the fight
was worth while. I have come out of it all with a respect and liking for
the West which will last as long as I do.

Very sincerely yours,
Gifford Pinchot.

March 14, 1910.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Cavanagh: Forest Ranger

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Cavanagh: Forest Ranger

I

THE DESERT CHARIOT

Lee Virginia Wetherford began her return journey into the mountain West
with exultation. From the moment she opened her car-window that August
morning in Nebraska the plain called to her, sustained her illusions. It
was all quite as big, as tawny, as she remembered it--fit arena for the
epic deeds in which her father had been a leader bold and free.

Her memories of Roaring Fork and its people were childish and romantic.
She recalled, vividly, the stagecoach which used to amble sedately, not to
say wheezily, from the railway to the Fork and from the Fork back to the
railway, in the days when she had ridden away in it a tearful, despairing,
long-limbed girl, and fully expected to find it waiting for her at Sulphur
City, with old Tom Quentan still as its driver.

The years of absence had been years of growth, and though she had changed
from child to woman in these suns and moons, she could not think of the
Fork as anything other than the romantic town she had left--a list wherein
spurred and steel-girt cow-men strode lamely over uneven sidewalks, or
swooped, like the red nomads of the desert, in mad troops through the
starlit night.

The first hint of "the new West" came to her by way of the pretentious
Hotel Alma, which stood opposite the station at Sulphur, and to which she
was led by a colored porter of most elaborate and kindly manners.

This house, which furnished an excellent dinner and an absorbing mixture
of types both American and European, was vaguely disturbing to her. It was
plainly not of the old-time West--the West her father had dominated in the
days "before the invasion." It was, indeed, distinctly built for the
tourist trade, and was filled with all that might indicate the comfortable
nearness of big game and good fishing.

Upon inquiry as to the stage, she was amazed to hear that an automobile
now made the journey to the Fork in five hours, and that it left
immediately after the