ning came, and the end of the month, Supervisor Davidson
always found himself in trouble. Then he sat down before his typewriter,
on which he pecked methodically with the rigid forefinger of his right
hand. Naturally slow of thought when confronted by blank paper, the
mechanical limitations put him far behind in his reports and
correspondence. Naturally awkward of phrase when deprived of his
picturesque vernacular, he stumbled among phrases. The monthly reports
were a nightmare to him. When at last they were finished, he breathed a
deep sigh, and went out into his sugar pines and spruces.

In August California John received his first inspector. At that time the
Forest Service, new to the saddle, heir to the confusion left by the
Land Office, knew neither its field nor its office men as well as it
does now. Occasionally it made mistakes in those it sent out. Brent was
one of them.

Brent was of Teutonic extraction, brought up in Brookline, educated in
the Yale Forestry School, and experienced in the offices of the Bureau
of Forestry before it had had charge of the nation's estates. He
possessed a methodical mind, a rather intolerant disposition, thick
glasses, a very cold and precise manner, extreme personal neatness, and
abysmal ignorance of the West. He disapproved of California John's
rather slipshod dress, to start with; his ingrained reticence shrank
from Davidson's informal cordiality; his orderly mind recoiled with
horror from the jumble of the Supervisor's accounts and reports. As he
knew nothing whatever of the Sierras, he was quite unable to appreciate
the value of trails, of fenced meadows, of a countryside of peace--those
things were so much a matter of course back East that he hardly noticed
them one way or another. Brent's thoroughness burrowed deep into office
failures. One by one he dragged them to the light and examined them
through his near-sighted glasses. They were bad enough in all
conscience; and Brent was not in the least malicious in the inferences
he drew. Only he had no conception of judging the Man with the Time and
the Place.

He believed in military smartness, in discipline, in ordered activities.

"It seems to me you give your rangers a great deal of freedom and
latitude," said he one day.

"Well," said California John, "strikes me that's the only way. With men
like these you got to get their confidence."

Brent peered at him.

"H'm," said he sarcastically, "do you think you have don