Part 49

He was almost as badly stunned by the significance of Swenson's news as Swenson himself. Could it be possible that the man who had built up the field service of the bureau--the man whose clean-handed patriotism had held the boys together, making them every year more clearly a unit, a little army of enthusiasts--could it be possible that the originator, the organizer of this great plan, had been stricken down just when his influence was of most account? He refused to believe it of an administration pledged to the cause of conservation.

As he entered the town he was struck instantly by the change in the faces turned toward him, in the jocular greetings hurled at him. "Hello, Mr. Cossack! What do you think of your chief now?"

"This will put an end to your infernal nonsense," said another. "We'll have a man in there now who knows the Western ways, and who's willing to boom things along. The cork is out of your forest bottle."

Gregg was most offensive of all. "This means throwing open the forest to anybody that wants to use it. Means an entire reversal of this fool policy."

"Wait and see," replied Cavanagh, but his face was rigid with the repression of the fear and anger he felt. With hands that trembled he opened the door to the telephone-booth, closed it carefully behind him, and called for the Supervisor's office. As soon as Redfield replied, he burst forth in question: "Is it true that the chief is out?"

Redfield's voice was husky as he replied, "Yes, lad, they've got him."

"Good Lord! What a blow to the service!" exclaimed Cavanagh, with a groan of sorrow and rage. "What is the President thinking of--to throw out the only man who stood for the future, the man who had built up this corps, who was its inspiration?" Then after a pause he added, with bitter resolution: "This ends it for me. Here's where I get off."

"Don't say that, boy. We need you now more than ever."

"I'm through. I'm done with America--with the States. I shall write my resignation at once. Send down another man to take my place."

Redfield's pleadings were of no avail. Cavanagh went directly from the booth to the post-office, and there, surrounded by jeering and exultant citizens, he penned his resignation and mailed it. Then, with stern and contemptuous face, he left the place, making no reply to the jeers of his enemies, and, mounting his horse, mechanically rode away out upon the plains, seeking the quiet, open places in order to regain calmness and decision. He did not deliberately ride away from Lee Virginia, but as he entered upon the open country he knew that he was leaving her as he was leaving the forests. He had cut himself off from her as he had cut himself off from the work he loved. His heart was swollen big within his breast. He longed for the return of "the Colonel" to the White House. "What manner of ruler is this who is ready to strike down the man whose very name means conservation, and who in a few years would have made this body of forest rangers the most effective corps of its size in the world?" He groaned again, and his throat ached with the fury of his indignation.

"Dismissed for insubordination," the report said. "In what way? Only in making war on greed, in checking graft, in preserving the heritage of the people."

The lash that cut deepest was the open exultation of the very men whose persistent attempt to appropriate public property the chief had helped to thwart. "Redfield will go next. The influence that got the chief will get Hugh. He's too good a man to escape. Then, as Swenson says, the thieves will roll in upon us to slash, and burn, and corrupt. What a country! What a country!"

As he reached the end of this line of despairing thought, he came back to the question of his remaining personal obligations. Wetherford must be cared for, and then--and then! there was Virginia waiting for him at this moment. In his weakness he confessed that he had never intended to marry her, and yet he had never deliberately intended to do her wrong. He had always stopped short of the hideous treachery involved in despoiling her young love. "And for her sake, to save her from humiliation, I will help her father to freedom."

This brought him back to the hideous tragedy of the heights, and with that thought the last shred of faith in the sense of justice in the State vanished.

"They will never discover those murderers. They will permit this outrage to pass unpunished, like the others. It will be merely another 'dramatic incident' in the history of the range."

His pony of its own accord turned, and by a circuitous route headed at last for the home canon as if it knew its master's wavering mind. Cavanagh observed what he was doing, but his lax hand did not intervene. Helpless to make the decision himself, he welcomed the intervention of the homing instinct of his horse. With bent head and brooding face he returned to the silence of the trail and the loneliness of the hills.

XII

CAVANAGH'S LAST VIGIL BEGINS

On his solitary ride upward and homeward the ranger searched his heart and found it bitter and disloyal. Love had interfered with duty, and pride had checked and defeated love. His path, no longer clear and definite, looped away aimlessly, lost in vague, obscure meanderings. His world had suddenly grown gray.

The magnificent plan of the Chief Forester (to which he had pledged such buoyant allegiance) was now a thing apart, a campaign in which he was to be merely an onlooker. It had once offered something congenial, helpful, inspiring; now it seemed fantastic and futile without the man who shaped it. "I am nearing forty," he said; "Eleanor is right. I am wasting my time here in these hills; but what else can I do?"

He had no trade, no business, no special skill, save in the ways of the mountaineer, and to return to his ancestral home at the moment seemed a woful confession of failure.

But the cause of his deepest dismay and doubt was the revelation to himself of the essential lawlessness of his love, a force within him which now made his duties as a law-enforcer sadly ironic. After all, was not the man who presumed upon a maiden's passion and weakness a greater malefactor than he who steals a pearl or strangles a man for his gold? To betray a soul, to poison a young life, is this not the unforgivable crime?

"Here am I, a son of the law, complaining of the lawlessness of the West--fighting it, conquering it--and yet at the same time I permit myself to descend to the level of Neill Ballard, to think as the barbaric man thinks."

He burned hot with contempt of himself, and his teeth set hard in the resolution to put himself beyond the reach of temptation. "Furthermore, I am concealing a criminal, cloaking a convict, when I should be arresting him," he pursued, referring back to Wetherford. "And why? Because of a girl's romantic notion of her father, a notion which can be preserved only by keeping his secret, by aiding him to escape." And even this motive, he was obliged to confess, had not all been on the highest plane. It was all a part of his almost involuntary campaign to win Virginia's love. The impulse had been lawless, lawless as the old-time West, and the admission cut deep into his self-respect.

It was again dusk as he rode up to his own hitching-pole and slipped from the saddle.

Wetherford came out, indicating by his manner that he had recovered his confidence once more. "How did you find things in the valley?" he inquired, as they walked away toward the corral.

"Bad," responded the ranger.

"In what way?"