“I see you’re a ranger,” he remarked drily.  “Well, I wouldn’t go to Samuels’s if I was you.  He’s give it out that he’ll kill the next ranger that sets foot on his place.”

“I’ve heard that sort of talk before,” replied Bob impatiently.

“Samuels means what he says,” stated the storekeeper.  “He drove off the last of you fellows with a shotgun—­and he went too.”

“You haven’t told me how to get there,” Bob pointed out.

“All you have to do is to turn to the right at the white church and follow your nose,” replied the man curtly.

“How far is it?”

“About four mile.”

“Thank you,” said Bob, and started out.

The man let him get to the door.

“Say, you!” he called.

Bob stopped.

“You might be in better business than to turn a poor man out of his house and home.”

Bob did not wait to hear the rest.  As he untied his saddle horse, a man brushed by him with what was evidently intentional rudeness, for he actually jostled Bob’s shoulder.  The man jerked loose the tie rein of his own mount, leaped to the saddle, and clattered away.  Bob noticed that he turned to the right at the white church.

The four-mile ride, Bob discovered, was almost straight up.  At the end of it he found himself well elevated above the valley, and once more in the sugar-pine belt.  The road wound among shades of great trees.  Piles of shakes, gleaming and fragrant, awaited the wagon.  Rude signs, daubed on the riven shingles, instructed the wayfarer that this or that dim track through the forest led to So-and-so’s shake camp.

It was by now after four of the afternoon.  Bob met nobody on the road, but he saw in the dust fresh tracks which he shrewdly surmised to be those of the man who had jostled him.  Samuels had his warning.  The mountaineer would be ready.  Bob had no intention of delivering a frontal attack.

He rode circumspectly, therefore, until he discerned an opening in the forest.  Here he dismounted.  The opening, of course, might be only that of a natural meadow, but in fact proved to be the homestead claim of which Bob was in search.

The improvements consisted of a small log cabin with a stone and mud chimney; a log stable slightly larger in size; a rickety fence made partly of riven pickets, partly of split rails, but long since weathered and rotted; and what had been a tiny orchard of a score of apple trees.  At some remote period this orchard had evidently been cultivated, but now the weeds and grasses grew rank and matted around neglected trees.  The whole place was down at the heels.  Tin cans and rusty baling wire strewed the back yard; an ill-cared-for wagon stood squarely in front; broken panes of glass in the windows had been replaced respectively by an old straw hat and the dirty remains of overalls.  The supports of the little verandah roof sagged crazily.  Over it clambered a vine.  Close about drew the forest.  That was it:  the forest!  The “homestead” was a mere hovel; the cultivation a patch; the improvements sketchy and ancient; but the forest, become valuable for lumber where long it had been considered available only for shakes, furnished the real motive for this desperate attempt to rehabilitate old and lapsed rights.