Bob rode jubilantly into camp. The expedition had taken him all the afternoon, and it was dropping dusk when he had reached the mill.
"We can get busy," he cried, waving the permit at Welton. "Here it is!"
Welton smiled. "I knew that, my boy," he replied, "and we're already busy to the extent of being ready to turn her loose to-morrow morning. I've sent down a yard crew to the lower end of the flume; and I've started Max to rustling out the teams by 'phone."
Next day the water was turned into the flume. Fifty men stood by. Rapidly the skilled workmen applied the clamps and binders that made of the boards a compact bundle to be given to the rushing current. Then they thrust it forward to the drag of the water. It gathered headway, rubbing gently against the flume, first on one side, then on the other. Its weight began to tell; it gathered momentum; it pushed ahead of its blunt nose a foaming white wave; it shot out of sight grandly, careening from side to side. The men cheered.
"Well, we're off!" said Bob cheerfully.
"Yes, we're off, thank God!" replied Welton.
From that moment the affairs of the new enterprise went as well as could be expected. Of course, there were many rough edges to be smoothed off, but as the season progressed the community shaped itself. It was indeed a community, of many and diverse activities, much more complicated, Bob soon discovered, than any of the old Michigan logging camps. A great many of the men brought their families. These occupied separate shanties, of course. The presence of the women and children took away much of that feeling of impermanence associated with most pioneer activities. As without exception these women kept house, the company "van" speedily expanded to a company store. Where the "van" kept merely rough clothing, tobacco and patent medicines, the store soon answered demands for all sorts of household luxuries and necessities. Provisions, of course, were always in request. These one of the company's bookkeepers doled out.
"Mr. Poole," the purchaser would often say to this man, "next time a wagon comes up from Sycamore Flats would you just as soon have them bring me up a few things? I want a washboard, and some shoes for Jimmy, and a double boiler; and there ought to be an express package for me from my sister."
"Sure! I'll see to it," said Poole.
This meant a great deal of trouble, first and last, what with the charges and all. Finally, Welton tired of it.
"We've got to keep a store," he told Bob finally.
With characteristic despatch he put the carpenters to work, and sent for lists of all that had been ordered from Sycamore Flats. A study of these, followed by a trip to White Oaks, resulted in the equipment of a store under charge of a man experienced in that sort of thing. As time went on, and the needs of such a community made themselves more evident, the store grew in importance. Its shelves accumulated dress goods, dry goods, clothing, hardware; its rafters dangled with tinware and kettles, with rope, harness, webbing; its bins overflowed with various food-stuffs unknown to the purveyor of a lumber camp's commissary, but in demand by the housewife; its one glass case shone temptingly with fancy stationery, dollar watches, and even cheap jewelry. There was candy for the children, gum for the bashful maiden, soda pop for the frivolous young. In short, there sprang to being in an astonishingly brief space of time a very creditable specimen of the country store. It was a business in itself, requiring all the services of a competent man for the buying, the selling, and the transportation. At the end of the year it showed a fair return on the investment.
"Though we'd have to have it even at a dead loss," Welton pointed out, "to hold our community together. All we need is a few tufts of chin whiskers and some politics to be full-fledged gosh-darn mossbacks."
The storekeeper, a very deliberate person, Merker by name, was much given to contemplation and pondering. He possessed a German pipe of porcelain, which he smoked when not actively pestered by customers. At such times he leaned his elbows on the counter, curved one hand about the porcelain bowl of his pipe, lost the other in the depths of his great seal-brown beard, and fell into staring reveries. When a customer entered he came back—with due deliberation—from about one thousand miles. He refused to accept more than one statement at a time, to consider more than one person at a time, or to do more than one thing at a time.
"Gim'me five pounds of beans, two of sugar, and half a pound of tea!" demanded Mrs. Max.
Merker deliberately laid aside his pipe, deliberately moved down the aisle behind his counter, deliberately filled his scoop, deliberately manipulated the scales. After the package was duly and neatly encased, labelled and deposited accurately in front of Mrs. Max, Merker looked her in the eye.
"Five pounds of beans," said he, and paused for the next item.
The moment the woman had departed, Merker resumed his pipe and his wide-eyed vacancy.
Welton was immensely amused and tickled.
"Seems to me he might keep a little busier," grumbled Bob.
"I thought so, too, at first," replied the older man, "but his store is always neat, and he keeps up his stock. Furthermore, he never makes a mistake—there's no chance for it on his one-thing-at-a-time system."
But it soon became evident that Merker's reveries did not mean vacancy of mind. At such times the Placid One figured on his stock. When he put in a list of goods required, there was little guess-work as to the quantities needed. Furthermore, he had other schemes. One evening he presented himself to Welton with a proposition. His waving brown hair was slicked back from his square, placid brow, his wide, cowlike eyes shone with the glow of the common or domestic fire, his brown beard was neat, and his holiday clothes were clean. At Welton's invitation he sat, but bolt upright at the edge of a chair.
"After due investigation and deliberation," he stated, "I have come to the independent conclusion that we are overlooking a means of revenue."
