tism of their chief.

As in _Hesper_ and _The Captain of the Gray Horse Troop_ I had attempted
to depict certain types of the red men, miners and ranchers. I now began
to study the mountain vedettes from the point of view of the Forest
Ranger, a federal officer who represented our newly acquired ideals of
Conservation, and whose duty it was to act as custodian of the National
Forests. I decided to write a novel which should, in some degree,
delineate the heroic side of this warden's solitary life as I had seen
it and shared it in a half-dozen forests in Colorado, Wyoming and
Montana.

In this writing I put myself at the opposite pole from the scenes of
_The Shadow World_, a study of psychic phenomena with which I had been
deeply involved for a year or more. From dark cabinets in murky seance
chambers, from contact with morbid, death-fearing, light-avoiding
residents of crowded apartments, I now found myself riding once again
ten thousand feet above sea level with men who "took chances" almost
every hour of their lives--not from any reckless defiance of death but
merely by way of duty, men who lived alone and rode alone, men in whose
ears the mountain streams as they fell from the white silences of the
snows, uttered songs of exultation. In the presence of these hardy
trailers the doings of darkened seance rooms seemed morbid, if not
actually insane.

The stark heroism of these forest guards, their loyalty to a far-off
chieftain (whom they knew only by name) appealed to me with increasing
power. Their problem became my problem. More than this they kindled my
admiration, for many of them possessed the cowboy's masterful skill with
bronchos, his deft handling of rope and gun and the grace which had
made him the most admired figure in our literature,--but in addition to
all this, they had something finer, something which the cowboy often
lacked. At their best they manifested the loyalty of soldiers. Heedful
of the Federal Government, they strove to dispense justice over the
lands which had been allotted to their care, and their flags--the Stars
and Stripes--as I came upon them fluttering from the peaks of their
cabins were to me the guidons of a new and valiant skirmish line. They
were of the Border in a new and noble sense. In short the Federal Ranger
was a hero made to my hand.

Not all the soldiers in the service were of this large mold, I admit,
but many of those I had met did possess precisely the qualities I have