Curtis stared, bewildered. Ross and Charley
Morton were laughing harder than anybody else. He started to his feet.

"Hold on, son," Ross commanded him, wiping his eyes. "Don't get hostile
at a little joke. You'll get used to the work. Of course we all like to
ride off in the mountains, and do cattle work, and figure on things, and
do administrative work; and we none of us are stuck on construction." He
looked around him at his audience, now quiet and attentive. "But we've
got to have headquarters, and barns, and houses, and corrals and
pastures. Once they're built, they're built and that ends it. But they
got to be built. We're just in hard luck that we happen to be rangers
right now. The Service can't hire carpenters for us very well, way up
here; and _somebody's_ got to do it. It ain't as if we had to do it for
a living, all the time. There's a variety. We get all kinds. Rangering's
no snap, any more than any other job. One thing," he ended with a laugh,
"we get a chance to do about everything."

The valley youth had dropped sullenly back into the shadows, nor did he
reply to this. After a little the men scattered to their quarters, for
they were tired.

Bob and Jack Pollock occupied together one of the older cabins, a rough
little structure, built mainly of shakes. It contained two bunks, a
rough table, and two stools constructed of tobacco boxes to which legs
had been nailed. As the young men were preparing for bed, Bob remarked:

"Fletcher got his rise, all right. Much obliged for your tip. I nearly
bit. But he wasted his talk in my notion. That fellow is hopeless. Ross
labours in vain if he tries to brace him up."

"I reckon Ross knows that," replied Jack, "and I reckon too, he has
mighty few hopes of bracin' up Curtis. I have a kind of notion Ross was
just usin' that Curtis as a mark to talk at. What he was talkin' _to_
was us."

II

The week's hard physical toil was unrelieved. After Bob and Jack Pollock
had driven the last staple in the last strand of barbed wire, they
turned their horses into the new pasture. The animals, overjoyed to get
free of the picket ropes that had heretofore confined them, took long,
satisfying rolls in the sandy corner, and then went eagerly to cropping
at the green feed. Bob, leaning on the gate, with the rope still in his
hand, experienced a glow of personal achievement greater than any he
remembered to have felt since, as a small boy, he had unaided reasoned
out the