"As what?" asked Welton, amused by the man's deadly seriousness.
"Hogs," stated Merker.
He went on deliberately to explain the waste in camp garbage, the price of young pigs, the cost of their transportation, the average selling price of pork, the rate of weight increase per month, and the number possible to maintain. He further showed that, turned at large, they would require no care. Amused still at the man's earnestness, Welton tried to trip him up with questions. Merker had foreseen every contingency.
"I'll turn it over to you. Draw the necessary money from the store account," Welton told him finally.
Merker bowed solemnly and went out. In two weeks pigs appeared. They became a feature of the landscape, and those who experimented with gardens indulged in profanity, clubs and hog-proof fences. Returning home after dark, the wayfarer was apt to be startled to the edge of flight by the grunting upheaval of what had seemed a black shadow under the moon. Bob in especial acquired concentrated practice in horsemanship for the simple reason that his animal refused to dismiss his first hypothesis of bears.
Nevertheless, at the end of the season Merker gravely presented a duly made out balance to the credit of hogs.
Encouraged by the success of this venture, he next attempted chickens. But even his vacant-eyed figuring had neglected to take into consideration the abundance of such predatory beasts and birds as wildcats, coyotes, raccoons, owls and the swift hawks of the falcon family.
"I had thought," he reported to the secretly amused Welton, "that even in feeding the finer sorts of garbage to hogs there might be an economic waste; hogs fatten well enough on the coarser grades, and chickens will eat the finer. In that I fell into error. The percentage of loss from noxious varmints more than equals the difference in the cost of eggs. I further find that the margin of profits on chickens is not large enough to warrant expenditures for traps, dogs and men sufficient for protection."
"And how does the enterprise stand now?" asked Welton.
"We are behind."
"H'm. And what would you advise by way of retrenchment?"
"I should advise closing out the business by killing the fowl," was Merker's opinion. "Crediting the account with the value of the chickens as food would bring us out with a loss of approximately ten dollars."
"Fried chicken is hardly applicable as lumber camp provender," pointed out Welton. "So it's scarcely a legitimate asset."
"I had considered that point," replied Merker, "and in my calculations I had valued the chickens at the price of beef."
Welton gave it up.
Another enterprise for which Merker was responsible was the utilization of the slabs and edgings in the construction of fruit trays and boxes. When he approached Welton on the subject, the lumberman was little inclined to be receptive to the idea.
"That's all very well, Merker," said he, impatiently; "I don't doubt it's just as you say, and there's a lot of good tray and box material going to waste. So, too, I don't doubt there's lots of material for toothpicks and matches and wooden soldiers and shingles and all sorts of things in our slashings. The only trouble is that I'm trying to run a big lumber company. I haven't time for all that sort of little monkey business. There's too much detail involved in it."
"Yes, sir," said Merker, and withdrew.
About two weeks later, however, he reappeared, towing after him an elderly, bearded farmer and a bashful-looking, hulking youth.
"This is Mr. Lee," said Merker, "and he wants to make arrangements with you to set up a little cleat and box-stuff mill, and use from your dump."
Mr. Lee, it turned out, had been sent up by an informal association of the fruit growers of the valley. Said informal association had been formed by Merker through the mails. The store-keeper had submitted such convincing figures that Lee had been dispatched to see about it. It looked cheaper in the long run to send up a spare harvesting engine, to buy a saw, and to cut up box and tray stuff than to purchase these necessities from the regular dealers. Would Mr. Welton negotiate? Mr. Welton did. Before long the millmen were regaled by the sight of a snorting little upright engine connected by a flapping, sagging belt to a small circular saw. Two men and two boys worked like beavers. The racket and confusion, shouts, profanity and general awkwardness were something tremendous. Nevertheless, the pile of stock grew, and every once in a while six-horse farm wagons from the valley would climb the mountain to take away box material enough to pack the fruit of a whole district. To Merker this was evidently a profound satisfaction. Often he would vary his usual between-customer reverie by walking out on his shaded verandah, where he would lean against an upright, nursing the bowl of his pipe, gazing across the sawdust to the diminutive and rackety box-plant in the distance.
Welton, passing one day, laughed at him.
"How about your economic waste, Merker?" he called. "Two good men could turn out three times the stuff all that gang does in about half the time."
"There are no two good men for that job," replied Merker unmoved. His large, cowlike eyes roved across the yards. "Men grow in a generation; trees grow in ten," he resumed with unexpected directness. "I have calculated that of a great tree but 40 per cent. is used. All the rest is economic waste—slabs, edging, tops, stumps, sawdust." He sighed. "I couldn't get anybody to consider your toothpick and matches idea, nor the wooden soldiers, nor even the shingles," he ended.
Welton stared.
"You didn't quote me in the matter, did you?" he asked at length.
"I did not take the matter as official. Would I have done better to have done so?"
"Lord, no!" cried Welton fervently.
"The sawdust ought to make something," continued Merker. "But I am unable to discover a practical use for it." He indicated the great yellow mound that each day increased.
