rest Ranger fellows! Finish up off the confounded National
Range. Finish up before they reach the National Range."

"And the Mexican herders?" asked the sheep skin chaps with a flourish
of his band above the fire that showed the flash of a diamond on the
little finger.

The white vest spread deprecating hands.

"That's your business, Jim! Make a clean sweep of the herd; but see
that no harm comes to the boy."

The old frontiersman headed his broncho silently back on the trail.

"Night birds hatching snake eggs. A'm really between two minds to go
back and crack their addled heads."

CHAPTER V

THE CHOICE THAT COMES TO ALL MEN

"Did you notice anything?" demanded Brydges, as the old stranger went
down the Ridge trail. "She knows English as well as you do; and she is
a French breed. Why did she put on to be Mexican? What did she sneak
for? Whole thing cussed queer. What do you make of it? Matthews?
Matthews? I recall that name. Fellow by that name wrote our paper to
know if any Canadian settlers had come here! Say, Wayland, the old man
pricked up his ears at MacDonald's name--spoke of Rebellion Days."

"Oh, shut it off, Bat! What in the world has a travelling half-cracked
ranting old evangelist to do with the MacDonald family? He'll land on
the Mission for a week or two free like the rest of 'em! He'll likely
preach Hell-fire to Indians, who'll not know a word of what he says
till Mr. Williams gives him a call to move on--"

"All the same," retorted Bat, disappearing inside the cabin.

Wayland passed a bad night, the worst he had known on the Holy Cross,
contending with what comes to all lives, and to many lives many times.

The Ranger had absorbed the average amount of Sunday school pabulum
that floats round in the mental atmosphere of all youth, that, if you
keep on doing right and doing it hard, things will turn out all right
in the end. Well, he told himself bluntly, he _had_ been doing right
and doing it hard, just as hundreds of the Land Office field men and
Land Office attorneys had been doing right in their vain endeavour to
stop public loot;--and things had turned out all wrong. What did his
four years' fight stand for, anyway? Marking time, that was all.
Nothing accomplished except the wasting of four years of his own life;
and, while that may be small enough in the sum total of things, where a
thousand seeds go to waste for one that bears fruit, it is
overwhelmingly big