topple would send them over a natural chute into the River. He had not
scaled those logs: neither had his assistants. There was no record of
them on the books. Of course, he had heard the chop and slash at the
settlers' cabins, but homesteaders don't farm on the edge of a vertical
precipice unless they are a lumber company; and logs tossed over that
precipice to the River were destined for only one market, Smelter City.
Then he remembered giving a permit to a Swede settler of the Homestead
Slope to take out windfall and dead tops for a little portable gasoline
engine; but the permit didn't cover this area.

"Having stopped stealing half a million from the Bitter Boot, they've
started their dummies in here." He looked at the gashed timber-slash
as a thrifty man looks at wantonness and waste; it was a gaping wound
in the forest side, old and young trees alike hacked down, the stumps
of the big trees, not eighteen inches low as the regulations provided,
but three and four and five feet high of waste to rot and gather
fungus, the biggest of the giant spruce cut from a scaffolding nine
feet from the ground, leaving wasted lumber enough to build a house.

"This was done when I was away on my last long patrol," reflected
Wayland. The slash of brushwood and wasted tops lay higher than his
horse's head. "A fine fire-trap for the fall drought," thought Wayland
angrily. "One spark in that tinder pile in a high wind; and there
would be no forests left on Holy Cross."

What did it mean, this open defiance, not of himself, (he was a mere
cog in the big wheel; so was the entire Forest Service,) this open
defiance of law; this open theft of Government property? Connected
with the outrage of the Range War, and the Senator's advice for him to
stop suing for restitution of the two-thousand acres of coal lands, and
the handy-man's urgent arguments for him "to chuck the fight and come
down to the Valley," the Ranger knew well enough what the pile of
stolen logs stamped with a counterfeit Government hatchet meant;
stamped, of course, by some poor ignorant dummy foreigner. The Ring
were setting their hired tools on to the fight. And far away in the
East--yes it was the East's business to see what went on in the
West--were myriads of wage-earners forced to pay exorbitantly for coal
and wood and lumber and house rent because of this wanton waste; this
seizing fraudulently by the few of the property belonging to the many.
If they had