“This was done when I was away on my last long patrol,” reflected Wayland.  The slash of brushwood and wasted tops lay higher than his horse’s head.  “A fine fire-trap for the fall drought,” thought Wayland angrily.  “One spark in that tinder pile in a high wind; and there would be no forests left on Holy Cross.”

What did it mean, this open defiance, not of himself, (he was a mere cog in the big wheel; so was the entire Forest Service,) this open defiance of law; this open theft of Government property?  Connected with the outrage of the Range War, and the Senator’s advice for him to stop suing for restitution of the two-thousand acres of coal lands, and the handy-man’s urgent arguments for him “to chuck the fight and come down to the Valley,” the Ranger knew well enough what the pile of stolen logs stamped with a counterfeit Government hatchet meant; stamped, of course, by some poor ignorant dummy foreigner.  The Ring were setting their hired tools on to the fight.  And far away in the East—­yes it was the East’s business to see what went on in the West—­were myriads of wage-earners forced to pay exorbitantly for coal and wood and lumber and house rent because of this wanton waste; this seizing fraudulently by the few of the property belonging to the many.  If they had thrown down the challenge, assuredly he was taking it up!  What would the people do about it, he wondered, when they came to know?  Would any power on earth waken the people up to do something, and stop talking? A Roman ruler had fiddled while his imperial city burned.  What was the many-headed ruler of the great republic doing, while enemies burned and cut and slashed and wasted in wantonness the property of the public for the enrichment of the Ring?

The Ranger touched his horse to a gallop and jumped all three animals through the criss-cross of wind-fall and slash, coming out on the edge of the rock chasm that cut the Upper Mesas off from the Holy Cross.  The gully crumbled on the near side and shelved on the far, twenty feet deep and fifty wide, altogether not very jumpable, the Ranger thought.  He zig-zagged in and out among the larches along the margin of the rock cut-way, noting “dead tops” ripe for the axe, pines where the squirrels had cached cone seed at the root, spruce logs gone to punk with alien seedlings coming up from the dead trunk, yellow ant-eaten wood-rot ripped open by some bear hunting the white eggs; noting, above all, the wonderful flame of the painter’s brush, spikes with the tints of the rainbow, like Indian arrows dipped in blood, knee-deep, multi-colored, fiery, dyed in the very essence of sunglow, humming with bees and alive with butterflies, lives of a summer in the aeon of ages that the snow flakes had taken manufacturing soil out of granite, silt out of snow.

“The little snow flake gets there all right,” reflected Wayland.  “It takes time; but she carves out her little snow flake job all the same, and the rocks go down before her!  Guess if we follow the law, we’re hitched up with the stars all right.”