On returning to headquarters, as Bob was naturally somewhat
incapacitated for manual work, he was given the fire patrol. This meant
that every day he was required to ride to four several "lookouts" on the
main ridge, from which points he could spy abroad carefully over vast
stretches of mountainous country. One of these was near the meadow of
the cold spring whence the three of them had first caught sight of the
Granite Creek fire. Thence he turned sharp to the north along the ridge
top. The trail led among great trees that dropped away to right and left
on the slopes of the mountain. Through them he caught glimpses of the
blue distance, or far-off glittering snow, or unexpected cañon depths.
The riding was smooth, over undulating knolls. Every once in a while
passing through a "_puerto suelo_," he looked on either side to tiny
green meadows, from which streams were born. Occasionally he saw a deer,
or more likely small bands of the wild mountain cattle that swung along
before him, heads held high, eyes staring, nostrils expanded. Then Bob
felt his pony's muscles stiffen beneath his thighs, and saw the animal's
little ears prick first forward at the cattle, then back for his
master's commands.
After three miles of this he came out on a broad plateau formed by the
joining of his ridge with that of the Baldy range. Here Granite Creek
itself rose, and the stream that flowed by the mill. It was a country of
wild, park-like vistas between small pines, with a floor of granite and
shale. Over it frowned the steeps of Baldy, with its massive domes, its
sheer precipices, and its scant tree-growth clinging to its sides.
Against the sky it looked very rugged, very old, very formidable; and
the sky, behind its yellowed age, was inconceivably blue.
Sometimes Bob rode up into the pass. More often he tied his horse and
took the steep rough trail afoot. The way was guarded by strange,
distorted trees, and rocks carved into fantastic shapes. Some of them
were piled high like temples. Others, round and squat, resembled the fat
and obscene deities of Eastern religions. There were seals and elephants
and crocodiles and allegorical monsters, some of them as tiny as the
grotesque Japanese carvings, others as stupendous as Egypt. The trail
led by them, among them, between them. At their feet clutched snowbush,
ground juniper, the gnarled fingers of manzañita, like devotees. A
foaming little stream crept and plunged over bare and splintered rocks.
Twisted junipers and the dwarf pines of high elevations crouched like
malignant gnomes amongst the boulders, or tossed their arms like witches
on the crags. This bold and splintered range rose from the softness and
mystery of the great pine woods on the lower ridge as a rock rises above
cool water.
The pass itself was not over fifty feet wide. Either side of it like
portals were the high peaks. It lay like the notch of a rifle sight
between them. Once having gained the tiny platform, Bob would sit down
and look abroad over the wonderful Sierra.
Never did he tire of this. At one eye-glance he could comprehend a
summer's toilsome travel. To reach yonder snowy peak would consume the
greater part of a week. Unlike the Swiss alps, which he had once
visited, these mountains were not only high, but wide as well. They had
the whole of blue space in which to lie. They were like the stars, for
when Bob had convinced himself that his eye had settled on the farthest
peak, then still farther, taking half-guessed iridescent form out of the
blue, another shone.
But his business was not with these distances. Almost below him, so
precipitous is the easterly slope of Baldy, lay cañons, pine forests,
lesser ridges, streams, the green of meadows. Patiently, piece by piece,
he must go over all this, watching for that faint blue haze, that
deepening of the atmosphere, that almost imagined pearliness against the
distant hills which meant new fire.
"Don't look for _smoke_," California John had told him. "When a fire
gets big enough for smoke, you can't help but see it. It's the new fire
you want to spot before it gets started. Then it's easy handled. And new
fire's almighty easy to overlook. Sometimes it's as hard for a greenhorn
to see as a deer. Look close!"
So Bob, concentrating his attention, looked close. When he had satisfied
himself, he turned square around.
From this point of view he saw only pine forests. They covered the ridge
below him like a soft green mantle thrown down in folds. They softened
the more distant ranges. They billowed and eddied, and dropped into
unguessed depths, and came bravely up to eyesight again far away. At
last they seemed to change colour abruptly, and a brown haze overcast
them through which glimmered a hint of yellow. This Bob knew was the
plain, hot and brown under the July sun. It rose dimly through the mist
to the height of his eye. Thus, even at eight thousand feet, Bob seemed
to stand in the cup of the earth, beneath the cup of the sky.
The other two lookouts were on the edge of the lower ridge. They gave an
opportunity of examining various coves and valleys concealed by the
shoulder of the ridge from the observer on Baldy. To reach them Bob rode
across the plateau of the ridge, through the pine forests, past the
mill.
Here, if the afternoon was not too far advanced, he used to allow
himself the luxury of a moment's chat with some of his old friends.
Welton, coat off, his burly face perspiring and red, always greeted him
jovially.
