en
were stirred with the same spirit as the old patriarch, he felt, as he
had said, that the conserving of the mountain streams was work worth
while.

As it chanced, he passed over the little stream whose channel he had
cleared on one of his patrol rides, and he stopped a moment to look at
it.

"Well," he said aloud, "I suppose some youngster some day will be
picking oranges off a tree that would have died if I hadn't done that
day's work," and he rode on to his camp greatly pleased with himself.

For a day or two the boy found himself quite unable to shake the spell
of the old patriarch's presence off his mind, and the more he thought
over it, the more he realized that scarcely any one thing in the whole
of the United States loomed larger on its future than the main idea of
Conservation. It had been merely a word before, but now it was a
reality, and he determined to take the first opportunity he would have,
during his vacation, of going down to the Salt River Valley to see the
old patriarch once again.

And still the weather grew hotter and the sky remained cloudless. And
now, every evening, Rifle-Eye would telephone over to make sure that
Wilbur was back at camp and that there was as yet no danger. They had
had one quite sharp tussle at a distant point of the forest, and one day
Wilbur had received orders to make a long ride to a lookout point in
another part of the forest, the work of a Guard who had been called away
to fight fire, but so far, Wilbur had been free. Two or three times he
found himself waking suddenly in the night, possessed with an intense
desire to saddle Kit and ride off to a part of the forest where he had
either dreamed or thought a fire was burning, but Rifle-Eye had been
careful to warn him against this very thing, and although the morning
found him simply wild to ride to this point of supposed danger, he had
followed orders and ridden his regular round.

Although Wilbur's camp was high, the heat grew hard to bear, and when
the boy passed from the shade of the pine along the naked rock to some
lookout point the ground seemed to blaze under him. The grass was
rapidly turning brown in the exposed places, and the pine needles were
as slippery as the smoothest ice.

Just at noon, one morning, Wilbur turned his horse--he was not riding
Kit that day--into one of these open trails, and taking out his glasses,
commenced to sweep the horizon. A heat haze was abroad, and his
over-excited eyes see