Tabor Evans Read Online Free

and keep them safe."
    "It's not quite that simplistic," Maidia said. For the first time since Longarm had seen her, she smiled. Her face changed completely.
    She went on, "Perhaps we have come to depend too much on others for protection, though. We've gotten to look on it as automatic, something we buy and take for granted, instead of looking out for ourselves."
    "Why'd you come out here, Miss Harkness?"
    Longarm was frankly curious. He'd seen all kinds of people during the years he'd been trying to bring civilized behavior to the raw, untamed West, but the Harkness woman didn't fit any of the compartments others had filled.
    She seemed surprised. "Why, to help, of course."
    "Help who?"
    "Those who need help the most. The Indians."
    "I see." Longarm made a business of blowing the ash off his cheroot. "Did they ask you to come help them?"
    "No, of course not. But other social workers have told me about their needs, and I decided that I'd be of more service to them than to the people I've been trying to help back home."
    Longarm was puzzled. "I reckon you lost me around that last bend, Miss Harkness. Is that what you do for a living? Just go around helping people?"
    "I suppose you could call it that. I'm a social worker, you see."
    "That's just it," he frowned. "I don't see. Now, I guess my business is helping folks by keeping robbers and killers and such behind bars, but from the way you were talking a while ago, you're just as concerned about helping them as you are about trying to do something for the folks they take advantage of."
    "Everybody has rights in life. Marshal Long, even the ones you call robbers and killers. After all, they're human beings too."
    Longarm grinned wryly. "After some of the things I've run into, I might put up a pretty argument that a lot of them ain't what you'd call good examples of human beings."
    "Nonsense. Why, you must remember the beautiful words Thomas Jefferson wrote in our Declaration of Independence: '... that all men are endowed with certain unalienable rights.'"
    "Oh, I know about the Declaration, sure. Only I disremember its saying anything about a body having a right to rob and maim and kill."
    "You're evading the issue, Marshal," she said severely. "Take the Indians. We've deprived a great many of them of their lives, and now we're depriving all of them of their liberty, by shutting them up on reservations like the ones here in the Indian Nation."
    "Well, now I've been pretty much all over the reservations here in the Nation. I don't recall seeing any Indians shut up, except a few that's turned to thieving from their own people, and killing, and things like that."
    "That's an old, feeble argument, Marshal. I've heard it before, many times. And I expect I'll hear it again and again, now that I'm out here in the West. Why, this country belonged to the Indians, and we took it away from them by force."
    "I reckon there's something in what you say. We crowded the Indians so close together that we made whole armies where there were only small raiding parties before. George Custer wouldn't have found himself in such a pickle if it hadn't been for that. And there's plenty who have lied to them and stolen from them and sold them guns and whiskey and gotten filthy rich in the process, and ruined such lives as they had in what they're pleased to call the Shining Times. I've traded shots with Indians, white men, Mexicans, and even Chinese, and I've had some of them help me out when I was in a few tight spots, too. There's some Indians just as greedy and ornery as white folks can be, which is how they lost some of what they had. They took a lot of scalps and tortured a lot of their own people, way back when, over sharing what they'd staked out as their territory."
    "Oh, I've heard that, too. Why should they share? The land was theirs."
    "Land's not worth much to people unless it's used, ma'am."
    Maidia was getting angry. "We spoil the land! We dig up the soil and cut down the trees and dam up the