ebuff, or
he wouldn't have been so furious with me. Perhaps she even broke her
engagement with him. I sincerely hope she did. She's too good for him.
That's the truth."

And so, from point to point, he progressed till with fine indignation he
reached a resolution to stay and meet whatever came. "I certainly would
be a timorous animal if I let myself be scared into flight by that big
bonehead," he said at last. "I have as much right here as he has, and the
law must protect me. It can't be that this country is entirely
barbaric."

Nevertheless, he felt very weak and very much depressed as he rode up the
street of the little town and dismounted at the hotel. The sidewalks were
littered with loafing cowboys and lumber-jacks, and some of them quite
openly ridiculed his riding-breeches and his thin legs. Others merely
grinned, but in their grins lay something more insulting than words. "To
them I am a poor thing," he admitted; but as he lifted his eyes to the
mighty semicircular wall of the Bear Tooth Range, over which the daily
storm was playing, he forgot his small worries. What gorgeous pageantry!
What life-giving air! "If only civilized men and women possessed this
glorious valley, what a place it would be!" he exclaimed, and in the heat
of his indignant contempt he would have swept the valley clean.

As his eyes caught the flutter of the flag on its staff above the Forest
Service building, his heart went out to the men who unselfishly wrought
beneath that symbol of federal unity for the good of the future. "That is
civilized," he said; "that is prophetic," and alighted at the door in a
glow of confidence.

Nash, who was alone in the office, looked up from his work. "Come in," he
called, heartily. "Come in and report."

"Thank you. I'd like to do so; and may I use your desk? I have a letter
to write."

"Make yourself at home. Take any desk you like. The men are all out on
duty."

"You're very kind," replied Wayland, gratefully. There was something
reassuring in this greeting, and in the many signs of skill and
scientific reading which the place displayed. It was like a bit of
Washington in the midst of a careless, slovenly, lawless mountain town,
and Norcross took his seat and wrote his letter with a sense of
proprietorship.

"I'm getting up an enthusiasm for the Service just from hearing Alec
Belden rave against it," he said a few minutes later, as he looked up
from his letter.

Nash grinned. "How did you li