The Boy With the U. S. Foresters

by Francis Rolt-Wheeler

"I helped in many of them," she said simply, "and when they came to me for advice I tried to give it. Doctor Davis was always there to suggest the more advisable course, and I put it to these Bascos, as they called them, so that they would understand."

"How about Burleigh?" asked Wilbur.

But the doctor's wife disclaimed all knowledge of a sheep-owner called Burleigh.

"All right," said Wilbur, "then I'll give my share of the story, as the old hunter told it to me. That is, if you don't mind."

"Tell it," she smiled, "if you like."

"Well," said Wilbur, "one Sunday afternoon a Ranger, whose cabin was near a lookout point, said to his wife, 'I'll ride up to the peak, and be back in time for supper.' He went off in his shirt-sleeves, bare-headed, for an hour's ride, and was gone a week. Up in the brush he found the trail of a band of sheep, and although he was cold and hungry and his horse was playing out, he stuck right on the job until it got too dark to see. The second day he smashed in the door of a miner's cabin, got some grub, and nailed a note on the door saying who'd taken it, and kept on. He tired his horse out, and left him in another fellow's corral, but kept on going on foot. The sheepman was known as dangerous, but this little Ranger—did I tell you he was Irish—stuck to it, trusting to find some way out even if the grazer did get ugly.

"At last he came on the sheep in a mountain meadow, and Burleigh on his horse by them, a rifle across his saddle bow. The Ranger said little at the time, and the two men went home to supper. After eating, as they sat there, the Ranger said his say. He told the grazer what were the orders he had, and that he would have to live up to them. But the grazer had a copy of 'orders,' too, and he had hired a lawyer to find out how he could get out of them. So he lit into the Ranger.

"'You see, Mac,' he said, 'those orders don't mean anything. They may be all right in Washington, but they don't go here. You can't stop me, nor arrest me, nor hurt my sheep. Your bosses won't stand by you if you get into any mix-up. The best thing you can do is to stay here to-night, and then go home. Make a report on it, if you like, I don't care."

"And then the Ranger began," the boy went on. "The old hunter told me that this little bit of an Irishman told the grazer about his work as a Ranger. He told him how he had seen the good that was going to be done, and that having put his hand to the plow, he couldn't let it go again. He didn't know much about it, and he'd never tried to talk about it before, but the natural knack of talking which his race always has came to help him out. Then he began to talk of the sheep and cattle war, and the shame that it was to have them killing each other's flocks and shooting each other because they could not agree about the right to grass.

"'An' there's one more thing,' he said, ''tis only the other day that I was talkin' to the "little white lady," and she said she knew that you wouldn't be the one to start up trouble again.' And he wound up with an appeal to his better judgment, which, so the old hunter told me the grazer said afterward, would have got a paralyzed mule on the move.