"Good Lord! What a blow to the service!" exclaimed Cavanagh, with a groan
of sorrow and rage. "What is the President thinking of--to throw out the
only man who stood for the future, the man who had built up this corps,
who was its inspiration?" Then after a pause he added, with bitter
resolution: "This ends it for me. Here's where I get off."
"Don't say that, boy. We need you now more than ever."
"I'm through. I'm done with America--with the States. I shall write my
resignation at once. Send down another man to take my place."
Redfield's pleadings were of no avail. Cavanagh went directly from the
booth to the post-office, and there, surrounded by jeering and exultant
citizens, he penned his resignation and mailed it. Then, with stern and
contemptuous face, he left the place, making no reply to the jeers of his
enemies, and, mounting his horse, mechanically rode away out upon the
plains, seeking the quiet, open places in order to regain calmness and
decision. He did not deliberately ride away from Lee Virginia, but as he
entered upon the open country he knew that he was leaving her as he was
leaving the forests. He had cut himself off from her as he had cut himself
off from the work he loved. His heart was swollen big within his breast.
He longed for the return of "the Colonel" to the White House. "What manner
of ruler is this who is ready to strike down the man whose very name means
conservation, and who in a few years would have made this body of forest
rangers the most effective corps of its size in the world?" He groaned
again, and his throat ached with the fury of his indignation.
"Dismissed for insubordination," the report said. "In what way? Only in
making war on greed, in checking graft, in preserving the heritage of the
people."
The lash that cut deepest was the open exultation of the very men whose
persistent attempt to appropriate public property the chief had helped to
thwart. "Redfield will go next. The influence that got the chief will get
Hugh. He's too good a man to escape. Then, as Swenson says, the thieves
will roll in upon us to slash, and burn, and corrupt. What a country! What
a country!"
As he reached the end of this line of despairing thought, he came back to
the question of his remaining personal obligations. Wetherford must be
cared for, and then--and then! there was Virginia waiting for him at this
moment. In his weakness he confessed that he had never intended to marry
her, and yet he had never deliberately intended to do her wrong. He had
always stopped short of the hideous treachery involved in despoiling her
young love. "And for her sake, to save her from humiliation, I will help
her father to freedom."
This brought him back to the hideous tragedy of the heights, and with that
thought the last shred of faith in the sense of justice in the State
vanished.
"They will never discover those murderers. They will permit this outrage
to pass unpunished, like the others. It will be merely another 'dramatic
incident' in the history of the range."
His pony of its own accord turned, and by a circuitous route headed at
last for the home canon as if it knew its master's wavering mind. Cavanagh
observed what he was doing, but his lax hand did not intervene. Helpless
to make the decision himself, he welcomed the intervention of the homing
instinct of his horse. With bent head and brooding face he returned to the
silence of the trail and the loneliness of the hills.