The Boy With the U. S. Foresters

by Francis Rolt-Wheeler

Wilbur raised his hat in salute for reply and reined Kit in until the party was lost to view. The afternoon was drawing on and the lad had lost nearly two hours in following the party, and in his chat with the old patriarch, but he could not but feel that even the momentary glimpse he had been given of the practical workings of the reclamation work of the government had gone far to emphasize and render of keener personal interest all that he had learned at school or heard from the Forest Service men about the making of a newer world within the New World itself. And when he remembered that over a quarter of a million families, within a space of about six years, have made their homes on what was an absolute desert ten years ago, and that these men and women were stirred with the same spirit as the old patriarch, he felt, as he had said, that the conserving of the mountain streams was work worth while.

As it chanced, he passed over the little stream whose channel he had cleared on one of his patrol rides, and he stopped a moment to look at it.

"Well," he said aloud, "I suppose some youngster some day will be picking oranges off a tree that would have died if I hadn't done that day's work," and he rode on to his camp greatly pleased with himself.

For a day or two the boy found himself quite unable to shake the spell of the old patriarch's presence off his mind, and the more he thought over it, the more he realized that scarcely any one thing in the whole of the United States loomed larger on its future than the main idea of Conservation. It had been merely a word before, but now it was a reality, and he determined to take the first opportunity he would have, during his vacation, of going down to the Salt River Valley to see the old patriarch once again.

And still the weather grew hotter and the sky remained cloudless. And now, every evening, Rifle-Eye would telephone over to make sure that Wilbur was back at camp and that there was as yet no danger. They had had one quite sharp tussle at a distant point of the forest, and one day Wilbur had received orders to make a long ride to a lookout point in another part of the forest, the work of a Guard who had been called away to fight fire, but so far, Wilbur had been free. Two or three times he found himself waking suddenly in the night, possessed with an intense desire to saddle Kit and ride off to a part of the forest where he had either dreamed or thought a fire was burning, but Rifle-Eye had been careful to warn him against this very thing, and although the morning found him simply wild to ride to this point of supposed danger, he had followed orders and ridden his regular round.

Although Wilbur's camp was high, the heat grew hard to bear, and when the boy passed from the shade of the pine along the naked rock to some lookout point the ground seemed to blaze under him. The grass was rapidly turning brown in the exposed places, and the pine needles were as slippery as the smoothest ice.

Just at noon, one morning, Wilbur turned his horse—he was not riding Kit that day—into one of these open trails, and taking out his glasses, commenced to sweep the horizon. A heat haze was abroad, and his over-excited eyes seemed to see smoke everywhere. But, as he swept round the horizon, suddenly his whole figure stiffened. He looked long, then, with a sigh of relief, turned away, and completed his circuit of the horizon. This done, he directed the glasses anew where he had looked before. He looked long, unsatisfied, then lay down on the rock where he could rest the glasses and scanned the scene for several minutes.

"Be sure," Merritt had once warned him, "better spend a half an hour at the start than lose two hours later."

But Wilbur felt sure and rushed for his horse. Half-way he paused. Then, going deliberately into the shade of a heavy spruce, he half-closed his eyes for a minute or two to let the muscles relax. Then quietly he came to the edge of the cliff, and directing his glasses point-blank at the place he had been examining so closely, scanned it in every detail. He slipped the glasses back into their case, snapped the clasp firmly, walked deliberately back to his horse, who had been taking a few mouthfuls of grass, tightened the cinches, looked to it that the saddle was resting true and that the blanket had not rucked up, vaulted into the saddle, and rode to the edge of the cliff. There was no doubt of it. Hanging low in the heavy air over and through the dark foliage of pine and spruce was a dull dark silver gleam, which changed enough as the sunlight fell upon it to show that it was eddying vapor rather than the heavier waves of fog.

"Smoke!" he said. "We've got to ride for it."