animal.

"Hullo," said he, overborne by an unexpected impulse.

"Good day," responded the old man, with a friendly deepening of the
kindly wrinkles about his blue eyes.

"John," asked Bob, "were you ever in those big mountains there?"

"Baldy?" said the Ranger. "Lord love you, yes. I have to cross Baldy
'most every time I go to the back country. There's two good passes
through Baldy."

"Back country!" repeated Bob. "Are there any higher mountains than
those?"

Old California John chuckled.

"Listen, son," said he. "There's the First Range, and then Stone Creek,
and then Baldy. And on the other side of Baldy there's the canon of the
Joncal which is three thousand foot down. And then there's the Burro
Mountains, which is half again as high as Baldy, and all the Burro
country to Little Jackass. That's a plateau covered with lodge-pole pine
and meadows and creeks and little lakes. It's a big plateau, and when
you're a-ridin' it, you shore seem like bein' in a wide, flat country.
And then there's the Green Mountain country; and you drop off five or
six thousand foot into the box canon of the north fork; and then you
climb out again to Red Mountain; and after that is the Pinnacles. The
Pinnacles is the Fourth Rampart. After them is South Meadow, and the
Boneyard. Then you get to the Main Crest. And that's only if you go
plumb due east. North and south there's all sorts of big country. Why,
Baldy's only a sort of taster."

Bob's satisfaction with himself collapsed. This land so briefly shadowed
forth was penetrable only in summer: that he well knew. And all summer
Bob was held to the great tasks of the forest. He hadn't the time!
Wherein did he differ from Hicks? In nothing save that his right of way
happened to be a trifle wider.

"Have you been to all these places?" asked Bob.

"Many times," replied California John. "From Stanislaus to the San
Bernardino desert I've ridden."

"How big a country is that?"

"It's about four hundred mile long, and about eighty mile wide as the
crow flies--a lot bigger as a man must ride."

"All big mountains?"

"Surely."

"You must have been everywhere?"

"No," said California John, "I never been to Jack Main's Canon. It's too
fur up, and I never could get time off to go in there."

So this man, too, the ranger whose business it was to travel far and
wide in the wild country, sighed for that which lay beyond his right of
way! Suddenly Bob was filled with a desire to tran