“Oh, of course.”
“We wanted to go over the John Muir Trail right along the crest of the Sierras to Yosemite.”
“You’ve hundreds of miles of almost unexplored country! Enough vacation places to last a lifetime! Rivers alive with trout! Bears! Cougars!” the Ranger had commented.
“And rattlers,” Long Lester had added grimly.
“And rattlers. And they’re the only living thing we need fear.”
“Not excluding range cattle?” Pedro had wanted to be assured.
“Not when you’re all together. Of course if you were alone you might break a leg or something that would leave you helpless, and you’d sure be a long way from anything to eat unless you had it with you.
“But unless we look alive the Big Interests are going to wrest away these beauty spots that we have set aside for our National playgrounds,” Radcliffe had declared.
“That’s just what Dad says!” Ace had remembered.
“And why? Not because they need the irrigation and water power of the big falls, for they can have it after the streams leave the parks, but because it would cost them a good deal less to secure these things of Uncle Sam than it would to build their projects outside Park limits. There isn’t a beauty spot in the West that some commercial interest hasn’t designs on.”