one caught cutting timber on the
reserve, now that it was a reserve, would go to the Pen for fifteen
years."

"What a bluff!"

"Bluff it certainly was. It didn't work, either. One of the tie-cutters
in reply suggested that the cowmen should go back and devote their time
to buying Navajo saddle-blankets and silver-mounted sombreros, since
ornamenting the landscape was all they had to do in life; another
replied that if a government inspector ever set eyes on their cattle
he'd drive them off the range as a disgrace to the State; and a third
capped the replies with the terse answer that no ten United States
officers and no hundred and ten cattlemen could take them out alive."

"That wouldn't make the cow-camp feel happy a whole lot," remarked the
red-headed man.

"There wasn't any shooting, though, as I said before, though just how it
kept off I never rightly could understand. At all events they fixed it
so that we heard of it in a hurry. Then both sides awaited developments.
The tie-cutters kept their hands off the cattle for a while, and the
cowmen had no special business with railroad ties, so that, aside from
snorting at each other, no special harm was done.

"But, of course, the timber trespass question had to be investigated,
and the Supervisor, who was then located at Colorado Springs, arranged
to make the trip with me to the tie-cutters' camp from a small station
about fifty miles north of the Springs. I met him at the station as
prearranged. We were just about to start when a telegram was handed him
calling him to another part of the forest in a hurry."

"Tough luck," said one of the listeners.

"It surely was--for me," commented the narrator. "The camp to which we
had intended going was twenty-six miles into the mountains, and going up
there alone didn't appeal to me a little bit. However, the Supervisor
told me to start right out, to get an idea of how much timber had been
cut, and in what kind of shape the ground had been left, and in short,
to 'nose around a little,' as he put it himself."

"That was hardly playing the game, sending you up there alone," said one
of the men.

"I thought at the time that it wasn't, but what could he do? The matter
had to be investigated, and he had been sent for and couldn't come with
me. But he was considerate enough, strongly urging me not to get killed,
'as Rangers were scarce.'"

"That was considerate!"

"Yes, wasn't it? But early the next morning I started for