ofed old house was waiting for us like some
huge, faithful creature yearning to receive us once again beneath its
wings. It was commonplace to our neighbors and without special
significance to the world, but to my children it was noble and beautiful
and poetic--it was home.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

"Cavanagh" and the "Winds of Destiny"

No doubt the reader has come to the conclusion, at this point, that my
habits as an author were not in the least like those of Burroughs or
Howells. There has never been anything cloistered about my life, on the
contrary my study has always been a point of departure rather than a
cell of meditation. From Elm Street, from the Homestead, I frequently
darted away to the plains or the Rocky Mountains, keenly aware of the
fact that the miner and cattleman, the trapper and the trailer were
being pushed into ever remoter valleys by the men of the hoe and the
spade, and that the customs and habits which the mountaineer had
established were about to pass, precisely as the blossoming prairies had
long since been broken and fenced and made commonplace by the plow.

That the destruction of the eagle and the mountain lion marked another
stage of that remorseless march which is called civilization I fully
recognized and--in a certain sense--approved, although the raising of
billions of hens and pigs admittedly useful, was not to me an inspiring
employment of human energy. The long-horn white-faced steer was more
picturesque than a "Mooly" cow.

Doubtless a dairyman is a more valuable citizen in the long run than a
prospector or miner, but he does not so easily appeal to the
imagination. To wade irrigating ditches, hoe in hand, is not
incompatible with the noblest manhood, but it is none the less true that
men riding the trail or exploring ledges of quartz are more alluring
characters to the novelist--at least that was the way I felt in 1909
when I began to shape another book concerning the great drama which was
going on in the forests of the High Country.

For more than fifteen years, while trailing among the mountains of
Colorado, Montana and Wyoming, I had seen the Forest Service, under
Gifford Pinchot's leadership, gradually getting into effect. I had seen
the silver miner disappear and the army of forest rangers grow from a
handful of hardy cowboys and "lonesome men" into a disciplined force of
over two thousand young foresters who represented in some degree the
science and the patrio