o camp down beside you."

"All right; but remember I've established a quarantine. I'll crack your
head if you break over the line an inch."

There was no longer any feeling of reaching up or reaching down between
the two men--they were equals. Wetherford, altogether admirable, seemed to
have regained his manhood as he stood in the door of the tent confronting
the ranger. "This Basque ain't much of a find, but, as you say, he's
human, and we can't let him lie here and die, I'll stay with him till you
can find a doctor or till he dies."

"I take off my hat to you," responded Cavanagh. "You are a man."

X

THE SMOKE OF THE BURNING

The reader will observe that the forest ranger's job is that of a man and
a patriot, and such a ranger was Cavanagh, notwithstanding his foreign
birth. He could ride all day in the saddle and fight fire all night. While
not a trained forester, he was naturally a reader, and thoroughly
understood the theories of the department. As a practical ranger he stood
half-way between the cowboy (who was at first the only available material)
and the trained expert who is being educated to follow him.

He was loyal with the loyalty of a soldier, and his hero was the colonel
of the Rough-riders, under whom he had campaigned. The second of his
admirations was the Chief Forester of the department.

The most of us are getting so thin-skinned, so dependent upon steam-heat
and goloshes, that the actions of a man like this riding forth upon his
trail at all hours of the day and night self-sufficing and serene, seem
like the doings of an epic, and so indeed they are.

On the physical side the plainsman, the cowboy, the poacher, are all
admirable, but Cavanagh went far beyond their physical hardihood. He
dreamed, as he rode, of his responsibilities. The care of the poor Basque
shepherd he had accepted as a matter of routine without Wetherford's
revelation of himself, which complicated an exceedingly pitiful case. He
could not forget that it was Lee Virginia's father who stood in danger of
contracting the deadly disease, and as he imagined him dying far up there
on that bleak slope, his heart pinched with the tragedy of the old man's
life. In such wise the days of the ranger were smouldering to this end.

On the backward trail he turned aside to stamp out a smoking log beside a
deserted camp-fire, and again he made a detour into a lovely little park
to visit a fisherman and to warn him of the danger