Just for a second, he pondered which path to follow. It would take an hour to go down the Ridge trail, cross the Valley and ascend the terra-cotta road of the Rim Rocks. Couldn't he jump his horses over the gully that cut between the Holy Cross and the Upper Mesa? He headed his horse into the tangle of hemlock and larch, the mule trotting ahead snatching bites of dogwood and willow from the edge of the dripping trail, the Ranger riding as Westerners ride, glued to the leather, guiding by the loose neck rein instead of the bit, with a wave of his hand to keep the little mule in line.
A turn to the left through a thicket of devil's club brought him where the Ridge overlooked the River. Wayland reined up sharply. A pile of logs scaled and marked with the U. S. stamp lay where the slightest topple would send them over a natural chute into the River. He had not scaled those logs: neither had his assistants. There was no record of them on the books. Of course, he had heard the chop and slash at the settlers' cabins, but homesteaders don't farm on the edge of a vertical precipice unless they are a lumber company; and logs tossed over that precipice to the River were destined for only one market, Smelter City. Then he remembered giving a permit to a Swede settler of the Homestead Slope to take out windfall and dead tops for a little portable gasoline engine; but the permit didn't cover this area.
"Having stopped stealing half a million from the Bitter Boot, they've started their dummies in here." He looked at the gashed timber-slash as a thrifty man looks at wantonness and waste; it was a gaping wound in the forest side, old and young trees alike hacked down, the stumps of the big trees, not eighteen inches low as the regulations provided, but three and four and five feet high of waste to rot and gather fungus, the biggest of the giant spruce cut from a scaffolding nine feet from the ground, leaving wasted lumber enough to build a house.
"This was done when I was away on my last long patrol," reflected Wayland. The slash of brushwood and wasted tops lay higher than his horse's head. "A fine fire-trap for the fall drought," thought Wayland angrily. "One spark in that tinder pile in a high wind; and there would be no forests left on Holy Cross."
What did it mean, this open defiance, not of himself, (he was a mere cog in the big wheel; so was the entire Forest Service,) this open defiance of law; this open theft of Government property? Connected with the outrage of the Range War, and the Senator's advice for him to stop suing for restitution of the two-thousand acres of coal lands, and the handy-man's urgent arguments for him "to chuck the fight and come down to the Valley," the Ranger knew well enough what the pile of stolen logs stamped with a counterfeit Government hatchet meant; stamped, of course, by some poor ignorant dummy foreigner. The Ring were setting their hired tools on to the fight. And far away in the East—yes it was the East's business to see what went on in the West—were myriads of wage-earners forced to pay exorbitantly for coal and wood and lumber and house rent because of this wanton waste; this seizing fraudulently by the few of the property belonging to the many. If they had thrown down the challenge, assuredly he was taking it up! What would the people do about it, he wondered, when they came to know? Would any power on earth waken the people up to do something, and stop talking? A Roman ruler had fiddled while his imperial city burned. What was the many-headed ruler of the great republic doing, while enemies burned and cut and slashed and wasted in wantonness the property of the public for the enrichment of the Ring?
The Ranger touched his horse to a gallop and jumped all three animals through the criss-cross of wind-fall and slash, coming out on the edge of the rock chasm that cut the Upper Mesas off from the Holy Cross. The gully crumbled on the near side and shelved on the far, twenty feet deep and fifty wide, altogether not very jumpable, the Ranger thought. He zig-zagged in and out among the larches along the margin of the rock cut-way, noting "dead tops" ripe for the axe, pines where the squirrels had cached cone seed at the root, spruce logs gone to punk with alien seedlings coming up from the dead trunk, yellow ant-eaten wood-rot ripped open by some bear hunting the white eggs; noting, above all, the wonderful flame of the painter's brush, spikes with the tints of the rainbow, like Indian arrows dipped in blood, knee-deep, multi-colored, fiery, dyed in the very essence of sunglow, humming with bees and alive with butterflies, lives of a summer in the aeon of ages that the snow flakes had taken manufacturing soil out of granite, silt out of snow.
"The little snow flake gets there all right," reflected Wayland. "It takes time; but she carves out her little snow flake job all the same, and the rocks go down before her! Guess if we follow the law, we're hitched up with the stars all right."
He reined up and caught at a pine bough. A sight to hold the eye of any forester held his; the enormous trunk of a fallen giant, a dozen dwarfs growing from its punk, spanned the gully. Wayland slid off his horse. The great trunk lay destitute of lesser branches to the tip on the far side of the chasm like great characters that discard mannerisms.
The Ranger struck his Service axe into the trunk. The bark held firm, though he heard the ring of the dry-rot at the heart that had brought the old giant crashing down to become food for the scrubs and pigmies of the forest. Wayland picked out two spindly birches. Quick strokes brought them down. Walking out on the dead trunk, he threw a birch on each side as a guard rail, affording fence, not protection, to the wavering faith of a shy horse, "all a feeling of security to steady a giddy head," he reflected. He led the little pack mule; and the bronchos followed. A moment later, he was galloping through the larches and low juniper that fringed the Mesas above the Rim Rock trail, the mule huff-huffing to the fore snatching mouthfuls on the run. Then, with a lope, Wayland's broncho leaped out on the bare sage-grown Mesas, the mule with ears pointed, nose high, heading straight for the white canvas-top of a tented wagon.
For a moment, the light blinded Wayland's sight; for the sun had come up in an orange fan; and the sky was not blue: it shone the dazzling silver of mercury. Against the high rarefied air came in view the figure of a man, grotesquely exaggerated, head and shoulders first, then body, riding a heavy horse, saddleless, hatless, coatless, white of hair, heels pressed to his horse's flanks, bent far over the animal's neck as Indians ride, galloping for the Rim Rock trail, or a second jump from the battlements.