“It isn’t the town or the people, it is my mother!” she burst forth again. “Tell me! A woman in the car yesterday accused my mother of selling whiskey unlawfully. Is this so? Tell me!”

She faced him resolutely, and perceiving that she could not be evaded, he made slow answer. “I don’t know that she does, but I’ve heard it charged against her.”

“Who made the charge?”

“One of the clergymen, and then it’s common talk among the rough men of the town.”

“Is that the worst they say of her? Be honest with me – I want to know the worst.”

He was quite decisive as he said: “Yes, that is the worst.”

She looked relieved. “I’m glad to hear you say so. I’ve been imagining all kinds of terrifying things.”

“Then, too, her bad health is some excuse for her housekeeping,” he added, eager to lessen the daughter’s humiliation, “and you must remember her associations are not those which breed scrupulous regard for the proprieties.”

“But she’s my mother!” wailed the girl, coming back to the central fact. “She has sent me money – she has been kind to me – what am I to do? She needs me, and yet the thought of staying here and facing her life frightens me.”

The rotten board walks, the low rookeries, the unshaven, blear-eyed men sitting on the thresholds of the saloons, the slattern squaws wandering abroad like bedraggled hens, made the girl stare with wonder and dismay. She had remembered the town street as a highway filled with splendid cavaliers, a list wherein heroic deeds were done with horse and pistol.

She recognized one of those “knights of the lariat” sitting in the sun, flabby, grizzled, and inert. Another was trying to mount his horse with a bottle in his hand. She recalled him perfectly. He had been her girlish ideal of manly beauty. Now here he was, old and mangy with drink at forty. In a most vivid and appealing sense he measured the change in her as well as the decay of the old-time cowboy. His incoherent salutation as his eyes fell upon her was like the final blasphemous word from the rear-guard of a savage tribe, and she watched him ride away reeling limply in his saddle as one watches a carrion-laden vulture take its flight.

She perceived in the ranger the man of the new order, and with this in her mind she said: “You don’t belong here? You’re not a Western man.”

“Not in the sense of having been born here,” he replied. “I am, in fact, a native of England, though I’ve lived nearly twenty years of my life in the States.”

She glanced at his badge. “How did you come to be a ranger – what does it mean? It’s all new to me.”

“It is new to the West,” he answered, smilingly, glad of a chance to turn her thought from her own personal griefs. “It has all come about since you went East. Uncle Sam has at last become provident, and is now ‘conserving his resources.’ I am one of his representatives with stewardship over some ninety thousand acres of territory – mostly forest.”

She looked at him with eyes of changing light. “You don’t talk like an Englishman, and yet you are not like the men out here.”

“I shouldn’t care to be like some of them,” he answered. “My being here is quite logical. I went into the cattle business like many another, and I went broke. I served under Colonel Roosevelt in the Cuban War, and after my term was out, naturally drifted back. I love the wilderness and have some natural taste for forestry, and I can ride and pack a horse as well as most cowboys, hence my uniform. I’m not the best forest ranger in the service, I’ll admit, but I fancy I’m a fair average.”

“And that is your badge – the pine-tree?”

“Yes, and I am proud of it. Some of the fellows are not, but so far as I am concerned I am glad to be known as a defender of the forest. A tree means much to me. I never mark one for felling without a sense of responsibility to the future.”

Her questions came slowly, like those of a child. “Where do you live?”

“Directly up the South Fork, about twenty miles.”

“What do you do?”

He smiled. “Not much. I ride the trails, guard the game, put out fires, scale lumber, burn brush, build bridges, herd cattle, count sheep, survey land, and a few other odd chores. It’s supposed to be a soft snap, but I can’t see it that way.”

“Do you live alone?”

“Yes, for the larger part of the time. I have an assistant who is with me during part of the summer months. Mostly I am alone. However, I am supposed to keep open house, and I catch a visitor now and then.”

They were both more at ease now, and her unaffected interest pleased him.

She went on, steadily: “Don’t you get very lonely?”

“In winter, sometimes; in summer I’m too busy to get lonely. In the fire season I’m in the saddle every day, and sometimes all night.”

“Who cooks for you?”

“I do. That’s part of a ranger’s job. We have no ‘servant problem’ to contend with.”

“Do you expect to do this always?”

He smiled again. “There you touch my secret spring. I have the hope of being Chief Forester some time – I mean we all have the prospect of promotion to sustain us. The service is so new that any one with even a knowledge of forestry is in demand; by and by real foresters will arise.”

