and the park like glades of the wonderfully straight and serried soldier ranks of the engleman spruce and the lodge-pole pines; and the larches yellow as gold dust to the touch of the alchemist autumn.  He wanted to bring out his violin some day with her and see if they could catch the exact tone and pitch of the pines, when they began harping those age-old melodies of Pan:  they were harping them to-day in the high wind; he was sure it was the same as the bass undertone of a big orchestra.  Had she ever noticed the way the seeds came fluffing out of the cinnamon cones and the asters and the golden rod and the fire flower in September, for all the world like fairies sailing pixie parachutes?  People said that autumn was sad, it presaged death!  Did it?  A Forester did not see it so; he saw the triumphal procession of the years lighted to its consummation by the flaming torches of ten thousand golden twinkling gay, recklessly gay flowers and trees—­the cottonwood and the poplar and the larch, the cone flower and the golden rod and the aster!  But to-day, he could not say a word.  They were no longer his Forests.  He had been cast out from his life work—­the continuity of a National Life Work broken—­because he had dared to interfere with the petty plans of peanut politicians and public plunderers.

“It is level here!  Let us gallop out of this bare burn to the shelter of the evergreens,” she said.  “I don’t mind wind, but I’d just as soon get under cover where it couldn’t lash us so.”

And the horses came chugging and breathing hard up on the sheltered trail below the evergreens.  She reined her horse to the slowest of walks.

“Did you see the news editor before you left town?” she asked.

“Yes, he came over to my hotel last night about twelve o’clock.  He had the biggest fool-scheme you ever heard of my running for Congress and buying a paper to boost out the Ring and all that!  Thunder, I don’t want to run!  I’ve no ax to grind!  I prefer to stay a free lance in the fighting ranks!”

“And do you think the fellows, who want to run and have an ax to grind, do best for the Nation?” asked Eleanor.  “Why wouldn’t you run if the people demanded it?”

“There is the plain brutal fact that it takes money,” explained Wayland.  “I haven’t the ambition; and I have less money.  I haven’t more than will set me up on some little one-horse irrigation farm.  Oh, I know some fool had been filling him up about my having rich friends East, who would put up money for this campaign and finance a new kind of newspaper for the Valley!  I’d like to knock the fool’s head off who told him that!  It’s all a lie!  Of course, I knew lots of moneyed chaps at Yale; but thunderation, I’d have to want public office a good deal harder than I do to go round cap in hand!  Why, Eleanor, a fellow who would do that wouldn’t be worth shucks to represent the people.”

“Did you tell him that?” asked Eleanor.