rthwest that it takes eight years to make
a good Mounted Policeman--eight years to jounce the duffer out and the
man in; but in the Forest Service, men over forty-five are not taken.
For men who serve up to forty-five, the inducements of salary beginning
at $65 a month and seldom exceeding $200 are not sufficient to retain
tested veterans. The big lumber companies will pay a trained forester
more for the same work on privately owned timber limits; so the rangers
remain for the most part young. Would the same difficulties rise if wise
old dogs were on guard? I hardly think so.

* * * * *

What manner of man is the ranger? As we sat round the little parlor of
the cabin that night in the Vasquez Forest, an army man turned forester
struck up on a piano that had been packed on horseback above cloud-line
strains of Wagner and Beethoven. A graduate of Ann Arbor and
post-graduate of Yale played with a cigarette as he gazed at his own
fancies through the mica glow of the coal stove. A Denver boy, whose
mother kept house in the cabin, was chief ranger. In the group was his
sister, a teacher in the village school; and I fancy most of the ranger
homes present pretty much the same types, though one does not ordinarily
expect to hear strains of grand opera above cloud-line. Picture the men
dressed in sage-green Norfolk suits; and you have as rare a scene as
Scott ever painted of the men in Lincoln green in England's borderland
forests.

Of course, there are traitors and spies and Judas Iscariots in the
Service with lip loyalty to public weal and one hand out behind for
thirty pieces of silver to betray self-government; but under the present
regime, such men are not kept when found out, nor shielded when caught.
For twenty years, the world has been ringing with praise of the
Northwest Mounted Police; but the red-coat men have served their day;
and the extension of Provincial Government will practically disband the
force in a few years. Right now, in the American West, is a similar
picturesque body of frontier fighters and wardens, doing battle against
ten times greater odds, with little or no authority to back them up, and
under constant fire of slanderous mendacity set going by the thieves and
grafters whose game of spoliation has been stopped. Let spread-eagleism
look at the figures and ponder them, and never forget them, especially
never forget them, when charges are being hurled against the Forest