on to
the west, still rolling in wave after wave of stupendous altitudes, each
range cutting into the sky with a purple saw-tooth edge. The landscape
seems to contain nothing but rocks and towering crags, a treasure-house
for those who mine. But this is illusive. Between these purple heights
charming valleys wind and meadows lie in which rich grasses grow and
cattle feed.

On certain slopes--where the devastating miners have not yet played their
relentless game--dark forests rise to the high, bold summits of the
chiefest mountains, and it is to guard these timbered tracts, growing
each year more valuable, that the government has established its Forest
Service to protect and develop the wealth-producing power of the
watersheds.

Chief among the wooded areas of this mighty inland empire of crag and
stream is the Bear Tooth Forest, containing nearly eight hundred thousand
acres of rock and trees, whose seat of administration is Bear Tooth
Springs, the small town in which our young traveler found himself.

He carefully explained to the landlord of the Cottage Hotel that he had
never been in this valley before, and that he was filled with
astonishment and delight of the scenery.

"Scenery! Yes, too much scenery. What we want is settlers," retorted the
landlord, who was shabby and sour and rather contemptuous, for the reason
that he considered Norcross a poor consumptive, and a fool to boot--"one
of those chaps who wait till they are nearly dead, then come out here
expecting to live on climate."

The hotel was hardly larger than the log shanty of a railway-grading
camp; but the meat was edible, and just outside the door roared Bear
Creek, which came down directly from Dome Mountain, and the young
Easterner went to sleep beneath its singing that night. He should have
dreamed of the happy mountain girl, but he did not; on the contrary, he
imagined himself back at college in the midst of innumerable freshmen,
yelling, "Bill McCoy, Bill McCoy!"

He woke a little bewildered by his strange surroundings, and when he
became aware of the cheap bed, the flimsy wash-stand, the ugly wallpaper,
and thought how far he was from home and friends, he not only sighed, he
shivered. The room was chill, the pitcher of water cold almost to the
freezing-point, and his joints were stiff and painful from his ride. What
folly to come so far into the wilderness at this time.

As he crawled from his bed and looked from the window he was still
f