as a symbol of all unintelligibility, and of the G.o.ds not at all. His stock was out of England by way of the Tennessee mountains, drifting Pacific coastward after the war of the Rebellion, and he was a Pot Hunter by occasion and inclination. The occasion he owned to being born in one of the bays of the southerly Sierras where the plent.i.tude of wild life reduced pot hunting to the degree of easy murder.

A Pot Hunter, you understand, is a business man. He is out for what he can get, and regards game laws as an interference with the healthful interactions of compet.i.tion. Greenhow potted quail in the Temblors where by simply rolling out of his blanket he could bag two score at a shot as they flocked, sleek and stately blue, down the runways to the drinking places. He took p.r.o.nghorn at Castac with a repeating rifle and a lure of his red necktie held aloft on a cleaning rod, and packed them four to a mule-back down the Tejon to Summerfield. He shot farrow does and fished out of season, and had never heard of the sportsmanly obligation to throw back the fingerlings. Anything that made gunning worth while to the man who came after you was, by Greenhow's reckoning, a menace to pot hunting.

There were Indians in those parts who could have told him better--notable hunters who never shot swimming deer nor does with fawn nor any game unaware; who prayed permission of the Wuld before they went to hunt, and left offal for their little brothers of the Wilderness. Indians know. But Greenhow, being a business man, opined that Indians were improvident, and not being even good at his business, fouled the waters where he camped, left man traces in his trails and neglected to put out his fires properly.

Whole hillsides where the deer had browsed were burnt off bare as your hand in the wake of the pot hunter. Thus in due course, though Greenhow laid it to the increasing severity of game laws framed in the interests of city sportsmen, who preferred working hard for their venison to buying it comfortably in the open market, pot hunting grew so little profitable that he determined to leave it off altogether an become a Settler. Not however until he had earned the reprisal of the G.o.ds, of whom in a dozen years he had not even become aware.

In the Spring of the year the Tonkawanda irrigation district was opened, he settled himself on a spur of San Jacinto where it plunges like a great dolphin in the green swell of the camissal, and throws up a lacy foam of chaparral along its sides. Below him, dotted over the flat reach of the mesa, the four square clearings of the Homesteaders showed along the line of the great ca.n.a.l, keen and blue as the cutting edge of civilization. There was a deep-soil level under the nose of San Jacinto--rabbits used to play there until Greenhow took to potting them for his breakfast--and a stream bubbled from under the hill to waste in the meadow.

Greenhow built a shack under a live oak there and fancied himself in the character of a proprietor. He reckoned that in the three years before his vineyard came into bearing, he could pot-hunt in the hills behind his clearing for the benefit of the Homesteaders.

It was altogether a lovely habitation. Camise grew flush with the meadow and the flanks of San Jacinto shivered and sparkled with the wind that turned the thousand leaves of the chaparral. Under the wind one caught at times the slow deep chuckle of the water.

Greenhow should have been warned by that. In just such tones the ancient Greeks had heard the great G.o.d Pan laughing in the woods under Parna.s.sus,--which was Greek indeed to the Pot Hunter.

Greenhow was thirty-four when he took out his preemption papers and planted his first acre of vines. For reasons best known to the G.o.ds, the deer kept well away from that side of the San Jacinto that year. Greenhow enlarged the meadow and turned up ground for a garden; he became acquainted with his neighbors and learned that they had prejudices in favor of game regulations, also that one of them had a daughter. She had white, even teeth that flashed when she laughed; the whole effect of her was as sound and as appetizing as a piece of ripe fruit. Greenhow told her that the prospect of having a home of his own was an incentive such as pot-hunting held out to no man. He looked as he said it, a very brother to Nimrod, for as yet the Pot had not marked him.

He stood straight; his eyes had the deep, varying blueness of lake water. Little wisps and burrs, odors of the forest clung about his clothing; a beard covered his slack, formless mouth. When he told the Homesteader's daughter how the stars went by on heather planted headlands and how the bucks belled the does at the bottom of deep canons in October, she heard in it the call of the trail and young Adventure. Times when she would see from the level of her father's quarter section the smoke of the Pot Hunter's cabin rising blue against the glistening green of the live oak, she thought that life might have a wilder, sweeter tang there about the roots of the mountain.

In his second Spring when the camissal foamed all white with bloom and the welter of yellow violets ran in the gra.s.s under it like fire, Greenhow built a lean-to to his house and made the discovery that the oak which jutted out from the barranca behind it was of just the right height from the ground to make a swing for a child, which caused him a strange pleasant embarra.s.sment.

"Look kind o' nice to see a little feller playin' round," he admitted to himself, and the same evening went down to call on the Homesteader's daughter.

That night the watchful guardians of the Wild sent the mule-deer to Harry the man who had been a pot-hunter. A buck of three years came down the draw by the watercourse and nibbled the young shoots of the vines where he could reach them across the rabbit proof fencing that the settler had drawn about his planted acres. Not that the wire netting would have stopped him; this was merely the opening of the game. Three days later he spent the night in the kitchen garden and cropped the tips of the newly planted orchard.

After that the two of them put in nearly the whole of the growing season dodging one another through the close twigged manzanita, lilac, laurel and mahogany that broke upward along the shining bouldered coasts of San Jacinto. the chaparral at this season took all the changes of the incoming surf, blue in the shadows, darkling green about the heads of the gulches, or riffling with the white under side of wind-lifted leaves. Once its murmurous swell had closed over them, the mule-deer would have his own way with the Pot Hunter. Often after laborious hours spent in repairing the garden, the man would hear his enemy coughing in the gully behind the house, and take up his rifle to put in the rest of the day snaking through the breathless fifteen foot cover, only to have a glimpse of the buck at last dashing back the late light from glittering antlers as he bounded up inaccessible rocky stairs. This was the more exasperating since Greenhow had promised the antlers to the Homesteader's daughter.