"Yes, I got to get a burner for it," said Welton, "it'll soon swamp us."
"There might be power in it," mused Merker. "A big furnace, now----"
"For heaven's sake, man, what for?" demanded Welton.
"I don't know yet," answered the store-keeper.
Merker amused and interested Welton, and in addition proved to be a valuable man for just his position. It tickled the burly lumberman, too, to stop for a moment in his rounds for the purpose of discussing with mock gravity any one of Marker's thousand ideas on economic waste, Welton discovered a huge entertainment in this. One day, however, he found Merker in earnest discussion with a mountain man, whom the store-keeper introduced as Ross Fletcher. Welton did not pay very much attention to this man and was about to pass on when his eye caught the gleam of a Forest Ranger's badge. Then he stopped short.
"Merker!" he called sharply.
The store-keeper looked up.
"See here a minute. Now," said Welton, as he drew the other aside, "I want one thing distinctly understood. This Government gang don't go here. This is my property, and I won't have them loafing around. That's all there is to it. Now understand me; I mean business. If those fellows come in here, they must buy what they want and get out. They're a lazy, loafing, grafting crew, and I won't have them."
Welton spoke earnestly and in a low tone, and his face was red. Bob, passing, drew rein in astonishment. Never, in his long experience with Welton, had he seen the older man plainly out of temper. Welton's usual habit in aggravating and contrary circumstances was to show a surface, at least, of the most leisurely good nature. So unprecedented was the present condition that Bob, after hesitating a moment, dismounted and approached.
Merker was staring at his chief with wide and astonished eyes, and plucking nervously at his brown beard.
"Why, that is Ross Fletcher," he gasped. "We were just talking about the economic waste in the forests. He is a good man. He isn't lazy. He—"
"Economic waste hell!" exploded Welton. "I won't have that crew around here, and I won't have my employees confabbing with them. I don't care what you tell them, or how you fix it, but you keep them out of here. Understand? I hate the sight of one of those fellows worse than a poison-snake!"
Merker glanced from Welton to the ranger and back again perplexed.
"But—but—" he stammered. "I've known Ross Fletcher a long time. What can I say—"
Welton cut in on him with contempt.
"Well, you'd better say something, unless you want me to throw him off the place. This is no corner saloon for loafers."
"I'll fix it," offered Bob, and without waiting for a reply, he walked over to where the mountaineer was leaning against the counter.
"You're a Forest Ranger, I see," said Bob.
"Yes," replied the man, straightening from his lounging position.
"Well, from our bitter experiences as to the activities of a Forest Ranger we conclude that you must be very busy people—too busy to waste time on us."
The man's face changed, but he evidently had not quite arrived at the drift of this.
"I think you know what I mean," said Bob.
A slow flush overspread the ranger's face. He looked the young man up and down deliberately. Bob moved the fraction of an inch nearer.
"Meaning I'm not welcome here?" he demanded.
"This place is for the transaction of business only. Can I have Merker get you anything?"
Fletcher shot a glance half of bewilderment, half of anger, in the direction of the store-keeper. Then he nodded, not without a certain dignity, at Bob.
"Thanks, no," he said, and walked out, his spurs jingling.
"I guess he won't bother us again," said Bob, returning to Welton.
The latter laughed, a trifle ashamed of his anger.
"Those fellows give me the creeps," he said, "like cats do some people. Mossbacks don't know no better, but a Government grafter is a little more useless than a nigger on a sawlog."
He went out. Bob turned to Merker.
"Sorry for the row," he said briefly, for he liked the gentle, slow man. "But they're a bad lot. We've got to keep that crew at arm's length for our own protection."
"Ross Fletcher is not that kind," protested Merker. "I've known him for years."
"Well, he's got a nerve to come in here. I've seen him and his kind holding down too good a job next old Austin's bar."
"Not Ross," protested Merker again. "He's a worker. He's just back now from the high mountains. Mr. Orde, if you've got a minute, sit down. I want to tell you about Ross."
Willing to do what he could to soften Merker's natural feeling, Bob swung himself to the counter, and lit his pipe.
"Ross Fletcher is a ranger because he loves it and believes in it," said Merker earnestly. "He knows things are going rotten now, but he hopes that by and by they'll go better. His district is in good shape. Why, let me tell you: last spring Ross was fighting fire all alone, and he went out for help and they docked him a day for being off the reserve!"
"You don't say," commented Bob.
"You don't believe it. Well, it's so. And they sent him in after sheep in the high mountains early, when the feed was froze, and wouldn't allow him pay for three sacks of barley for his animals. And Ross gets sixty dollars a month, and he spends about half of that for trail tools and fire tools that they won't give him. What do you think of that?"
"Merker," said Bob kindly, "I think your man is either a damn liar or a damn fool. Why does he say he does all this?"
"He likes the mountains. He—well, he just believes in it."
"I see. Are there any more of these altruists? or is he the only bird of the species?"
Merker caught the irony of Bob's tone.
"They don't amount to much, in general," he admitted. "But there's a few—they keep the torch lit."
