II
THE FOREST RANGER

From her makeshift bed in the middle of the floor Lee Virginia was awakened next morning by the passing of some one down the hall calling at each door, “Six o’clock!” She had not slept at all till after one. She was lame, heart-weary, and dismayed, but she rose and dressed herself as neatly as before. She had decided to return to Sulphur. “I cannot endure this,” she had repeated to herself a hundred times. “I will not!”

Hearing the clatter of dishes, she ventured (with desperate courage) into the dining-room, which was again filled with cowboys, coal-miners, ranchers and their tousled families, and certain nondescript town loafers of tramp-like appearance. The flies were nearly as bad as ever – but not quite, for under Mrs. Wetherford’s dragooning the waiters had made a nerveless assault upon them with newspaper bludgeons, and a few of them had been driven out into the street.

Slipping into a seat at the end of the table which offered the cleanest cloth, Lee Virginia glanced round upon her neighbors with shrinking eyes. All were shovelling their food with knife-blades and guzzling their coffee with bent heads; their faces scared her, and she dropped her eyes.

At her left, however, sat two men whose greetings were frank and manly, and whose table-manners betrayed a higher form of life. One of them was a tall man with a lean red face against which his blond mustache lay like a chalk-mark. He wore a corduroy jacket, cut in Norfolk style, and in the collar of his yellow shirt a green tie was loosely knotted. His hands were long and freckled, but were manifestly trained to polite usages.

The other man was younger and browner, and of a compact, athletic figure. On the breast of his olive-green coat hung a silver badge which bore a pine-tree in the centre. His shirt was tan-colored and rough, but his head was handsome. He looked like a young officer in the undress uniform of the regular army. His hands were strong but rather small, and the lines of his shoulders graceful. Most attractive of all were his eyes, so brown, so quietly humorous, and so keen.

In the rumble of cheap and vulgar talk the voices of these men appealed to the troubled girl with great charm. She felt more akin to them than to any one else in the room, and from time to time she raised her eyes to their faces.

They were aware of her also, and their gaze was frankly admiring as well as wondering; and in passing the ham and eggs or the sugar they contrived to show her that they considered her a lady in a rough place, and that they would like to know more about her.

She accepted their civilities with gratitude, and listened to their talk with growing interest. It seemed that the young man had come down from the hills to meet his friend and take him back to his cabin.

“I can’t do it to-day, Ross,” said the older man. “I wish I could, but one meal of this kind is all I can stand these days.”

“You’re getting finicky,” laughed the younger man.

“I’m getting old. Time was when my fell of hair would rise at nothing, not even flies in the butter, but now – ”

“That last visit to the ancestral acres is what did it.”

“No, it’s age – age and prosperity. I know now what it is to have broiled steak.”

Mrs. Wetherford, seizing the moment, came down to do the honors. “You fellers ought to know my girl. Virginny, this is Forest Supervisor Redfield, and this is Ross Cavanagh, his forest ranger in this district. You ought to know each other. My girl’s just back from school, and she don’t think much of the Fork. It’s a little too coarse for her.”

Lee flushed under this introduction, and her distress was so evident that both men came to her rescue.

The older man bowed, and said: “I didn’t know you had a daughter, Mrs. Wetherford,” and Cavanagh, with a glance of admiration, added: “We’ve been wondering who you might be.”

Lize went on: “I thought I’d got rid of her. She’s been away now for about ten years. I don’t know but it was a mistake – look’s like she’s grown a little too fine-haired for us doughies out here.”

“So much the worse for us,” replied Redfield.

This little dialogue gave the girl time to recover herself, but as Cavanagh watched the blush fade from her face, leaving it cold and white, he sympathized with her – pitied her from the bottom of his heart. He perceived that he was a chance spectator of the first scene in a painful domestic drama – one that might easily become a tragedy. He wondered what the forces might be which had brought such a daughter to this sloven, this virago. To see a maid of this delicate bloom thrust into such a place as Lize Wetherford’s “hotel” had the reputation of being roused indignation.

“When did you reach town?” he asked, and into his voice his admiration crept.

“Only last night.”

“You find great changes here?”

“Not so great as in my mother. It’s all – ” She stopped abruptly, and he understood.

Lize being drawn back to her cash-register, Redfield turned to say: “My dear young lady, I don’t suppose you remember me, but I knew you when you were a tot of five or six. I knew your father very well.”

“Did you?” Her face lighted up.

“Yes, poor fellow, he went away from here rather under a cloud, you know.”

