She kept the conversation to the desired point. “Mr. Cavanagh’s work interests me very much. It seems very important; and it must be new, for I never heard of a forest ranger when I was a child.”
“The forester is new—at least, in America,” he answered. “My dear young lady, you are returned just in the most momentous period in the history of the West. The old dominion—the cattle-range—is passing. The supremacy of the cowboy is ended. The cow-boss is raising oats, the cowboy is pitching alfalfa, and swearing horribly as he blisters his hands. Some of the rangers at the moment are men of Western training like Ross, but whose allegiance is now to Uncle Sam. With others that transfer of allegiance is not quite complete, hence the insolence of men like Gregg, who think they can bribe or intimidate these forest guards, and so obtain favors; the newer men are college-bred, real foresters. But you can’t know what it all means till you see Ross, or some other ranger, on his own heath. We’ll make up a little party some day and drop down upon him, and have him show us about. It’s a lonely life, and so the ranger keeps open house. Would you like to go?”
“Oh, yes indeed! I’m eager to get into the mountains. Every night as I see the sun go down over them I wonder what the world is like up there.”
Then he began very delicately to inquire about her Eastern experience. There was not much to tell. In a lovely old town not far from Philadelphia, where her aunt lived, she had spent ten years of happy exile. “I was horribly lonely and homesick at first,” she said. “Mother wrote only short letters, and my father never wrote at all. I didn’t know he was dead then. He was always good to me. He wasn’t a bad man, was he?”
“No,” responded Redfield, without hesitation. “He was very like the rest of us—only a little more reckless and a little more partisan, that’s all. He was a dashing horseman and a dead-shot, and so, naturally, a leader of these daredevils. He was popular with both sides of the controversy up to the very moment when he went South to lead the invaders against the rustlers.”
“What was it all about? I never understood it. What were they fighting about?”
“In a sense, it was all very simple. You see, Uncle Sam, in his careless, do-nothing way, has always left his range to whomever got there first, and that was the cattle-man. At first there was grass enough for us all, but as we built sheds and corrals about watering-places we came to claim rights on the range. We usually secured by fraud homesteads in the sections containing water, and so, gun in hand, ‘stood off’ the man who came after. Gradually, after much shooting and lawing, we parcelled out the range and settled down covering practically the whole State. Our adjustments were not perfect, but our system was working smoothly for us who controlled the range. We had convinced ourselves, and pretty nearly everybody else, that the State was only fit for cattle-grazing, and that we were the most competent grazers; furthermore, we were in possession, and no man could come in without our consent.
“However, a very curious law of our own making was our undoing. Of course the ‘nester’ or ‘punkin roller,’ as we contemptuously called the small farmer, began sifting in here and there in spite of our guns, but he was only a mosquito bite in comparison with the trouble which our cow-punchers stirred up. Perhaps you remember enough about the business to know that an unbranded yearling calf without its mother is called a maverick?”
“Yes, I remember that. It belongs to the man who finds him, and brands him.”
“Precisely. Now that law worked very nicely so long as the poor cowboy was willing to catch and brand him for his employer, but it proved a ‘joker’ when he woke up and said to his fellows: ‘Why brand these mavericks at five dollars per head for this or that outfit when the law says it belongs to the man who finds him?’”