"I supposed their job was more in the line of putting it out," observed Bob; then, catching Merker's look of slow bewilderment, he added: "So there are several."
"Yes. There's good men among 'em. There's Ross, and Charley Morton, and Tom Carroll, and, of course, old California John."
Bob's amused smile died slowly. Before his mental vision rose the picture of the old mountaineer, with his faded, ragged clothes, his beautiful outfit, his lean, kindly face, his steady blue eyes, guarding an empty trail for the sake of an empty duty. That man was no fool; and Bob knew it. The young fellow slid from the counter to the floor.
"I'm glad you believe in your friend, Merker," said he "and I don't doubt he's a fine fellow; but we can't have rangers, good, bad, or indifferent, hanging around here. I hope you understand that?"
Merker nodded, his wide eyes growing dreamy.
"It's an economic waste," he sighed, "all this cross-purposes. Here's you a good man, and Ross a good man, and you cannot work in harmony because of little things. The Government and the private owner should conduct business together for the best utilization of all raw material—"
"Merker," broke in Bob, with a kindly twinkle, "you're a Utopian."
"Mr. Orde," returned Merker with entire respect, "you're a lumberman."
With this interchange of epithets they parted.
The establishment of the store attracted a great many campers. California is the campers' state. Immediately after the close of the rainy season they set forth. The wayfarer along any of the country roads will everywhere meet them, either plodding leisurely through the charming landscape, or cheerfully gipsying it by the roadside. Some of the outfits are very elaborate, veritable houses on wheels, with doors and windows, stove pipes, steps that let down, unfolding devices so ingenious that when they are all deployed the happy owners are surrounded by complete convenience and luxury. The man drives his ark from beneath a canopy; the women and children occupy comfortably the living room of the house—whose sides, perchance, fold outward like wings when the breeze is cool and the dust not too thick. Carlo frisks joyously ahead and astern. Other parties start out quite as cheerfully with the delivery wagon, or the buckboard, or even—at a pinch—with the top buggy. For all alike the country-side is golden, the sun warm, the sky blue, the birds joyous, and the spring young in the land. The climate is positively guaranteed. It will not rain; it will shine; the stars will watch. Feed for the horses everywhere borders the roads. One can idle along the highways and the byways and the noways-at-all, utterly carefree, surrounded by wild and beautiful scenery. No wonder half the state turns nomadic in the spring.
And then, as summer lays its heats—blessed by the fruit man, the irrigator, the farmer alike—over the great interior valleys, the people divide into two classes. One class, by far the larger, migrates to the Coast. There the trade winds blowing softly from the Pacific temper the semi-tropic sun; the Coast Ranges bar back the furnace-like heat of the interior; and the result is a summer climate even nearer perfection—though not so much advertised—than is that of winter. Here the populace stays in the big winter hotels at reduced rates, or rents itself cottages, or lives in one or the other of the unique tent cities. It is gregarious and noisy, and healthy and hearty, and full of phonographs and a desire to live in bathing suits. Another, and smaller contingent, turns to the Sierras.
We have here nothing to do with those who attend the resorts such as Tahoe or Klamath; nor yet with that much smaller contingent of hardy and adventurous spirits who, with pack-mule and saddle, lose themselves in the wonderful labyrinth of granite and snow, of cañon and peak, of forest and stream that makes up the High Sierras. But rather let us confine ourselves to the great middle class, the class that has not the wealth nor the desire for resort hotels, nor the skill nor the equipment to explore a wilderness. These people hitch up the farm team, or the grocer's cart, or the family horse, pile in their bedding and their simple cooking utensils, whistle to the dog, and climb up out of the scorching inferno to the coolness of the pines.
They have few but definite needs. They must have company, water, and the proximity of a store where they can buy things to eat. If there is fishing, so much the better. At any rate there is plenty of material for bonfires. And since other stores are practically unknown above the six-thousand-foot winter limit of habitability, it follows that each lumber-mill is a magnet that attracts its own community of these visitors to the out of doors.
As early as the beginning of July the first outfit drifted in. Below the mill a half-mile there happened to be a small, round lake with meadows at the upper and lower ends. By the middle of the month two hundred people were camped there. Each constructed his abiding place according to his needs and ideas, and promptly erected a sign naming it. The names were facetiously intended. The community was out for a good time, and it had it. Phonographs, concertinas, and even a tiny transportable organ appeared. The men dressed in loose rough clothes; the women wore sun-bonnets; the girls inclined to bandana handkerchiefs, rough-rider skirts and leggings, cowboy hats caught up at the sides, fringed gauntlet gloves. They were a good-natured, kindly lot, and Bob liked nothing better than to stroll down to the Lake in the twilight. There he found the arrangements differing widely. The smaller ranchmen lived roughly, sleeping under the stars, perhaps, cooking over an open fire, eating from tinware. The larger ranchmen did things in better style. They brought rocking chairs, big tents, chinaware, camp stoves and Japanese servants to manipulate them. The women had flags and Chinese lanterns with which to decorate, hammocks in which to lounge, books to read, tables at which to sit, cots and mattresses on which to sleep. No difference in social status was made, however. The young people undertook their expeditions together: the older folks swapped yarns in the peaceful enjoyment of the forest. Bob found interest in all, for as yet the California ranchman has not lost in humdrum occupations the initiative that brought him to a new country nor the influences of the experience he has gained there. To his surprise several of the parties were composed entirely of girls. One, of four members, was made up of students from Berkeley, out for their summer vacation. Late in the summer these four damsels constructed a pack of their belongings, lashed it on a borrowed mule, and departed. They were gone for a week in the back country, and returned full of adventures over the detailing of which they laughed until they gasped.
