The elder man regarded him curiously, perhaps with the faintest glimmer of admiration. "You'd better wait till to-morrow, Dan," he replied. "Bill will have supper soon, anyway. To-morrow we'll walk up the ridge and I'll see if I can show you a deer. You don't want to overdo too much, right at first."
"But, good Heavens! I'm not going to try to spare myself while I'm here. It's too late for that."
"Of course—but sit down now, anyway. I'm sorry that Snowbird isn't here."
"Snowbird is—"
"My daughter. My boy, she can make a biscuit! That's not her name, of course, but we've always called her that. She got tired of keeping house and is working this summer. Poor Bill has to keep house for her, and no wonder he's eager to take the stock down to the lower levels. I only wish he hadn't brought 'em up this spring at all; I've lost dozens from the coyotes."
"But a coyote can't kill cattle—"
"It can if it has hydrophobia, a common thing in the varmints this time of year. But as I say, Bill will take the stock down next season, and then Snowbird's work will be through, and she'll come back here."
"Then she's down in the valley?"
"Far from it. She's a mountain girl if one ever lived. Perhaps you don't know the recent policy of the forest service to hire women when they can be obtained. It was a policy started in wartimes and kept up now because it is economical and efficient. She and a girl from college have a cabin not five miles from here on old Bald Mountain, and they're doing lookout duty."
Dan wondered intensely what lookout duty might be. His thoughts went back to his early study of forestry. "You see, Dan," Lennox said in explanation, "the government loses thousands of dollars every year by forest fire. A fire can be stopped easily if it is seen soon after it starts. But let it burn awhile, in this dry season, and it's a terror—a wall of flame that races through the forests and can hardly be stopped. And maybe you don't realize how enormous this region is—literally hundreds of miles across. We're the last outpost—there are four cabins, if you can find them, in the first seventy miles back to town. So they have to put lookouts on the high points, and now they're coming to the use of aëroplanes so they can keep even a better watch. All summer and until the rains come in the fall, they have to guard every minute, and even then sometimes the fires get away from them. And one of the first things a forester learns, Dan, is to be careful with fire."