A ROLLING CLOUD OF SMOKE
The days became hotter and hotter, and each morning when Wilbur rose he searched eagerly for some sign of cloud that should presage rain, but the sky remained cloudless. Several times he had heard of fires in the vicinity, but they had kept away from that portion of the forest over which he had control, and he had not been summoned from his post. The boy had given up his former schedule of covering his whole forest twice a week, and now was riding on Sundays, thus reaching every lookout point every other day. It was telling upon the horses, and he himself was conscious of the strain, but he was more content in feeling that he had gone the limit in doing the thing that was given him to do.
One day, while in a distant part of the forest, he came upon the signs of a party of campers. Since his experience with the tourists the boy had become panic-stricken by the very idea of careless visitors to the forest, and the chance of their setting a fire, and so, recklessly, he put his horse at a sharp gallop and started down the trail that they had left. The signs were new, so that he overtook them in a couple of hours. But in the meantime he had passed the place where the party had made their noonday halt, and he could see that full precautions had been taken to insure the quenching of the fire.
When he overtook them, moreover, he was wonderfully relieved and freed from his fears. There were six in all, the father, who was quite an old man, the mother, two grown-up sons, and two younger girls. They had heard his horse come galloping down the trail, and the two younger men had hung back to be the first to meet him.
"Which way?" one of them asked, as Wilbur pulled his horse down to a walk.
"Your way," said Wilbur, "I guess. I just rode down to see who it was on the trail. There was a bunch of tourists hanging around here a few weeks ago, and the forest floor is too dry to take any chances with their campfires."
"Oh, that's it," said the former speaker. Then, with a laugh, he continued: "I guess we aren't in that class."
"I can see you're not," the boy replied, "but I'm one of the Forest Service men, and it's a whole lot better to be safe than sorry."
"Right," the other replied. "I think you might ride on with us a bit," he continued, "and talk to the rest of them. It may ease their minds. You were headed our way down that trail as though you were riding for our scalps."
Wilbur laughed at the idea of his inspiring fear in the two stalwart men riding beside him.
"I guess I'd have had some job," he said, "if I had tried it on."
"Well," the first speaker answered, "we wouldn't be the first of the family to decorate a wigwam that way. My grandfather an' his two brothers got ambushed by some Apaches in the early seventies."
"Your grandfather?" the boy repeated.
"Sure, son. Most of the fellows that got the worst of it with the Indians was some one's granddad, I reckon. One of my uncles, father's brother, was with them at the time, and he got scalped, too. It isn't so long ago since the days of the Indians, son, an' it's wonderful to think of the families livin' peacefully where the war-parties used to ride. That's goin' to be a great country down there. But," he broke off suddenly, "here's dad."
The bent figure in the saddle, riding an immense iron gray mare, straightened up as the three rode close, and the old man turned a keen glance on the boy. Instantly, Wilbur was reminded of the old hunter, although the two men were as unlike as they could be, and in that same instant the boy realized that the likeness lay in the eyes. The springiness might have gone out of his step, and to a certain extent the seat in the saddle was unfirm, and the strength and poise of the body showed signs of abatement, but the fire in the eyes was undimmed and every line of the features was instinct to a wonderful degree with life and vitality. After a question or two to his sons he turned to the boy, and in response to a query as to his destination, replied, in a sing-song voice that was reminiscent of frontier camp-meetings:
"I'm goin' to the Promised Land. It's been a long an' a weary road, but the time of rejoicin' has come. It is writ that the desert shall blossom as a rose, an' I'm goin' to grow rose-trees where the cactus used to be; the solitary place shall be alone no more, an' I and mine are flockin' into it; the lion an' wolf shall be no more therein, an' the varmints all are gone away; an' a little child shall lead them, an' before I die I reckon to see my children an' my children's children under the shadow of my vine an' fig tree."
Wilbur looked a little bewilderedly at the two younger men and one of them said hastily:
"We're goin' down to the Salt River Valley, down in Arizona, where the government has irrigated land."
"Oh, I know," said Wilbur, "that's one of the big projects of the Reclamation Service."
"Have you been down there at all?"
"No," the boy answered, "but I understand that to a very great extent much of the Forest Service work is being done with irrigation in view."
"They used to call it," broke out the old prophet again, "the 'land that God forgot,' but now they're callin' it the 'land that God remembered.'"
Wilbur waited a moment to see if the old man would speak again, but as he was silent, he turned to the man beside him:
"How did you get interested in this land?" he asked.
"I was born," the other answered, "in one of the villages of the cliff-dwellers, who lived so many years ago. Dad, he always used to think that the sudden droppin' out of those old races an' the endurin' silence about them was some kind of a visitation. An' he always believed that the curse, whatever it was, would be taken off."