To Bob's astonishment none of the men seemed particularly wrought up over this escapade.
"They're used to the mountains," he was assured, "and they'll get along all right with that old mule."
"Does anybody live over there?" asked Bob.
"No, it's just a wild country, but the trails is good."
"Suppose they get into trouble?"
"What trouble? And 'tain't likely they'd all get into trouble to once."
"I should think they'd be scared."
"Nothin' to be scared of," replied the man comfortably.
Bob thought of the great, uninhabited mountains, the dark forests, the immense loneliness and isolation, the thousand subtle and psychic influences which the wilderness exerts over the untried soul. There might be nothing to be scared of, as the man said. Wild animals are harmless, the trails are good. But he could not imagine any of the girls with whom he had acquaintance pushing off thus joyous and unafraid into a wilderness three days beyond the farthest outpost. He had yet to understand the spirit, almost universal among the native-born Californians, that has been brought up so intimately with the large things of nature that the sublime is no longer the terrible. Perhaps this states it a little too pompously. They have learned that the mere absence of mankind is 'nothing to be scared of'; they have learned how to be independent and to take care of themselves. Consequently, as a matter of course, as one would ride in the park, they undertake expeditions into the Big Country.
Many of these travellers, especially toward the close of the summer, complained bitterly of the scarcity of horse-feed. In the back country where the mountains were high and the wilderness unbroken, they depended for forage on the grasses of the mountain meadows. This year they reported that the cattle had eaten the forage down to the roots. Where usually had been abundance and pleasant camping, now were hard, close lawns, and cattle overrunning and defiling everything. Under the heavy labour of mountain travel the horses fell off rapidly in flesh and strength.
"We're the public just as much as them cattlemen," declaimed one grizzled veteran waving his pipe. "I come to these mountains first in sixty-six, and the sheep was bad enough then, but you always had some horse meadows. Now they're just plumb overrunning the country. There's thousands and thousands of folks that come in camping, and about a dozen of these yere cattlemen. They got no right to hog the public land."
With so much approval did this view meet that a delegation went to Plant's summer quarters to talk it over. The delegation returned somewhat red about the ears. Plant had politely but robustly told it that a supervisor was the best judge of how to run his own forest. This led to declamatory denunciation, after the American fashion, but without resulting in further activity. Resentment seemed to be about equally divided between Plant and the cattlemen as a class.
This resentment as to the latter, however, soon changed to sympathy. In September the Pollock boys stopped overnight at the Lake Meadow on their way out. Their cattle, in charge of the dogs, they threw for the night into a rude corral of logs, built many years before for just that purpose. Their horses they fed with barley hay bought from Merker. Their camp they spread away from the others, near the spring. It was dark before they lit their fire. Visitors sauntering over found George and Jim Pollock on either side the haphazard blaze stolidly warming through flapjacks, and occasionally settling into a firmer position the huge coffee pot. The dust and sweat of driving cattle still lay thick on their faces. A boy of eighteen, plainly the son of one of the other two, was hanging up the saddles. The whole group appeared low-spirited and tired. The men responded to the visitors by a brief nod only. The latter there-upon sat down just inside the circle of lamplight and smoked in silence. Presently Jim arose stiffly, frying pan in hand.
"It's done," he announced.
They ate in silence, consuming great quantities of half-cooked flapjacks, chunks of overdone beef, and tin-cupfuls of scalding coffee. When they had finished they thrust aside the battered tin dishes with the air of men too weary to bother further with them. They rolled brown paper cigarettes and smoked listlessly. After a time George Pollock remarked:
"We ain't washed up."
The statement resulted in no immediate action. After a few moments more, however, the boy arose slowly, gathered the dishes clattering into a kettle, filled the latter with water, and set it in the fire. Jim and his brother, too, bestirred themselves, disappearing in the direction of the spring with a bar of mottled soap, an old towel, and a battered pan. They returned after a few moments, their faces shining, their hair wetted and sleeked down.
"Plumb too lazy to wash up." George addressed the silent visitors by way of welcome.
"Drove far?" asked an old ranchman.
"Twin Peaks."
"How's the feed?" came the inevitable cowman's question.
"Pore, pore," replied the mountaineer. "Ain't never seen it so short. My cattle's pore."
"Well, you're overstocked; that's what's the matter," spoke up some one boldly.
George Pollock turned his face toward this voice.
