The Boy With the U. S. Foresters | Page 9

slightly to one side as an unspoken invitation to be one of them, and Wilbur stepped up.
The man who was speaking was comparing the present peaceful administration of the forests with the conditions that used to exist years ago, before the Service had been established, and when the Western "bad man" was at the summit of his power.
"It was during the cattle and sheep war that a fellow had to be pretty quick on the draw," said one.
"The Service had a good enough man for that, all right," suggested another member of the same group, "there wasn't any of them who could pull a bead quicker than our grazing Chief yonder." Wilbur turned and saw crossing the room a quiet-looking, spare man, light-complexioned, and apparently entirely inoffensive. "I guess they were ready enough to give him a wide berth when it came to gun-play."
"Talking about the cattle war," said the first speaker, "the worst trouble I ever had, or rather, the one that I hated to go into most, was back in those days. I was on the old Plum Creek Timber Land Reserve, now a portion of the Pike National Forest. A timber trespass sometimes leads to a very pretty scrap, and a cattle mix-up usually spells 'War' with a capital 'W,' but this had both."
"You get them that way sometimes," said a middle-aged, red-headed man, who was standing by.
"Had some down your way, too, I reckon?"
"Plenty of 'em. But go ahead with the yarn."
"Well, this bunch that I'm speaking of had skipped out from Montana; they were 'wanted' there, and they had come down and started cutting railroad ties in a secluded canyon forming one of the branches of West Plum Creek. They were hated good and plenty, these same tie-cutters, because they had a reputation of being too handy with their guns, and consequently causing a decrease in the calf crop. The cattlemen used to drop in on them every once in a while, but the tie-cutters were foxy, and they were never caught with the goods. Of course, there was a moral certainty that they weren't buying meat, but nothing could be proved against them, and the interchanges of compliments, while lively and picturesque enough, never took the form of lead, although it was expected every time they met."
"Had this been going on long?"
"Several months, I reckon," answered the former Ranger, "before I heard of it. This was just before that section of the country was taken over by the Forest Service. As soon as notice was given that the district in question was to be placed under government regulations, a deputation to the tie-cutters loped down on their cow-ponies to convey the cheerful news. Expressing, of course, the profoundest sympathy for them, the spokesman of the cattle group volunteered the information that they could wrap up their axes in tissue paper, tie pink ribbons on their rifles and go home, because any one caught cutting timber on the reserve, now that it was a reserve, would go to the Pen for fifteen years."
"What a bluff!"
"Bluff it certainly was. It didn't work, either. One of the tie-cutters in reply suggested that the cowmen should go back and devote their time to buying Navajo saddle-blankets and silver-mounted sombreros, since ornamenting the landscape was all they had to do in life; another replied that if a government inspector ever set eyes on their cattle he'd drive them off the range as a disgrace to the State; and a third capped the replies with the terse answer that no ten United States officers and no hundred and ten cattlemen could take them out alive."
"That wouldn't make the cow-camp feel happy a whole lot," remarked the red-headed man.
"There wasn't any shooting, though, as I said before, though just how it kept off I never rightly could understand. At all events they fixed it so that we heard of it in a hurry. Then both sides awaited developments. The tie-cutters kept their hands off the cattle for a while, and the cowmen had no special business with railroad ties, so that, aside from snorting at each other, no special harm was done.
"But, of course, the timber trespass question had to be investigated, and the Supervisor, who was then located at Colorado Springs, arranged to make the trip with me to the tie-cutters' camp from a small station about fifty miles north of the Springs. I met him at the station as prearranged. We were just about to start when a telegram was handed him calling him to another part of the forest in a hurry."
"Tough luck," said one of the listeners.
"It surely was--for me," commented the narrator. "The camp to which we had intended going was twenty-six miles into the mountains, and going up there alone didn't appeal to me a