Peck's Bad Boy with the Cowboys by George W. Peck
page 51 of 117 (43%)
page 51 of 117 (43%)
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'Please, mister, let me alone, and let me nibble around and eat
the stuff you do not want, and we drive them into a bunch, the way the rich and mean iron-handed trusts drive the people, and then we turn in and club them with the ax handle of graft and greed, and we keep our power over them, if enough are killed off so we are in the majority, but the jackrabbits that escape the drive keep on breeding, like the poor people that the trusts try to exterminate. Some day the jackrabbit and the poor people will get nerve enough to fight back, and then the jackrabbit and the poor people will outnumber the men who fight them and kill them, and they will turn on the cowboys with the clubs, and the trusts with the big head, and drive those who now pursue them into corrals on the prairies and into penitentiaries in the states, and those who are pig-headed and cruel will get theirs, see?" I told Pa I thought I could see, though there were rabbit hairs in my eyes, and then I got Pa to get up and mount his horse, and we rode back to town with the gang, while the 5,000 rabbit carcasses were hauled to town in wagons and loaded on the cars. "Where do you send those jackrabbits?" asked Pa of the leader of the slayers, as he watched them loading the rabbits. "To the Chicago packing houses," said the man. "They make the finest canned chicken you ever et." "The devil, you say," said pa. "Then we have been working all day to make packing houses rich. Wouldn't that skin you?" Then we went to the hotel and I put court-plaster on Pa where the |
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