"Don't you suppose I know it?" he demanded. "There's a thousand head too many on my range alone. I've been crowded and pushed all summer, and I ain't got a beef steer fit to sell, right now. My cattle are so pore I'll have to winter 'em on foothill winter feed. And in the spring they'll be porer."
"Well, why don't you all get together and reduce your stock?" persisted the questioner. "Then there'll be a show for somebody. I got three packs and two saddlers that ain't fatted up from a two weeks' trip in August. You got the country skinned; and that ain't no dream."
George Pollock turned so fiercely that his listeners shrank.
"Get together! Reduce our stock!" he snarled, shaken from the customary impassivity of the mountaineer, "It ain't us! We got the same number of cattle, all we mountain men, that our fathers had afore us! There ain't never been no trouble before. Sometimes we crowded a little, but we all know our people and we could fix things up, and so long as they let us be, we got along all right. It don'tpayus to overstock. What for do we keep cattle? To sell, don't we? And we can't sell 'em unless they're fat. Summer feed's all we got to fat 'em on. Winter feed's no good. You know that. We ain't going to crowd our range. You make me tired!"
"What's the trouble then?"
"Outsiders," snapped Pollock. "Folks that live on the plains and just push in to summer their cattle anyhow, and then fat 'em for the market on alfalfa hay. This ain't their country. Why don't they stick to their own?"
"Can't you handle them? Who are they?"
"It ain't they," replied George Pollock sullenly. "It's him. It's the richest man in California, with forty ranches and fifty thousand head of cattle and a railroad or two and God knows what else. But he'll come up here and take a pore man's living away from him for the sake of a few hundred dollars saved."
"Old Simeon, hey?" remarked the ranchman thoughtfully.
"Simeon Wright," said Pollock. "The same damn old robber. Forest Reserves!" he sneered bitterly. "For the use of the public! Hell! Who's the public? me and you and the other fellow? The public is Simeon Wright. What do you expect?"
"Didn't Plant say he was going to look into the matter for next year?" Bob inquired from the other side the fire.
"Plant! He's bought," returned Pollock contemptuously. "He's never seen the country, anyway; and he never will."
He rose and kicked the fire together.
"Good night!" he said shortly, and, retiring to the shadows, rolled himself in a blanket and turned his back on the visitors.
The season passed without further incidents of general interest. It was a busy season, as mountain seasons always are. Bob had opportunity to go nowhere; but in good truth he had no desire to do so. The surroundings immediate to the work were rich enough in interest. After the flurry caused by the delay in opening communication, affairs fell into their grooves. The days passed on wings. Almost before he knew it, the dogwood leaves had turned rose, the aspens yellow, and the pines, thinning in anticipation of the heavy snows, were dropping their russet needles everywhere. A light snow in September reminded the workers of the altitude. By the first of November the works were closed down. The donkey engines had been roughly housed in; the machinery protected; all things prepared against the heavy Sierra snows. Only the three caretakers were left to inhabit a warm corner. Throughout the winter these men would shovel away threatening weights of snow and see to the damage done by storms. In order to keep busy they might make shakes, or perhaps set themselves to trapping fur-bearing animals. They would useskisto get about.
For a month after coming down from the mountain, Bob stayed at Auntie Belle's. There were a number of things to attend to on the lower levels, such as anticipating repairs to flumes, roads and equipment, systematizing the yard arrangements, and the like. Here Bob came to know more of the countryside and its people.
He found this lower, but still mountainous, country threaded by roads; rough roads, to be sure, but well enough graded. Along these roads were the ranch houses and spacious corrals of the mountain people. Far and wide through the wooded and brushy foothills roamed the cattle, seeking the forage of the winter range that a summer's absence in the high mountains had saved for them. Bob used often to "tie his horse to the ground" and enter for a chat with these people. Harbouring some vague notions of Southern "crackers," he was at first considerably surprised. The houses were in general well built and clean, even though primitive, and Bob had often occasion to notice excellent books and magazines. There were always plenty of children of all sizes. The young women were usually attractive and blooming. They insisted on hospitality; and Bob had the greatest difficulty in persuading them that he stood in no immediate need of nourishment. The men repaid cultivation. Their ideas were often faulty because of insufficient basis of knowledge: but, when untinged by prejudice, apt to be logical. Opinions were always positive, and always existent. No phenomenon, social or physical, could come into their ken without being mulled over and decided upon. In the field of their observations were no dead facts. Not much given to reception of contrary argument or idea they were always eager for new facts. Bob found himself often held in good-humoured tolerance as a youngster when he advanced his opinion; but listened to thirstily when he could detail actual experience or knowledge. The head of the house held patriarchal sway until the grown-up children were actually ready to leave the paternal roof for homes of their own. One and all loved the mountains, though incoherently, and perhaps without full consciousness of the fact. They were extremely tenacious of personal rights.
