is states it a little too pompously. They have learned that the mere
absence of mankind is 'nothing to be scared of'; they have learned how
to be independent and to take care of themselves. Consequently, as a
matter of course, as one would ride in the park, they undertake
expeditions into the Big Country.

Many of these travellers, especially toward the close of the summer,
complained bitterly of the scarcity of horse-feed. In the back country
where the mountains were high and the wilderness unbroken, they depended
for forage on the grasses of the mountain meadows. This year they
reported that the cattle had eaten the forage down to the roots. Where
usually had been abundance and pleasant camping, now were hard, close
lawns, and cattle overrunning and defiling everything. Under the heavy
labour of mountain travel the horses fell off rapidly in flesh and
strength.

"We're the public just as much as them cattlemen," declaimed one
grizzled veteran waving his pipe. "I come to these mountains first in
sixty-six, and the sheep was bad enough then, but you always had some
horse meadows. Now they're just plumb overrunning the country. There's
thousands and thousands of folks that come in camping, and about a dozen
of these yere cattlemen. They got no right to hog the public land."

With so much approval did this view meet that a delegation went to
Plant's summer quarters to talk it over. The delegation returned
somewhat red about the ears. Plant had politely but robustly told it
that a supervisor was the best judge of how to run his own forest. This
led to declamatory denunciation, after the American fashion, but without
resulting in further activity. Resentment seemed to be about equally
divided between Plant and the cattlemen as a class.

This resentment as to the latter, however, soon changed to sympathy. In
September the Pollock boys stopped overnight at the Lake Meadow on their
way out. Their cattle, in charge of the dogs, they threw for the night
into a rude corral of logs, built many years before for just that
purpose. Their horses they fed with barley hay bought from Merker. Their
camp they spread away from the others, near the spring. It was dark
before they lit their fire. Visitors sauntering over found George and
Jim Pollock on either side the haphazard blaze stolidly warming through
flapjacks, and occasionally settling into a firmer position the huge
coffee pot. The dust and sweat of driving cattle still lay thic