ed the cruelties of the Service.

"'The boss,' they said, 'just sticks it on us all the time. We are
workin' like slaves--Guards and Rangers and everybody. It's plumb wicked
the way we're herded here.'

"So the new hand felt comforted by this outward sympathy, and he ambled
innocently on.

"'That heavy brush tears my clothes, and my back aches, and I burned a
shoe, and my socks are full of stickers. Then I fell on the barbed wire
when I was stretching it--and cut my nose. I tell you what it is,
fellows, if I ever get a chance to get away, I hope I'll never see
another inch of barbed wire as long as I live. If I was only back in
Peanutville, where I used to live, I could be eating a plate of ice
cream this minute instead of working like a dog and having to wash my
own clothes Sundays when I might be hearing the band play in the park.'

"'Too bad,' shouted the old Rangers in chorus, until a peal of laughter
that echoed through and through that mountain camp showed the indignant
youngster that his point of view hadn't been what you might say warmly
welcomed by the old-timers.

"But the following day, as I heard the story from Charles H. Shinn," the
doctor went on, "one of the best men in the gang took the lad aside the
following morning as they were riding up the trail, and said to him:

"'How much of that stuff you was preachin' last night did you mean? Of
course, this is hard work; it has to be. Either leave it mighty pronto,
or wrastle with it till you're a man at the game. I've seen lots of
young fellows harden up--some of 'em just as green an' useless when they
came as you are now. Don't you know you hold us back, and waste our
time, too, on almost any job? But it's the price we have to pay up here
to get new men started. Unless you grow to love it so much that there
isn't anything else in all the world you'd care to do, you ain't fit for
it, an' you'd better get out, and let some one with more sand than you
have get in.'

"Well, Loyle," the doctor said, "that youngster was provoked. He
wasn't man enough to get really angry, so that his temper would
keep him sticking to the work; he was one of these saucy
slap-'em-on-the-wrist-naughty kind.

"'I think all of you are crazy,' he said.

"He walked into the Supervisor's office that afternoon and explained
that the kind of work he had been given to do was altogether below his
intellectual powers. He never understood how quickly things happened,
but he signed a r