Bob, being an engaging and open-hearted youth, soon gained favour. Among others he came to know the two Pollock families well. Jim Pollock, with his large brood, had arrived at a certain philosophical, though watchful, acceptance of life; but George, younger, recently married, and eagerly ambitious, chafed sorely. The Pollocks had been in the country for three generations. They inhabited two places on opposite sides of a cañon. These houses possessed the distinction of having the only two red-brick chimneys in the hills. They were low, comfortable, rambling, vine-clad.
"We always run cattle in these hills," said George fiercely to Bob, "and got along all right. But these last three years it's been bad. Unless we can fat our cattle on the summer ranges in the high mountains, we can't do business. The grazing on these lower hills you justgotto save for winter. You can't raise no hay here. Since they begun to crowd us with old Wright's stock it's tur'ble. I ain't had a head of beef cattle fittin' to sell, bar a few old cows. And if I ain't got cattle to sell, where do I get money to live on? I always been out of debt; but this year I done put a mortgage on the place to get money to go on with."
"We can always eat beef, George," said his wife with a little laugh, "and miner's lettuce. We ain't the first folks that has had hard times—and got over it."
"Mebbe not," agreed George, glancing with furrowed brow at a tiny garment on which Mrs. George was sewing.
Jim Pollock, smoking comfortably in his shirt sleeves before his fire, was not so worried. His youngest slept in his arms; two children played and tumbled on the floor; buxom Mrs. Pollock bustled here and there on household business; the older children sprawled over the table under the lamp reading; the oldest boy, with wrinkled brow, toiled through the instructions of a correspondence school course.
"George always takes it hard," said Jim. "I've got six kids, and he'll have one—or at most two—mebbe. It's hard times all right, and a hard year. I had to mortgage, too. Lord love you, a mortgage ain't so bad as a porous plaster. It'll come off. One good year for beef will fix us. We ain't lost nothing but this year's sales. Our cattle are too pore for beef, but they're all in good enough shape. We ain't lost none. Next year'll be better."
"What makes you think so?" asked Bob.
"Well, Smith, he's superintendent at White Oaks, you know, he's favourable to us. I seed him myself. And even Plant, he's sent old California John back to look over what shape the ranges are in. There ain't no doubt as to which way he'll report. Old John is a cattleman, and he's square."
One day Bob found himself belated after a fishing excursion to the upper end of the valley. As a matter of course he stopped over night with the first people whose ranch he came to. It was not much of a ranch and it's two-room house was of logs and shakes, but the owners were hospitable. Bob put his horse into a ramshackle shed, banked with earth against the winter cold. He had a good time all the evening.
"I'm going to hike out before breakfast," said he before turning in, "so if you'll just show me where the lantern is, I won't bother you in the morning."
"Lantern!" snorted the mountaineer. "You turn on the switch. It's just to the right of the door as you go in."
So Bob encountered another of the curious anomalies not infrequent to the West. He entered a log stable in the remote backwoods and turned on a sixteen-candle-power electric globe! As he extended his rides among the low mountains of the First Rampart, he ran across many more places where electric light and even electric power were used in the rudest habitations.
The explanation was very simple; these men had possessed small water rights which Baker had needed. As part of their compensation they received from Power House Number One what current they required for their own use.
Thus reminded, Bob one Sunday visited Power House Number One. It proved to be a corrugated iron structure through which poured a great stream and from which went high-tension wires strung to mushroom-shaped insulators. It was filled with the clean and shining machinery of electricity. Bob rode up the flume to the reservoir, a great lake penned in cañon walls by a dam sixty feet high. The flume itself was of concrete, large enough to carry a rushing stream. He made the acquaintance of some of the men along the works. They tramped and rode back and forth along the right of way, occupied with their insulations, the height of their water, their watts and volts and amperes. Surroundings were a matter of indifference to them. Activity was of the same sort, whether in the city or in the wilderness. As influences—city or wilderness—it was all the same to them. They made their own influences—which in turn developed a special type of people—among the delicate and powerful mysteries of their craft. Down through the land they had laid the narrow, uniform strip of their peculiar activities; and on that strip they dwelt satisfied with a world of their own. Bob sat in a swinging chair talking in snatches to Hicks, between calls on the telephone. He listened to quick, sharp orders as to men and instruments, as to the management of water, the undertaking of repairs. These were couched in technical phrases and slang, for the most part. By means of the telephone Hicks seemed to keep in touch not only with the plants in his own district, but also with the activities in Power Houses Two, Three and Four, many miles away. Hicks had never once, in four years, been to the top of the first range. He had had no interest in doing so. Neither had he an interest in the foothill country to the west.
"I'd kind of like to get back and kill a buck or so," he confessed; "but I haven't got the time."
"It's a different country up where we are," urged Bob. "You wouldn't know it for the same state as this dry and brushy country. It has fine timber and green grass."
"I suppose so," said Hicks indifferently. "But I haven't got the time."
Bob rode away a trifle inclined to that peculiar form of smug pity a hotel visitor who has been in a place a week feels for yesterday's arrival. He knew the coolness of the great mountain.
