Cavanagh, Forest Ranger: A Romance of the Mountain West. Garland Hamlin

felt quite repaid for the pressure he had put upon his wife to induce her to write that note. “You may leave Lize Wetherford out of the count, my dear,” he had said. “There is nothing of her discernible in the girl. Virginia is a lady. I don’t know where she got it, but she’s a gentlewoman by nature.”

      Lize said: “Don’t you figure on me in any way, Reddy. I’m nothing but the old hen that raised up this lark, and all I’m a-livin’ for now is to make her happy. Just you cut me out when it comes to any question about your wife and Virginia. I’m not in their class.”

      It was hot and still in the town, but no sooner was the car in motion than both heat and dust were forgotten. Redfield’s machine was not large, and as he was content to go at moderate speed, conversation was possible.

      He was of that sunny, optimistic, ever-youthful nature which finds delight in human companionship under any conditions whatsoever. He accepted this girl for what she seemed – a fresh, unspoiled child. He saw nothing cheap or commonplace in her, and was not disposed to impose any of her father’s wild doings upon her calendar. He had his misgivings as to her future – that was the main reason why he had said to Mrs. Redfield, “The girl must be helped.” Afterward he had said “sustained.”

      It was inevitable that the girl should soon refer to the ranger, and Redfield was as complimentary of him as she could wish. “Ross hasn’t a fault but one, and that’s a negative one: he doesn’t care a hang about getting on, as they say over in England. He’s content just to do the duty of the moment. He made a good cow-puncher and a good soldier; but as for promotion, he laughs when I mention it.”

      “He told me that he hoped to be Chief Forester,” protested Virginia.

      “Oh yes, he says that; but do you know, he’d rather be where he is, riding over the hills, than live in London. You should see his cabin some time. It’s most wonderful, really. His walls are covered with bookshelves of his own manufacture, and chairs of his own design. Where the boy got the skill, I don’t see. Heaven knows, his sisters are conventional enough! He’s capable of being Supervisor, but he won’t live in town and work in an office. He’s like an Indian in his love of the open.”

      All this was quite too absorbingly interesting to permit of any study of the landscape, which went by as if dismissed by the chariot wheels of some contemptuous magician. Redfield’s eyes were mostly on the road (in the manner of the careful driver), but when he did look up it was to admire the color and poise of his seat-mate, who made the landscape of small account.

      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?’”

      Lee Virginia looked up brightly. “That seems right to me!”

      “Ah yes; but wait. We cattle-men had large herds, and the probabilities were that the calf belonged to some one of us; whereas, the cowboy, having no herd at all, knew the maverick belonged to some one’s herd. True, the law said it was his, but the law did not mean to reward the freebooter; yet that is exactly what it did. At first only a few outlaws took advantage of it; but hard years came on, the cattle business became less and less profitable, we were forced to lay off our men, and so at last the range swarmed with idle cow-punchers; then came the breakdown in our scheme! The cowboys took to ‘mavericking’ on their own account. Some of them had the grace to go into partnership with some farmer, and so claim a small bunch of cows, but others suddenly and miraculously acquired herds of their own. From keeping within the law, they passed to violent methods. They slit the tongues of calves for the purpose of separating them from their mothers. Finding he could not suck, bossy would at last wander away from his dam, and so become a ‘maverick.’ In short, anarchy reigned on the range.”

      “But surely my father had nothing to do with this?”

      “No; your father, up to this time, had been on good terms with everybody. He had a small herd of cattle down the river, which he owned in common with a man named Hart.”

      “I remember him.”

      “He was well thought of by all the big outfits; and when the situation became intolerable, and we got together to weed out ‘the rustlers,’ as these cattle-thieves were called, your father was approached and converted to a belief in drastic measures. He had suffered less than the rest of us because of his small herd and the fact that he was very popular among the cowboys. So far as I was concerned, the use of violent methods revolted me. My training in the East had made me a respecter of the law. ‘Change the law,’ I said. ‘The law is all right,’ they replied; ‘the trouble is with these rustlers. We’ll hang a few of