rne looked at him curiously.

"How do you like it as far as you've gone?" he permitted himself to ask.
"This isn't quite up to the romantic idea of rangering, is it?"

"Well," said Bob with conviction, "I suppose it may sound foolish; but I
never was surer of anything in my life than that I've struck the right
job."

As he walked home that night, he looked back on the last few days with a
curious bewilderment. It had all been so real; now apparently it meant
nothing. Thorne was doing good work; these rangers were good men. But
where had vanished all Bob's exaltation? where his feeling of the
portent and influence and far-reaching significance of what these men
were doing? He realized its importance; but the feeling of its
fatefulness had utterly gone. Things with him were back on a work-a-day
basis. He even laughed a little, good-humouredly, at himself. At the
gate to the new pasture he once more stopped and looked at his horse. A
deep content came over him.

"I've sure struck the right job!" he repeated aloud with conviction.

And this, could he have known it, was the outward and visible and only
sign of the things spiritual that had been veiled.

III

When Saturday evening came the men washed and shaved and put on clean
garments. Bob, dog tired after a hard day, was more inclined to lie on
his back.

"Ain't you-all goin' over to-night?" asked Jack Pollock.

"Over where?"

"Why," explained the younger man, "always after supper Saturdays all the
boys who are in camp go over to spend the evenin' at headquarters."

Aggressively sleek and scrubbed, the little group marched down through
the woods in the twilight. At headquarters Amy Thorne and her brother
welcomed them and ushered them into the big room, with the stone
fireplace. In this latter a fire of shake-bolts leaped and roared. The
men crowded in, a trifle bashfully, found boxes and home-made chairs,
and perched about talking occasionally in very low tones to the nearest
neighbour. Amy sat in a rocking chair by the table lamp, sewing on
something, paying little attention to the rangers, save to throw out an
occasional random remark. Thorne had not yet entered. Finally Amy
dropped the sewing in her lap.

"You're all as solemn as a camp-meeting," she told them severely. "How
many times must I tell you to smoke up and be agreeable? Here, Mr. Ware,
set them a good example."

She pushed a cigar box toward the older man. Bob saw it to be half full