"Spend all your salary this month?" he would ask. "Does the business
keep you occupied?" And once or twice, seriously, "Bob, haven't you had
enough of this confounded nonsense? You're getting too old to find any
great fun riding around in this kid fashion pretending to do things.
There's big business to be done in this country, and we need you boys to
help. When I was a youngster I'd have jumped hard at half the chance
that's offered you."
But Bob never would answer seriously. He knew this to be his only chance
of avoiding even a deeper misunderstanding between himself and this man
whom he had learned to admire and love.
Once he met Baker. That young man greeted him as gaily as ever, but into
his manner had crept the shadow of a cold contempt. The stout youth's
standards were his own, and rigid, as is often the case with people of
his type. Bob felt himself suddenly and ruthlessly excluded from the
ranks of those worthy of Baker's respect. A hard quality of character,
hitherto unsuspected, stared from the fat young man's impudent blue
eyes. Baker was perfectly polite, and suitably jocular; but he had not
much time for Bob; and soon plunged into a deep discussion with Welton
from which Bob was unmistakably excluded.
On one occasion, too, he encountered Oldham riding down the trail from
headquarters. The older man had nodded to him curtly. His eyes had
gleamed through his glasses with an ill-concealed and frosty amusement,
and his thin lips had straightened to a perceptible sneer. All at once
Bob divined an enemy. He could not account for this, as he had never
dealt with the man; and the accident of his discovering the gasoline
pump on the Lucky Land Company's creeks could hardly be supposed to
account for quite so malignant a triumph. Next time Bob saw Welton, he
asked his old employer about it.
"What have I ever done to Oldham?" he inquired. "Do you know?"
"Oldham?" repeated Welton.
"Baker's land agent."
"Oh, yes. I never happened to run across him. Don't know him at all."
Bob put down Oldham's manifest hatred to pettiness of disposition.
Even from Merker, the philosophic storekeeper, Bob obtained scant
comfort.
"Men like you, with ability, youth, energy," said Merker, "producing
nothing, just conserving, saving. Conditions should be such that the
possibility of fire, of trespass, of all you fellows guard against,
should be eliminated. Then you could supply steam, energy,
accomplishment, instead of being merely the lubrication. It's an
economic waste."
Bob left the mill-yards half-depressed, half-amused. All his people had
become alien. He opposed them in nothing, his work in no way interfered
with their activities; yet, without his volition, and probably without
their realization, he was already looked upon as one to be held at arms'
length. It saddened Bob, as it does every right-thinking young man when
he arrives at setting up his own standards of conduct and his own ways
of life. He longed with a great longing, which at the same time he
realized to be hopeless, to make these people feel as he felt. It gave
him real pain to find that his way of life could never gain anything
beyond disapproval or incomprehension. It took considerable fortitude to
conclude that he now must build his own structure, unsupported. He was
entering the loneliness of soul inseparable from complete manhood.
After such disquieting contacts, the more uncomfortable in that they
defied analysis, Bob rode out to the last lookout and gazed abroad over
the land. The pineclad bluff fell away nearly four thousand feet. Below
him the country lay spread like a relief map--valley, lesser ranges,
foothills, far-off plain, the green of trees, the brown of grass and
harvest, the blue of glimpsed water, the haze of heat and great
distance, the thread-like gossamer of roads, the half-guessed shimmer of
towns and cities in the mirage of summer, all the opulence of earth and
the business of human activity. Millions dwelt in that haze, and beyond
them, across the curve of the earth, hundreds of millions more, each
actuated by its own selfishness or charity, by its own conception of the
things nearest it. Not one in a multitude saw or cared beyond the
immediate, nor bothered his head with what it all meant, or whether it
meant anything. Bob, sitting on his motionless horse high up there in
the world, elevated above it all, in an isolation of pines, close under
his sky, bent his ear to the imagined faint humming of the spheres.
Affairs went on. The machine fulfilled its function. All things had
their place, the evil as well as the good, the waste as well as the
building, balancing like the governor of an engine the opposition of
forces. He saw, by the soft flooding of light, rather than by any flash
of insight, that were the shortsightedness, the indifference, the
ignorance, the crass selfishness to be eliminated before yet the world's
work was done, the energies of men, running too easily, would outstrip
the development of the Plan, as a machine "races" without its load. A
humility came to him. His not to judge his fellows by the mere externals
of their deeds. He could only act honestly according to what he saw, as
he hoped others were doing.
"Just so a man isn't _mean_, I don't know as I have any right to despise
him," he summed it all up to his horse. "But," he added cheerfully,
"that doesn't prevent my kicking him into the paths of righteousness if
he tries to steal my watch."
The sun dipped toward the heat haze of the plains. It was from a golden
world that Bob turned at last to ride through the forest to the
cheerfulness of his rude camp.