"That's a queer idea," said the boy; "I never heard it before."
"Well," said the other, "it does seem queer. An' when the government first started this reclamation work, dad he thought it was a sign, and he went into every project, I reckon, the government ever had. An' they used to say that unless 'the Apache Prophet,' as they called him, had been once on a project, it was no use goin' on till he came."
"But what did he do?"
"They always gave him charge of a gang of men for as long as he wanted it, and Jim an' I, we used to boss a gang, too. We've been on the Huntley and Sun River in Montana, we've laid the foundation of the highest masonry dam in the world—the Shoshone dam in Wyoming,—helped build a canal ninety-five miles long in Nebraska, I've driven team on the Belle Fourche in South Dakota; in Kansas, where there's no surface water, I've dug wells that with pumps will irrigate eight thousand acres, and away down in New Mexico on the Pecos and in Colorado on the Rio Grande I've helped begin a new life for those States."
"An' a river shall flow out of it," the old man burst forth again, "an' I reckon thar ain't a river flowin' nowhere that's forgot. I don't know where Jordan rolls, but any stream that brings smilin' plenty where the desert was before looks enough like Jordan to suit me. I've seen it, I tell you," he added fiercely, turning to the boy, "I've seen the desert an' I've seen Eden, an' I'm goin' there to live. An' where the flamin' sword of thirst once whirled, there's little brooks a-ripplin' an' the flowers is springin' fair."
"You must have seen great changes?" suggested the boy, interested in the old man's speech.
"Five years ago," he answered, "we were campin' on the Snake River, in southern Idaho. There was sage-brush, an' sand, an' stars, an' nothin' else. An engineerin' fellow, who he was I dunno, rides up to the fire. Where he comes from I dunno; I reckon his body came along the road of the sage-brush and the sand, but his mind came by the stars. An' he takes the handle of an ax, and draws out on the sand an irrigatin' plan. There wasn't a house for thirty miles. An' he just asks if he shall go ahead. An' I knows he's right, an' I says I knows he's right, an' he goes straight off to Washington, an' now there's three thousand people where the sage-brush was, and right on the very spot where my campfire smoked just five years ago, a school has been opened with over a hundred children there."
He stopped as suddenly as he began.
"There was some great work in the Gunnison canyon, was there not?" queried Wilbur.
The old man made no reply, and the son answered the question.
"When they had to lower a man from the top into the canyon, seven hundred feet below," he said, "Dad was the first to volunteer. I reckon, son, there's no greater story worth the tellin' than the Uncompahgre tunnel. And then, I ain't told nothin' about the big Washington and Oregon valleys, where tens of thousands now have homes an' are rearin' the finest kind of men an' women. But, as dad says, we're comin' home. There's four centuries of our history and there's seven centuries of Moki traditions, an' still there's nothing to tell me who the people are who built the cliff-town where I was born. Dad, he thinks that when the water comes, perhaps the stones will speak. I don't know, but if they ever do, I want to be there to hear. It's the strangest, wildest place in all the world, I think, and while it is harsh and unkindly, still it's home. Dad's right there. These forests are all right," he added, remembering that the boy was attached to the Forest Service, "but for me, I want a world whose end you can't see an' where every glance leads up."
"Do you suppose," said Wilbur, "that in the days of the cliff-dwellers, and earlier, the 'inland empire' was densely populated?"
"Some time," the other replied slowly, "it must have been. Not far from my cliff home is the famous Cheltro Palace, which contains over thirty million blocks of stone."
"How big is it?" asked Wilbur.
"Well, it is four stories high, nearly five hundred feet long, an' just half that width."
Wilbur whistled.
"My stars," he ejaculated, "that is big! And is there nothing left to tell about them?" he asked.
The other shook his head.
"Nothing," he answered.
"They were, an' they were not," interjected the old patriarch. "I looked for the place where I should find him, an' lo, he was gone. They were eatin' an' drinkin' when the end came, an' they knew it not. Like enough they had some warnin' which they heeded not, an' their house is left unto them desolate. An' we go in and possess their land. Young man, come with us."
Wilbur started.
"Oh, I can't," he said. "I should like to see some of those projects, but my work is here. But I'm one of you," he added eagerly; "the rivers that flow down to enrich your desert rise from springs in our mountains, and all those springs would dry up if the forests were destroyed. And all the headwaters of the streams are in our care."
"You kind of look after them when they're young," Wilbur's companion suggested, "that we can use them when the time is ripe."
