Cavanagh, Forest Ranger. Garland Hamlin

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СКАЧАТЬ turned up the street toward the high hill to the south, and she kept step with him. As she did not speak, he asked: “What did you expect to do out here?”

      “I hoped to teach,” she replied, her voice still choked with her emotion. “I expected to find the country much improved.”

      “And so it is; but it is still a long way from an Eastern State. Perhaps you will find the people less savage than they appear at first glance.”

      “It isn’t the town or the people, it is my mother!” she burst forth again. “Tell me! A woman in the car yesterday accused my mother of selling whiskey unlawfully. Is this so? Tell me!”

      She faced him resolutely, and perceiving that she could not be evaded, he made slow answer. “I don’t know that she does, but I’ve heard it charged against her.”

      “Who made the charge?”

      “One of the clergymen, and then it’s common talk among the rough men of the town.”

      “Is that the worst they say of her? Be honest with me—I want to know the worst.”

      He was quite decisive as he said: “Yes, that is the worst.”

      She looked relieved. “I’m glad to hear you say so. I’ve been imagining all kinds of terrifying things.”

      “Then, too, her bad health is some excuse for her housekeeping,” he added, eager to lessen the daughter’s humiliation, “and you must remember her associations are not those which breed scrupulous regard for the proprieties.”

      “But she’s my mother!” wailed the girl, coming back to the central fact. “She has sent me money—she has been kind to me—what am I to do? She needs me, and yet the thought of staying here and facing her life frightens me.”

      The rotten board walks, the low rookeries, the unshaven, blear-eyed men sitting on the thresholds of the saloons, the slattern squaws wandering abroad like bedraggled hens, made the girl stare with wonder and dismay. She had remembered the town street as a highway filled with splendid cavaliers, a list wherein heroic deeds were done with horse and pistol.

      She recognized one of those “knights of the lariat” sitting in the sun, flabby, grizzled, and inert. Another was trying to mount his horse with a bottle in his hand. She recalled him perfectly. He had been her girlish ideal of manly beauty. Now here he was, old and mangy with drink at forty. In a most vivid and appealing sense he measured the change in her as well as the decay of the old-time cowboy. His incoherent salutation as his eyes fell upon her was like the final blasphemous word from the rear-guard of a savage tribe, and she watched him ride away reeling limply in his saddle as one watches a carrion-laden vulture take its flight.

      She perceived in the ranger the man of the new order, and with this in her mind she said: “You don’t belong here? You’re not a Western man.”

      “Not in the sense of having been born here,” he replied. “I am, in fact, a native of England, though I’ve lived nearly twenty years of my life in the States.”

      She glanced at his badge. “How did you come to be a ranger—what does it mean? It’s all new to me.”

      “It is new to the West,” he answered, smilingly, glad of a chance to turn her thought from her own personal griefs. “It has all come about since you went East. Uncle Sam has at last become provident, and is now ‘conserving his resources.’ I am one of his representatives with stewardship over some ninety thousand acres of territory—mostly forest.”

      She looked at him with eyes of changing light. “You don’t talk like an Englishman, and yet you are not like the men out here.”

      “I shouldn’t care to be like some of them,” he answered. “My being here is quite logical. I went into the cattle business like many another, and I went broke. I served under Colonel Roosevelt in the Cuban War, and after my term was out, naturally drifted back. I love the wilderness and have some natural taste for forestry, and I can ride and pack a horse as well as most cowboys, hence my uniform. I’m not the best forest ranger in the service, I’ll admit, but I fancy I’m a fair average.”

      “And that is your badge—the pine-tree?”

      “Yes, and I am proud of it. Some of the fellows are not, but so far as I am concerned I am glad to be known as a defender of the forest. A tree means much to me. I never mark one for felling without a sense of responsibility to the future.”

      Her questions came slowly, like those of a child. “Where do you live?”

      “Directly up the South Fork, about twenty miles.”

      “What do you do?”

      He smiled. “Not much. I ride the trails, guard the game, put out fires, scale lumber, burn brush, build bridges, herd cattle, count sheep, survey land, and a few other odd chores. It’s supposed to be a soft snap, but I can’t see it that way.”

      “Do you live alone?”

      “Yes, for the larger part of the time. I have an assistant who is with me during part of the summer months. Mostly I am alone. However, I am supposed to keep open house, and I catch a visitor now and then.”

      They were both more at ease now, and her unaffected interest pleased him.

      She went on, steadily: “Don’t you get very lonely?”

      “In winter, sometimes; in summer I’m too busy to get lonely. In the fire season I’m in the saddle every day, and sometimes all night.”

      “Who cooks for you?”

      “I do. That’s part of a ranger’s job. We have no ‘servant problem’ to contend with.”

      “Do you expect to do this always?”

      He smiled again. “There you touch my secret spring. I have the hope of being Chief Forester some time—I mean we all have the prospect of promotion to sustain us. The service is so new that any one with even a knowledge of forestry is in demand; by and by real foresters will arise.”

      She returned abruptly to her own problem. “I dread to go back to my mother, but I must. Oh, how I hate that hotel! I loathe the flies, the smells, the people that eat there, the waiters—everything!” She shuddered.

      “Many of the evils you mention could be reformed—except, of course, some of the people who come to eat. I fear several of them have gone beyond reformation.”

      As they started back down the street she saw the motor-stage just leaving the door of the office. “That settles one question,” she said. “I can’t get away till to-morrow.”

      “Where would you go if you broke camp—back to the East?”

      “No; my mother thinks there is a place for me in Sulphur City.”

      “Your case interests me deeply. I wish I could advise you to stay, but this is a rough town for a girl like you. Why don’t you talk the problem over with the Supervisor?” His voice became firmer. “Mrs. Redfield is the very one to help you.”

      “Where СКАЧАТЬ