"What time to-morrow?" he said. "I'll be ready."
"Middle of the afternoon," said Merritt. "So long."
He bade good-by to the doctor and his wife, and after having seen that Kit was properly attended to, went on his way to the Kern River Valley, to visit the Edison power plant erected on the river, and to prepare for the installation of the new pulp-mill.
In the meantime, Wilbur, more fatigued by the day's excitement than he had supposed himself to be, had fallen asleep, a sleep unbroken until the evening. And all evening the doctor and his wife told him stories of the Forest Service men and of the various miners, lumbermen, prospectors, ranchers, and so forth, all tales of manliness, courage, and endurance, and not infrequently of heroism. But when Wilbur told of the professor and asked about other greenhorns that had come to the forest, the doctor turned and asked him if he knew anything of "the boy from Peanutville."
"He had just come into camp up here in the Sierras," said the doctor on receiving the lad's negative reply, "from some little place in the middle West that was giving itself airs as a city. He had read somewhere about the forest Rangers, and he himself had been on several Sunday School picnics in the woods, so he thought that he knew all about it. At the end of his first couple of days' work he said:
"'I never supposed that a Ranger had to cut brush and build fence and grub stumps and slave like a nigger. I don't believe he ought to. I don't think it's what my people would like to have me do. I always supposed that he just rode around under the trees and made outsiders toe the mark.'
"I said he was a new Guard," the doctor continued, "but he said this in camp to a group of old-timers with whom he had been working. They hadn't worried him at all, but had given him a fair show and helped him all they could. But this was too rich. They glanced at each other with mingled contempt and amusement, then put on mournful faces, looked on him solemn-eyed, and regretted the cruelties of the Service.
"'The boss,' they said, 'just sticks it on us all the time. We are workin' like slaves—Guards and Rangers and everybody. It's plumb wicked the way we're herded here.'
"So the new hand felt comforted by this outward sympathy, and he ambled innocently on.
"'That heavy brush tears my clothes, and my back aches, and I burned a shoe, and my socks are full of stickers. Then I fell on the barbed wire when I was stretching it—and cut my nose. I tell you what it is, fellows, if I ever get a chance to get away, I hope I'll never see another inch of barbed wire as long as I live. If I was only back in Peanutville, where I used to live, I could be eating a plate of ice cream this minute instead of working like a dog and having to wash my own clothes Sundays when I might be hearing the band play in the park.'