"That is just it," said Wilbur. Then, turning to the old man, he added:
"I must go back to my patrol," he said, "but when you're down in that Garden of Eden, where the river is making the world all over again, you'll remember us once in a while, and the little bit of a stream that flows out of my corral will always have good wishes for you down there."
The old man turned in his saddle with great dignity.
"There be vessels to honor," he said gravely, "an' to every one his gifts. Go back to your forest home an' work, an' take an old man's wishes that while water runs you may never want for work worth doin', for friends worth havin', an' at the last a tally you ain't ashamed to show."
Wilbur raised his hat in salute for reply and reined Kit in until the party was lost to view. The afternoon was drawing on and the lad had lost nearly two hours in following the party, and in his chat with the old patriarch, but he could not but feel that even the momentary glimpse he had been given of the practical workings of the reclamation work of the government had gone far to emphasize and render of keener personal interest all that he had learned at school or heard from the Forest Service men about the making of a newer world within the New World itself. And when he remembered that over a quarter of a million families, within a space of about six years, have made their homes on what was an absolute desert ten years ago, and that these men and women were stirred with the same spirit as the old patriarch, he felt, as he had said, that the conserving of the mountain streams was work worth while.
As it chanced, he passed over the little stream whose channel he had cleared on one of his patrol rides, and he stopped a moment to look at it.
"Well," he said aloud, "I suppose some youngster some day will be picking oranges off a tree that would have died if I hadn't done that day's work," and he rode on to his camp greatly pleased with himself.
For a day or two the boy found himself quite unable to shake the spell of the old patriarch's presence off his mind, and the more he thought over it, the more he realized that scarcely any one thing in the whole of the United States loomed larger on its future than the main idea of Conservation. It had been merely a word before, but now it was a reality, and he determined to take the first opportunity he would have, during his vacation, of going down to the Salt River Valley to see the old patriarch once again.
And still the weather grew hotter and the sky remained cloudless. And now, every evening, Rifle-Eye would telephone over to make sure that Wilbur was back at camp and that there was as yet no danger. They had had one quite sharp tussle at a distant point of the forest, and one day Wilbur had received orders to make a long ride to a lookout point in another part of the forest, the work of a Guard who had been called away to fight fire, but so far, Wilbur had been free. Two or three times he found himself waking suddenly in the night, possessed with an intense desire to saddle Kit and ride off to a part of the forest where he had either dreamed or thought a fire was burning, but Rifle-Eye had been careful to warn him against this very thing, and although the morning found him simply wild to ride to this point of supposed danger, he had followed orders and ridden his regular round.
Although Wilbur's camp was high, the heat grew hard to bear, and when the boy passed from the shade of the pine along the naked rock to some lookout point the ground seemed to blaze under him. The grass was rapidly turning brown in the exposed places, and the pine needles were as slippery as the smoothest ice.
Just at noon, one morning, Wilbur turned his horse—he was not riding Kit that day—into one of these open trails, and taking out his glasses, commenced to sweep the horizon. A heat haze was abroad, and his over-excited eyes seemed to see smoke everywhere. But, as he swept round the horizon, suddenly his whole figure stiffened. He looked long, then, with a sigh of relief, turned away, and completed his circuit of the horizon. This done, he directed the glasses anew where he had looked before. He looked long, unsatisfied, then lay down on the rock where he could rest the glasses and scanned the scene for several minutes.
"Be sure," Merritt had once warned him, "better spend a half an hour at the start than lose two hours later."
But Wilbur felt sure and rushed for his horse. Half-way he paused. Then, going deliberately into the shade of a heavy spruce, he half-closed his eyes for a minute or two to let the muscles relax. Then quietly he came to the edge of the cliff, and directing his glasses point-blank at the place he had been examining so closely, scanned it in every detail. He slipped the glasses back into their case, snapped the clasp firmly, walked deliberately back to his horse, who had been taking a few mouthfuls of grass, tightened the cinches, looked to it that the saddle was resting true and that the blanket had not rucked up, vaulted into the saddle, and rode to the edge of the cliff. There was no doubt of it. Hanging low in the heavy air over and through the dark foliage of pine and spruce was a dull dark silver gleam, which changed enough as the sunlight fell upon it to show that it was eddying vapor rather than the heavier waves of fog.
"Smoke!" he said. "We've got to ride for it."
NO WATER, NO FORESTS. NO FORESTS, NO WATER.
Example of country which irrigation will cause to become wonderfully fertile.
Photograph by U. S. Forest Service.
WITH WATER!
In the foreground, a field and orchard; in the background, the sand-dunes of the arid desert. Transformation effected by a tiny stream and a poplar wind-break.
Photograph by U. S. Forest Service.