Published by Good Press, 2019

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      EAN 4064066240028

Table of Contents

       I

       THE DESERT CHARIOT

       II

       THE FOREST RANGER

       III

       LEE VIRGINIA WAGES WAR

       IV

       VIRGINIA TAKES ANOTHER MOTOR RIDE

       V

       TWO ON THE VERANDA

       VI

       THE VOICE FROM THE HEIGHTS

       VII

       THE POACHERS

       VIII

       THE SECOND ATTACK

       IX

       THE OLD SHEEP-HERDER

       X

       THE SMOKE OF THE BURNING

       XI

       SHADOWS ON THE MIST

       XII

       CAVANAGH’S LAST VIGIL BEGINS

       XIII

       CAVANAGH ASKS FOR HELP

       XIV

       THE PEST-HOUSE

       XV

       WETHERFORD PASSES ON

       CONCLUSION

      INTRODUCTION

      My Dear Mr. Garland:—You have been kind enough to let me see the proofs of Cavanagh: Forest Ranger. I have read it with mingled feelings—with keen appreciation of your sympathetic understanding of the problems which confronted the Forest Service before the Western people understood it, and with deep regret that I am no longer officially associated with its work (although I am as deeply interested, and almost as closely in touch as ever).

      The Western frontier, to the lasting sorrow of all old hunters like yourself, has now practically disappeared. Its people faced life with a manly dependence on their own courage and capacity which did them, and still does them, high honor. Some of them were naturally slow to see the advantages of the new order. But now that they have seen it, there is nowhere more intelligent, convinced, and effective support of the Conservation policies than in the West. The establishment of the new order in some places was not child’s play. But there is a strain of fairness among the Western people which you can always count on in such a fight as the Forest Service has made and won.

      The Service contains the best body of young men I know, and many splendid veterans. It is nine-tenths made up of Western men. It has met the West on its own ground, and it has won the contest—an episode of which you have so well described—because the West believes in what it stands for.

      I have lived much among the Western mountain men. I have studied their problems; differed with some of them, and worked with many of them. Sometimes I have lost and sometimes I have won, but every time the fight was worth while. I have come out of it all with a respect and liking for the West which will last as long as I do.

      Very sincerely yours,

      Gifford Pinchot.

      March 14, 1910.

      Cavanagh: Forest Ranger

      Cavanagh: Forest Ranger

I

       Table of Contents

THE DESERT CHARIOT

       Table of Contents

      Lee Virginia Wetherford began her return journey into the mountain West with exultation. From the moment she opened her car-window that August morning in Nebraska the plain called to her, sustained her illusions. It was all quite as big, as tawny, as she remembered it—fit arena for the epic deeds in which her father had been a leader bold and free.

      Her memories of Roaring Fork and its people were childish and romantic. She recalled, vividly, the stagecoach which used to amble sedately, not to say wheezily, from the railway to the Fork and from the Fork back to the railway, in the days when she had ridden away in it a tearful, despairing, long-limbed girl, and fully expected to find it waiting for her at Sulphur City, with old Tom Quentan still as its driver.

      The years of absence had been years of growth, and though she had changed from child to woman in these suns and moons, she could not think of the Fork as anything other than the romantic town she had left—a