"Had this been going on long?"
"Several months, I reckon," answered the former Ranger, "before I heard of it. This was just before that section of the country was taken over by the Forest Service. As soon as notice was given that the district in question was to be placed under government regulations, a deputation to the tie-cutters loped down on their cow-ponies to convey the cheerful news. Expressing, of course, the profoundest sympathy for them, the spokesman of the cattle group volunteered the information that they could wrap up their axes in tissue paper, tie pink ribbons on their rifles and go home, because any one caught cutting timber on the reserve, now that it was a reserve, would go to the Pen for fifteen years."
"What a bluff!"
"Bluff it certainly was. It didn't work, either. One of the tie-cutters in reply suggested that the cowmen should go back and devote their time to buying Navajo saddle-blankets and silver-mounted sombreros, since ornamenting the landscape was all they had to do in life; another replied that if a government inspector ever set eyes on their cattle he'd drive them off the range as a disgrace to the State; and a third capped the replies with the terse answer that no ten United States officers and no hundred and ten cattlemen could take them out alive."
"That wouldn't make the cow-camp feel happy a whole lot," remarked the red-headed man.
"There wasn't any shooting, though, as I said before, though just how it kept off I never rightly could understand. At all events they fixed it so that we heard of it in a hurry. Then both sides awaited developments. The tie-cutters kept their hands off the cattle for a while, and the cowmen had no special business with railroad ties, so that, aside from snorting at each other, no special harm was done.
"But, of course, the timber trespass question had to be investigated, and the Supervisor, who was then located at Colorado Springs, arranged to make the trip with me to the tie-cutters' camp from a small station about fifty miles north of the Springs. I met him at the station as prearranged. We were just about to start when a telegram was handed him calling him to another part of the forest in a hurry."
"Tough luck," said one of the listeners.
"It surely was—for me," commented the narrator. "The camp to which we had intended going was twenty-six miles into the mountains, and going up there alone didn't appeal to me a little bit. However, the Supervisor told me to start right out, to get an idea of how much timber had been cut, and in what kind of shape the ground had been left, and in short, to 'nose around a little,' as he put it himself."
"That was hardly playing the game, sending you up there alone," said one of the men.