The Ranger saddled his own broncho for himself and a horse belonging to one of his assistants for the old frontiersman, who must be some where on the upper Mesas.  To each saddle he fastened a Service hatchet and a cased rifle.  Then, he caught one of the mules of the road gang for the pack saddle.  Going inside the cabin, he furbished together such provisions as his biscuit box shelves afforded, a sack containing half a ham, a quarter bag of flour, one tin of canned beans, a tobacco pouch filled with tea, another pouch with sugar on one side of the dividing leather and salt in the other.  Then, he cinched a couple of cow-boy slickers over the pack saddle, and, in place of the green Service coat which he had left at the Mission, donned a leather jacket, took a last look to see if a water-proof match case were in the inside pocket, ran back to the cabin for a half-flask of brandy, and an extra hat, and with the other horse and the pack mule in front, he mounted his pony and set out for the Rim Rocks.  It will be seen this was not the equipment of a man who intended to remain marking time.

Just for a second, he pondered which path to follow.  It would take an hour to go down the Ridge trail, cross the Valley and ascend the terra-cotta road of the Rim Rocks.  Couldn’t he jump his horses over the gully that cut between the Holy Cross and the Upper Mesa?  He headed his horse into the tangle of hemlock and larch, the mule trotting ahead snatching bites of dogwood and willow from the edge of the dripping trail, the Ranger riding as Westerners ride, glued to the leather, guiding by the loose neck rein instead of the bit, with a wave of his hand to keep the little mule in line.

A turn to the left through a thicket of devil’s club brought him where the Ridge overlooked the River.  Wayland reined up sharply.  A pile of logs scaled and marked with the U. S. stamp lay where the slightest topple would send them over a natural chute into the River.  He had not scaled those logs:  neither had his assistants.  There was no record of them on the books.  Of course, he had heard the chop and slash at the settlers’ cabins, but homesteaders don’t farm on the edge of a vertical precipice unless they are a lumber company; and logs tossed over that precipice to the River were destined for only one market, Smelter City.  Then he remembered giving a permit to a Swede settler of the Homestead Slope to take out windfall and dead tops for a little portable gasoline engine; but the permit didn’t cover this area.

“Having stopped stealing half a million from the Bitter Boot, they’ve started their dummies in here.”  He looked at the gashed timber-slash as a thrifty man looks at wantonness and waste; it was a gaping wound in the forest side, old and young trees alike hacked down, the stumps of the big trees, not eighteen inches low as the regulations provided, but three and four and five feet high of waste to rot and gather fungus, the biggest of the giant spruce cut from a scaffolding nine feet from the ground, leaving wasted lumber enough to build a house.