“How long would it take you?” asked Bob.

“By riding hard, about a week.”

Rather the loyalty seemed to be gropingly to the idea back of it all, to something broad and dim and beautiful which these rough, untutored men had drawn from their native mountains and which thus they rendered back.

As Bob gradually came to understand more of the situation his curiosity grew.  The lumberman’s instinctive hostility to government control and interference had not in the slightest degree modified; but he had begun to differentiate this small, devoted band from the machinery of the Forest Reserves as they were then conducted.  He was a little inclined to the fanatic theory; he knew by now that the laziness hypothesis would not apply to these.

“What is there in it?” he asked.  “You surely can’t hope for a boost in salary; and certainly your bosses treat you badly.”

At first he received vague and evasive answers.  They liked the work; they got along all right; it was a lot better than the cattle business just now, and so on.  Then as it became evident that the young man was genuinely interested, California John gradually opened up.  One strange and beautiful feature of American partisanship for an ideal is its shyness.  It will work and endure, will wait and suffer, but it will not go forth to proselyte.

“The way I kind of look at it is this,” said the old man one evening.  “I always did like these here mountains—­and the big trees—­and the rocks and water and the snow.  Everywhere else the country belongs to some one:  it’s staked out.  Up here it belongs to me, because I’m an American.  This country belongs to all of us—­the people—­all of us.  We most of us don’t know we’ve got it, that’s all.  I kind of look at it this way:  suppose I had a big pile of twenty-dollar gold pieces lying up, say in Siskiyou, that I didn’t know nothing whatever about; and some fellow come along and took care of it for me and hung onto it even when I sent out word that anybody was welcome to anything I owned in Siskiyou—­I not thinking I really owned anything there, you understand—­why—­well, you see, I sort of like to feel I’m one of those fellows!”

“What good is there in hanging onto a lot of land that would be better developed?” asked Bob.

But California John refused to be drawn into a discussion.  He had his faith, but he would not argue about it.  Sometime or other the people would come to that same faith.  In the meantime there was no sense in tangling up with discussions.

“They send us out some reading that tells about it,” said California John.  “I’ll give you some.”

He was as good as his word.  Bob carried away with him a dozen government publications of the sort that, he had always concluded, everybody received and nobody read.  Interested, not in the subject matter of the pamphlets, but in their influence on these mountain men, he did read them.  In this manner he became for the first time acquainted with the elementary principles of watersheds and water conservation.  This was actually so.  Nor did he differ in this respect from any other of the millions of well-educated youth of the country.  In a vague way he knew that trees influence climate.  He had always been too busy with trees to bother about climate.