He did not follow the zig-zag Ridge trail but clambered straight up the face of the slope, following pretty much the short cut-off they had taken the night before.  He came to the crag where the spruce logs spanned the tinkling water course.  There was a gossamer scarf of cloud hanging among the mosses of the trees.  The peak came out opal fire above belts of clouds.  The sage-green moss spanning the spruces turned to a jewel-dropped thing in a sun-bathed rain-washed world of flawless clouds and jubilant waters.  He drew a deep breath.  The air was tonic of imprisoned sunlight and resinous healing.  Was each day’s birth the dawn to new being?

It was here he had met her the night before.  Waves of consciousness, tender delirious consciousness, flooded and surprised him.  He had asked for a seal of memory.  He knew now it would never be a memory:  it would be consciousness, ever-living, ever present; a compulsion not to be controlled because it was not his own; and never to be quenched because it burned within.  If he had been a weakling, the seal would have been a seal to self; but because an elemental war for right was winnowing the self out of him, he knew it was a seal to service.

Day-dawn marked the creation of a new world; and That had opened the doors for him to a life that no telling could have revealed.  Would it be the same with the Nation?  Would this struggle open the doors to a new life; or would the powers that stood for law and right go on marking time inside the firing line, while the powers that stood for wrong and outrage held their course rampant, unchecked; straining the law not to protect right but to extend wrong; perverting the courts; stealing where they chose to steal; killing where they chose to kill; deluging the land with anarchy by sweeping away law, just as surely as the removal of the sluice gates would set loose flood waters?

He ascended the rest of the dripping Ridge trail in a swing that was almost a run.

Below the Ranger cabin on the Homestead Slope stood the large oblong canvas bunk house of the road gang employed by the Forest Service.

“Hi—­fellows,” shouted Wayland, shaking the tent flap.  “All hands up!” And he ordered the foreman to send the road gang to skin and burn and bury what lay at the foot of the battlements.  As the Rim Rocks lay a few feet outside the bounds of the National Forests, it will be seen that Wayland had stopped marking time behind the law and gone out beyond the firing line.  If it isn’t clear to you how the Ranger was exceeding the authority of the law, then read the Senator’s speeches about “the Forest and Land Service men going outside their jurisdiction employing Government men to do work which was not Government Service at all.”