"'Too bad,' shouted the old Rangers in chorus, until a peal of laughter that echoed through and through that mountain camp showed the indignant youngster that his point of view hadn't been what you might say warmly welcomed by the old-timers.
"But the following day, as I heard the story from Charles H. Shinn," the doctor went on, "one of the best men in the gang took the lad aside the following morning as they were riding up the trail, and said to him:
"'How much of that stuff you was preachin' last night did you mean? Of course, this is hard work; it has to be. Either leave it mighty pronto, or wrastle with it till you're a man at the game. I've seen lots of young fellows harden up—some of 'em just as green an' useless when they came as you are now. Don't you know you hold us back, and waste our time, too, on almost any job? But it's the price we have to pay up here to get new men started. Unless you grow to love it so much that there isn't anything else in all the world you'd care to do, you ain't fit for it, an' you'd better get out, and let some one with more sand than you have get in.'
"Well, Loyle," the doctor said, "that youngster was provoked. He wasn't man enough to get really angry, so that his temper would keep him sticking to the work; he was one of these saucy slap-'em-on-the-wrist-naughty kind.
"'I think all of you are crazy,' he said.
"He walked into the Supervisor's office that afternoon and explained that the kind of work he had been given to do was altogether below his intellectual powers. He never understood how quickly things happened, but he signed a resignation blank almost before he knew it, and went back to Peanutville.
"It so happened that one of the Rangers had friends in Peanutville, and the boys at the camp followed the youth's career with much interest. He clerked, he took money at a circus window, he tried cub newspaper work, he stood behind a dry-goods counter, he was everything by turns but nothing long."
"What finally happened to him?" asked Wilbur.
"Last I heard he was a salesman in a woman's shoe store. But he's still with us in spirit," said the doctor, "as a horrible example. Right now, down in the heart of a forest fire, when the Rangers are working like men possessed down some hot gulch, one will say to the other:
"'Gee, Jack, if I was only back where I used to be, I could be having a plate of ice cream this minute.' And the other will reply: 'I wish I might be back in Peanutville and hear the band play in the park.' And both men will laugh and go at the work all the harder for realizing what a miserable failure the weak greenhorn had been."