At this point an opening in the second growth of yellow pines permitted him a vista. He looked back. He had never been in this part of the country before. A little portion of Baldy, framed in a pine-clad cleft through the First Range, towered chill, rugged and marvellous in its granite and snow. For the first time Bob realized that even so immediately behind the scene of his summer's work were other higher, more wonderful countries. As he watched, the peak was lost in the blackness of one of those sudden storms that gather out of nothing about the great crests. The cloud spread like magic in all directions. The faint roll of thunder came down a wind, damp and cool, sucked from the high country.
Bob rounded a bend in the road to overtake old California John, jingling placidly along on his beautiful sorrel. Though by no means friendly to any member of this branch of government service, Bob reined his animal.
"Hullo," said he, overborne by an unexpected impulse.
"Good day," responded the old man, with a friendly deepening of the kindly wrinkles about his blue eyes.
"John," asked Bob, "were you ever in those big mountains there?"
"Baldy?" said the Ranger. "Lord love you, yes. I have to cross Baldy 'most every time I go to the back country. There's two good passes through Baldy."
"Back country!" repeated Bob. "Are there any higher mountains than those?"
Old California John chuckled.
"Listen, son," said he. "There's the First Range, and then Stone Creek, and then Baldy. And on the other side of Baldy there's the cañon of the Joncal which is three thousand foot down. And then there's the Burro Mountains, which is half again as high as Baldy, and all the Burro country to Little Jackass. That's a plateau covered with lodge-pole pine and meadows and creeks and little lakes. It's a big plateau, and when you're a-ridin' it, you shore seem like bein' in a wide, flat country. And then there's the Green Mountain country; and you drop off five or six thousand foot into the box cañon of the north fork; and then you climb out again to Red Mountain; and after that is the Pinnacles. The Pinnacles is the Fourth Rampart. After them is South Meadow, and the Boneyard. Then you get to the Main Crest. And that's only if you go plumb due east. North and south there's all sorts of big country. Why, Baldy's only a sort of taster."
Bob's satisfaction with himself collapsed. This land so briefly shadowed forth was penetrable only in summer: that he well knew. And all summer Bob was held to the great tasks of the forest. He hadn't the time! Wherein did he differ from Hicks? In nothing save that his right of way happened to be a trifle wider.
"Have you been to all these places?" asked Bob.
"Many times," replied California John. "From Stanislaus to the San Bernardino desert I've ridden."
"How big a country is that?"
"It's about four hundred mile long, and about eighty mile wide as the crow flies—a lot bigger as a man must ride."
"All big mountains?"
"Surely."
"You must have been everywhere?"
"No," said California John, "I never been to Jack Main's Cañon. It's too fur up, and I never could get time off to go in there."
So this man, too, the ranger whose business it was to travel far and wide in the wild country, sighed for that which lay beyond his right of way! Suddenly Bob was filled with a desire to transcend all these activities, to travel on and over the different rights of way to which all the rest of the world was confined until he knew them all and what lay beyond them. The impulse was but momentary, and Bob laughed at himself as it passed.
"Something hid beyond the ranges," he quoted softly to himself.
Suddenly he looked up, and gathered his reins.
"John," he said, "we're going to catch that storm."
"Surely," replied the old man looking at him with surprise; "just found that out?"
"Well, we'd better hurry."
"What's the use? It'll catch us, anyhow. We're shore due to get wet."
"Well, let's hunt a good tree."
"No," said California John, "this is a thunder-storm, and trees is too scurce. You just keep ridin' along the open road. I've noticed that lightnin' don't hit twice in the same place mainly because the same place don't seem to be thar any more after the first time."
The first big drops of the storm delayed fully five minutes. It did seem foolish to be jogging peacefully along at a foxtrot while the tempest gathered its power, but Bob realized the justice of his companion's remarks.
When it did begin, however, it made up for lost time. The rain fell as though it had been turned out of a bucket. In an instant every runnel was full. The water even flowed in a thin sheet from the hard surface of the ground. The men were soaked.
Then came the thunder in a burst of fury and noise. The lightning flashed almost continuously, not only down, but aslant, and even—Bob thought—up. The thunder roared and reverberated and reëchoed until the world was filled with its crashes. Bob's nerves were steady with youth and natural courage, but the implacable rapidity with which assault followed assault ended by shaking him into a sort of confusion. His horse snorted, pricking its ears backward and forward, dancing from side to side. The lightning seemed fairly to spring into being all about them, from the substance of the murk in which they rode.
"Isn't this likely to hit us?" he yelled at California John.
"Liable to," came back the old man's reply across the roar of the tempest.
Bob looked about him uneasily. The ranger bent his head to the wind. Star, walking more rapidly, outpaced Bob's horse, until they were proceeding single file some ten feet apart.
Suddenly the earth seemed to explode directly ahead. A blinding flare swept the ground, a hissing crackle was drowned in an overwhelming roar of thunder. Bob dodged, and his horse whirled. When he had mastered both his animal and himself he spurred back. California John had reined in his mount. Not twenty feet ahead of him the bolt had struck. California John glanced quizzically over his shoulder at the sky.
"Old Man," he remarked, "you'll have to lower your sights a little, if you want to git me."