“I remember a little of it. I was here when the shooting took place.”

“So you were. Well, since then much has happened to us all,” he explained to the ranger. “There wasn’t room for a dashing young blood such as Ed Wetherford was in those days.” He turned to Lee. “He was no worse than the men on the other side – it was dog eat dog; but some way the people rather settled on him as a scapegoat. He was forced out, and your mother has borne the brunt of it since. Those were lawless days.”

It was a painful subject, and Redfield’s voice grew lower and more hesitant as he went on. Looking at this charming girl through the smoke of fried ham, with obscene insects buzzing about her fair head, made him feel for the thousandth time, and more keenly than ever before, the amazing combinations in American society. How could she be the issue of Edward and Eliza Wetherford?

More and more Lee Virginia’s heart went out in trust toward these two men. Opposed to the malodorous, unshaven throng which filled the room, they seemed wondrously softened and sympathetic, and in the ranger’s gaze was something else – something which made her troubles somehow less intolerable. She felt that he understood the difficult situation in which she found herself.

Redfield went on. “You find us horribly uncivilized after ten years’ absence?”

“I find this uncivilised,” she replied, with fierce intensity, looking around the room. Then, on the impulse, she added: “I can’t stand it! I came here to live with my mother, but this is too – too horrible!”

“I understand your repulsion,” replied Redfield. “A thousand times I repeat, apropos of this country, ‘Where every prospect pleases and only man is vile.’”

“Do you suppose it was as bad ten years ago?” she asked. “Was everything as dirty – as mean? Were the houses then as full of flies and smells?”

“I’m afraid they were. Of course, the country isn’t all like this, and there are neat homes and gentle people in Sulphur; but most cattle-men are – as they’ve always been – a shiftless, happy-go-lucky lot at best – and some of them have been worse, as you know.”

“I never dreamed of finding my mother in such a place,” she went on. “I don’t know what to do or say. She isn’t well. I ought to stay and help her, and yet – oh, it is disheartening!”

Lize tapped Redfield on the shoulder. “Come over here, Reddy, if you’ve finished your breakfast; I want to talk with you.”

Redfield rose and followed his landlady behind the counter, and there sat in earnest conversation while she made change. The tone in which her mother addressed the Supervisor, her action of touching him as one man lays hand upon another, was profoundly revealing to Lee Virginia. She revolted from it without realizing exactly what it meant; and feeling deeply but vaguely the forest ranger’s sympathy, she asked:

“How can you endure this kind of life?”

“I can’t, and I don’t,” he answered, cautiously, for they were being closely observed. “I am seldom in town; my dominion is more than a mile above this level. My cabin is nine thousand feet above the sea. It is clean and quiet up there.”

“Are all the other restaurants in the village like this?”

“Worse. I come here because it is the best.”

She rose. “I can’t stand this air and these flies any longer. They’re too disgusting.”

He followed her into the other house, conscious of the dismay and bitterness which burst forth the instant they were alone. “What am I to do? She is my mother, but I’ve lost all sense of relationship to her. And these people – except you and Mr. Redfield – are all disgusting to me. It isn’t because my mother is poor, it isn’t because she’s keeping boarders; it’s something else.” At this point her voice failed her.

The ranger, deeply moved, stood helplessly silent. What could he say? He knew a great deal better than she the essential depravity of her mother, and he felt keenly the cruelty of fate which had plunged a fine young spirit into this swamp of ill-smelling humanity.

“Let us go out into the air,” he suggested, presently. “The mountain wind will do you good.”

She followed him trustfully, and as she stepped from the squalor of the hotel into the splendor of the morning her head lifted. She drank the clear, crisp wind as one takes water in the desert.

“The air is clean, anyway,” she said.

Cavanagh, to divert her, pointed away to the mountains. “There is my dominion. Up there I am sole ruler. No one can litter the earth with corruption or poison the streams.”

She did not speak, but as she studied the ranger her face cleared. “It is beautiful up there.”

He went on. “I hate all this scrap-heap quite as heartily as you do, but up there is sweetness and sanity. The streams are germless, and the forest cannot be devastated. That is why I am a ranger. I could not endure life in a town like this.”

He turned up the street toward the high hill to the south, and she kept step with him. As she did not speak, he asked: “What did you expect to do out here?”

“I hoped to teach,” she replied, her voice still choked with her emotion. “I expected to find the country much improved.”

“And so it is; but it is still a long way from an Eastern State. Perhaps you will find the people less savage than they appear at first glance.”