When the surface of the camissal had taken on the brown tones of weed under sea water and the young cl.u.s.ters of the grapes were set--for this was the year the vineyard was expected to come into bearing--the mule-deer disappeared altogether from that district, and Greenhow went back hopefully to rooting the joint gra.s.s out of the garden. But about the time he should have been rubbing the velvet off his horns among the junipers of the high ridges, the mule-deer came back with two of his companions and fattened on the fruit of the vineyard. They went up and down the rows ruining with selective bites the finest cl.u.s.ters. During the day they lay up like cattle under the quaking aspens beyond the highest, wind-whitened spay of the chaparral, and came down to feast day by day as the sun ripened the swelling amber globules. They slipped between the barbs of the fine wired fence without so much as changing a leg or altering their long, loping stride; and what they left the quail took.

In pattering droves of hundreds they trekked in from the camise before there was light enough to shoot by, and nipped once and with precision at the ripest in every bunch. Afterward they dusted themselves in the chaparral and twitted the proprietor with soft contented noises. At the end of the October rut the deer came back plentifully to the Tonkawanda District, and Greenhow gave up the greater part of the rainy season to auditing his account with them. He spent whole days scanning the winter colored slope for the flicker and slide of light on a hairy flank that betrayed his enemy, or, rifle in hand, stalking a patch of choke cherry and manzanita within which the mule-deer could snake and crawl for hours by intricacies of doubling and back tracking that yielded not a square inch of target and no more than the dust of his final disappearance. Wood gatherers heard at times above their heads the discontented whine of deflected bullets. Windy mornings the quarry would signal from the high barrens by slow stiff legged bounds that seemed to invite the Pot Hunter's fire, and at the end of a day's tracking among the punishing stubs of the burnt district, Greenhow returning would hear the whistling cough of the mule-deer in the ravine not a rifle shot from the house.

In the meantime rabbits burrowed under the wire netting to bark his young trees, and an orchardist who held the job of ditch tender along the Tonkawanda, began to take an interest in the Homesteader's daughter. Seldom any smoke went up now from the cabin under the Dolphin's nose. Occasionally there rose a blue thread of it far up on the thinly forested crest of San Jacinto where the buck, bedded in the low brush between the bosses of the hills, kept a look out across the gullies from which Greenhow attempted to ambuscade him.

Day by day the man would vary the method of approach until almost within rifle range, and then the wind would change or there would be the click of gravel underfoot, or the sc.r.a.pe of a twig on stiff overalls, and suddenly the long oval ears would slope forward, the angular lines flow into grace and motion and the game would begin again.

Greenhow killed many deer that season and got himself under suspicion of the game warden, but never THE deer; and a very subtle change came over him, such a change as marks the point at which a man leaves off being hunter to become the hunted. He began to sense, with vague reactions of resentment, the personality of Power.

It was about the end of the rains that the DITCH TENDER who was also an orchardist, took the Homesteader's daughter to ride on his unoccupied Sunday afternoon. He had something to say to her which demanded the wide, uninterrupted s.p.a.ce of day. They went up toward the roots of the mountain between the green dikes of the chaparral, and he was so occupied with watching the pomegranate color of her cheeks and the nape of her neck where the sun touched it, that he failed to observe that it was she who turned the horses into the trail that led off the main road toward the shack of the Pot Hunter. The same change that had come over the man had fallen on his habitation. through the uncurtained window they saw heaps of unwashed dishes and the rusty stove, and along the eaves of the lean-to, a row of antlers bleaching.

"There's really no hope for a man," said the ditch tender, "once he gets THAT habit. It's worse than drink."

"Perhaps," said the Homesteader's daughter, "if he had any one at home who cared..." She was looking down at the bindweed that had crept about the roots of a banksia rose she had once given the Pot Hunter out of her own garden, and she sighed, but the ditch tender did not notice that either. He was thinking this was so good an opportunity for what he had to say that he drew the horses toward the end of the meadow where the stream came in, and explained to her particularly just what it meant to a man to have somebody at home who cared.

The Homesteader's daughter leaned against the oak as she listened, and lifted up her clear eyes with a light in them that was like a flash out of the deep, luminous eye of day, which caused the ditch tender the greatest possible satisfaction. He did not think it strange, immediately he had her answer, to hear the t.i.tter of the leaves of the lilac and the sudden throaty chuckle of the water.

"I am so happy," laughed the ditch tender, "that I fancy the whole world is laughing with me."

All this was not so long as you would imagine to look at the Pot Hunter. As time went on the marking of the pot came out on him very plainly. He acquired the shifty, sidelong gait of the meaner sort of predatory creatures. His clothes, his beard, his very features have much the appearance that his house has, as if the owner of it were distant on another occupation, and the camise has regained a considerable portion of his clearing. Owing to the vigilance of the game warden his is not a profitable business; also he is in disfavor with the homesteaders along the Tonkawanda who credit him with the disappearance of the mule-deer, once plentiful in that district. A solitary specimen is occasionally met by sportsmen along the back of San Jacinto, exceedingly gun wary. But if Greenhow had known a little more about the Greeks it might all have turned out quite differently.

[signed] Mary Austin

Men of the Sea

The afternoon sun etched our shadows on the whitewashed wall behind us. Acres of grain and gorse turned the moorland golden under a windy blue sky. In front of us the Bay of Biscay burned sapphire to the horizon.

"You men of the sea," I said, "attain a greater growth of soul than do we whose roots are in the land. You are men of wider spiritual vision, of deeper capacity than are we."