the windfall and burn; and now, the deity of the woods, Nature, was at work!  By the moonlight, the Ranger could see the pale chalky peach-bloom boles of the ghost birches, and the satiny poplars and cottonwoods, turning gold to the approaching autumn but going down gay, twinkling, laughing fellows to the year’s death, actually clapping their hands, shaking with glee, sending leaves down in a rain of gold, which, it is to be hoped, the pixies picked up, the pixies sailing the air in feather parachutes of flower and cone seed!  Wayland could see these airy ships between him and the silver moonlight, dropping seeds—­seeds—­seeds; seeds of fire flower and golden rod and hoary evergreen; shooting them out in tiny catapults; sending them up in dandelion fluff and sky rockets; catching and skimming the wind in airy canoes; tilting the winged sails to a whiff and sailing, sailing, dropping the seeds of life for a thousand years!  And beneath the birches with the hundred eyes looking out from the chalky faced bark, and the poplars laughing and shaking with glee, and the cottonwoods showering down a rain of gold in their death; stood the little pines seeded by the wind, nursed by the shade of the quick growing trees.  Who would be living and loving and fighting and hating and winning and losing when these little fellows rose to toss and flaunt their victory in the face of the sky?  Was that the meaning of life after all, the strength and thew, the valor and might of the fight up?  Then, it was not such a bad way with the Nation.  The Nation would be the better for this fight.  Certain, it was, the better side would win.  Would it be the few like the sugar pine towering over its fellows; or the many like the lodge pole pine and englemann spruce standing in serried ranks of equal valor and power?

And if you think he could take that ride without wishing to the “nth” degree that she could be with him to share the joy, then, I assure you, you don’t know to what music those gay, twinkling, trembling gold leaves above the Brule were beating time all night to the whisper of the wind and rustle of the pixy parachutes sailing mid-air.

CHAPTER XXV

THE QUESTION IS—­WHICH UNCLE SAM?

Before, it had been a race-reverie; a waiting, puzzled and uncertain for the ways of life.  Now, it was the joy of life, the fulfilment for which life had been created and waited expectant; and whether the ways were any plainer in the new light, there was no room for wonder in the fulness of joy.  Eleanor was glad the little bundle of tawdry loquacity toddling between them kept up a constant stream of idle boastings on the road to the Mission House, about being “waal-thy” and “Faather shure bein’ a gen’leman when they were waal-thy” and “herself as foine as eny loidy in th’ land,” and more and more of the same, all the way down the Ridge Trail; which was not so fatuous as it sounded, when it voiced the convictions of a great many more people than the little unwashed garlicky Shanty Town dancer.  Eleanor wondered if the same arguments applied to the culture of horses and pigs and potatoes—­size instead of sort, fulness of stomach not quality of head, area of possession not area of service.