She returned abruptly to her own problem. “I dread to go back to my mother, but I must. Oh, how I hate that hotel! I loathe the flies, the smells, the people that eat there, the waiters – everything!” She shuddered.

“Many of the evils you mention could be reformed – except, of course, some of the people who come to eat. I fear several of them have gone beyond reformation.”

As they started back down the street she saw the motor-stage just leaving the door of the office. “That settles one question,” she said. “I can’t get away till to-morrow.”

“Where would you go if you broke camp – back to the East?”

“No; my mother thinks there is a place for me in Sulphur City.”

“Your case interests me deeply. I wish I could advise you to stay, but this is a rough town for a girl like you. Why don’t you talk the problem over with the Supervisor?” His voice became firmer. “Mrs. Redfield is the very one to help you.”

“Where does she live?”

“Their ranch lies just above Sulphur, at the mouth of the Canon. May I tell him what you’ve told me? He’s a good sort, is Redfield – much better able to advise than I am.”

Cavanagh found himself enjoying the confidence of this girl so strangely thrown into his care, and the curious comment of the people in the street did not disturb him, except as it bore upon his companion’s position in the town.

At the door of the hotel some half-a-dozen men were clustered. As the young couple approached they gave way, but a short, powerful man, whom Lee Virginia recognized as Gregg the sheepman, called to the ranger:

“I want to see you before you leave town, Mr. Ranger.”

“Very well. I shall be here all the forenoon,” answered Cavanagh, in the tone of a man accepting a challenge; then, turning to the girl, he said, earnestly: “I want to help you. I shall be here for lunch, and meanwhile I wish you would take Redfield into your confidence. He’s a wise old boy, and everybody knows him. No one doubts his motives; besides, he has a family, and is rich and unhurried. Would you like me to talk with him?”

“If you will. I want to do right – indeed I do.”

“I’m sure of that,” he said, with eyes upon her flushed and quivering face. “There’s a way out, believe me.”

They parted on the little porch of the hotel, and her eyes followed his upright figure till he entered one of the shops. He had precisely the look and bearing of a young lieutenant in the regular army, and she wondered what Gregg’s demand meant. In his voice was both menace and contempt.

She returned to her own room, strangely heartened by her talk with the ranger. “If I stay here another night this room must be cleaned,” she decided, and approached the bed as though it harbored venomous reptiles. “This is one of the things that must be reformed,” she decided, harking back to the ranger’s quiet remark.

She was still pondering ways and means of making the room habitable when her mother came in.

“How’d you sleep last night?”

Lee Virginia could not bring herself to lie. “Not very well,” she admitted.

“Neither did I. Fact of the matter is your coming fairly upset me. I’ve been kind o’ used up for three months. I don’t know what ails me. I’d ought to go up to Sulphur to see a doctor, but there don’t seem to be any free time. I ’pear to have lost my grip. Food don’t give me any strength. I saw you talking with Ross Cavanagh. There’s a man – and Reddy. Reddy is what you may call a fancy rancher – goes in for alfalfy and fruit, and all that. He isn’t in the forest service for the pay or for graft. He’s got a regular palace up there above Sulphur – hot and cold water all through the house, a furnace in the cellar, and two bath-rooms, so they tell me; I never was in the place. Well, I must go back – I can’t trust them girls a minute.” She turned with a groan of pain. “’Pears like every joint in me is a-creakin’ to-day.”

“Can’t I take your place?” asked Lee Virginia, pity deepening in her heart as she caught the look of suffering on her mother’s face.

“No; you better keep out o’ the caffy. It ain’t a fit place for you. Fact is, I weren’t expecting anything so fine as you are. I laid awake till three o’clock last night figurin’ on what to do. I reckon you’d better go back and give this outfit up as a bad job. I used to tell Ed you didn’t belong to neither of us, and you don’t. I can’t see where you did come from – anyhow, I don’t want the responsibility of havin’ you here. Why, you’ll have half the men in the county hitchin’ to my corral – and the males out here are a fierce lot o’ brutes.” She studied the girl again, finding her so dainty, so far above herself, that she added: “It would be a cruel shame for me to keep you here, with all these he-wolves roamin’ around. You’re too good to be meat for any of them. You just plan to pack up and pull out to-morrow.”

She went out with a dragging step that softened the girl’s heart. It was true there was little of real affection between them. Her memories of Eliza up to this moment had been rather mixed. As a child she had seldom been in her arms, and she had always been a little afraid of the bold, bright, handsome creature who rode horses and shot pistols like a man. It was hard to relate the Eliza Wetherford of those days with this flabby, limping old woman, and yet her daughter came nearer to loving her at this moment than at any time since her fifth year.