She looked relieved. "I'm glad to hear you say so. I've been imagining all
kinds of terrifying things."
"Then, too, her bad health is some excuse for her housekeeping," he added,
eager to lessen the daughter's humiliation, "and you must remember her
associations are not those which breed scrupulous regard for the
proprieties."
"But she's my mother!" wailed the girl, coming back to the central fact.
"She has sent me money--she has been kind to me--what am I to do? She
needs me, and yet the thought of staying here and facing her life
frightens me."
The rotten board walks, the low rookeries, the unshaven, blear-eyed men
sitting on the thresholds of the saloons, the slattern squaws wandering
abroad like bedraggled hens, made the girl stare with wonder and dismay.
She had remembered the town street as a highway filled with splendid
cavaliers, a list wherein heroic deeds were done with horse and pistol.
She recognized one of those "knights of the lariat" sitting in the sun,
flabby, grizzled, and inert. Another was trying to mount his horse with a
bottle in his hand. She recalled him perfectly. He had been her girlish
ideal of manly beauty. Now here he was, old and mangy with drink at forty.
In a most vivid and appealing sense he measured the change in her as well
as the decay of the old-time cowboy. His incoherent salutation as his eyes
fell upon her was like the final blasphemous word from the rear-guard of a
savage tribe, and she watched him ride away reeling limply in his saddle
as one watches a carrion-laden vulture take its flight.
She perceived in the ranger the man of the new order, and with this in her
mind she said: "You don't belong here? You're not a Western man."
"Not in the sense of having been born here," he replied. "I am, in fact, a
native of England, though I've lived nearly twenty years of my life in the
States."
She glanced at his badge. "How did you come to be a ranger--what does it
mean? It's all new to me."
"It is new to the West," he answered, smilingly, glad of a chance to turn
her thought from her own personal griefs. "It has all come about since you
went East. Uncle Sam has at last become provident, and is now 'conserving
his resources.' I am one of his representatives with stewardship over some
ninety thousand acres of territory--mostly forest."
She looked at him with eyes of changing light. "You don't talk like an
Englishman, and yet you are not like the men out here."
"I shouldn't care to be like some of them," he answered. "My being here is
quite logical. I went into the cattle business like many another, and I
went broke. I served under Colonel Roosevelt in the Cuban War, and after
my term was out, naturally drifted back. I love the wilderness and have
some natural taste for forestry, and I can ride and pack a horse as well
as most cowboys, hence my uniform. I'm not the best forest ranger in the
service, I'll admit, but I fancy I'm a fair average."
"And that is your badge--the pine-tree?"
"Yes, and I am proud of it. Some of the fellows are not, but so far as I
am concerned I am glad to be known as a defender of the forest. A tree
means much to me. I never mark one for felling without a sense of
responsibility to the future."