outlined. Ready, cheerful, undaunted in the face of danger, some of them
had the capacity for lonely action which rendered them as admirable in
their way as any of the long line of frontiersmen who had made the
winning of the West an epic of singular hardihood. To fight cold and
snow and loneliness during long months, with no one looking on, calls
for stern resolution. Such work is directly antithetic to that of the
city fireman who goes to his duties with a crowd looking on. The ranger
has only his own conscience as spectator. For many weeks he does not
even see his supervisor.

To the writing of _Cavanagh_ I came, therefore, in the spirit of one who
had discovered not only a new hero but the reverse side of the
squatter's shield. Just as in my studies for _The Captain of the Gray
Horse Troop_, I had come upon the seamy side of the cattleman's
activity, so now I perceived that many of the men who had settled on the
national forests were merely adventurers trying to get something for
nothing. To filch Uncle Sam's gold, to pasture on his grass, to dig his
coal and seize his water-power--these were the real designs of the
claim-holders, while the ranger was in effect a federal policeman, the
guardian of a domain whose wealth was the heritage of us all. He was the
prophet of a new order, the evangel of a new faith.

The actual composition of _Cavanagh_ began as I was riding the glorious
trails around Cloud Peak in the Big Horn Mountains of northern Wyoming
in the summer of 1908, one of the most beautiful of all my outings, for
while the Big Horns are low and tame compared to the Wind River Range,
yet the play of their lights and shadows, their clouds, and their mist
was as romantic as anything I had ever encountered.

I recall riding alone down the eastern slope one afternoon, while
prodigious rivers of cloud--white as wool and soundless as
light--descended the canon on my right and spread above the foothills,
forming a level sea out of which the high dark peaks rose like rocky
islands. This flood came so swiftly, flowed so marvelously and enveloped
my world so silently that the granite ledges appeared to melt beneath my
horse's feet.

At times the vapor closed densely round me, shutting out even the rocks
of the trail and as I cautiously descended, I almost bumped astonished
steers whose heads burst from the mist as if through a covered hoop. The
high granite crags on the opposite side of the ravine took on the shapes