thrown down the challenge, assuredly he was taking it up!
What would the people do about it, he wondered, when they came to know?
Would any power on earth waken the people up to do something, and stop
talking? _A Roman ruler had fiddled while his imperial city burned.
What was the many-headed ruler of the great republic doing, while
enemies burned and cut and slashed and wasted in wantonness the
property of the public for the enrichment of the Ring_?

The Ranger touched his horse to a gallop and jumped all three animals
through the criss-cross of wind-fall and slash, coming out on the edge
of the rock chasm that cut the Upper Mesas off from the Holy Cross.
The gully crumbled on the near side and shelved on the far, twenty feet
deep and fifty wide, altogether not very jumpable, the Ranger thought.
He zig-zagged in and out among the larches along the margin of the rock
cut-way, noting "dead tops" ripe for the axe, pines where the squirrels
had cached cone seed at the root, spruce logs gone to punk with alien
seedlings coming up from the dead trunk, yellow ant-eaten wood-rot
ripped open by some bear hunting the white eggs; noting, above all, the
wonderful flame of the painter's brush, spikes with the tints of the
rainbow, like Indian arrows dipped in blood, knee-deep, multi-colored,
fiery, dyed in the very essence of sunglow, humming with bees and alive
with butterflies, lives of a summer in the aeon of ages that the snow
flakes had taken manufacturing soil out of granite, silt out of snow.

"The little snow flake gets there all right," reflected Wayland. "It
takes time; but she carves out her little snow flake job all the same,
and the rocks go down before her! Guess if we follow the law, we're
hitched up with the stars all right."

He reined up and caught at a pine bough. A sight to hold the eye of
any forester held his; the enormous trunk of a fallen giant, a dozen
dwarfs growing from its punk, spanned the gully. Wayland slid off his
horse. The great trunk lay destitute of lesser branches to the tip on
the far side of the chasm like great characters that discard mannerisms.

The Ranger struck his Service axe into the trunk. The bark held firm,
though he heard the ring of the dry-rot at the heart that had brought
the old giant crashing down to become food for the scrubs and pigmies
of the forest. Wayland picked out two spindly birches. Quick strokes
brought them down. Walking out on the dead trunk, he th