Wayland used to dream, as he rode down the hog’s back trail, of the day coming when all the National Forests would be a great park, the people’s playground, yielding bigger annual harvest in ripe lumber than the wheat fields or the corn; yielding income for the State and health for the Nation.  Germany did it.  Why couldn’t America?  Why not, indeed; except that she had not exterminated her pirates of the public weal, her freebooters of the wilderness, her slippery fingered pick-pockets, who shouted “I am Uncle Sam,” while they picked Uncle Sam’s pockets?

Riding down the hog’s back, you first left the larches and the junipers below the snow line, the junipers beginning to show their berries, the larches yellowing and shedding their golden shower to the approach of autumn.  Then, a turn of the trail; and you were among the hemlocks, funereal and sombre in the distance, wonderfully lightened when you were below them by the sage-green moss and the pale silver blue lining on the under side of the leaves.  Another turn or two, there came the feathery sugar pine and the Douglas spruce—­the monarchs of the North-Western Forests—­plume decked warriors carrying a glint of spears with the scars of a thousand years and a thousand victories in the wrinkled bark, with cones like tassels, and whorls like banners.  You could count these whorls, or the scars of the whorls; and you had their years; and the bluish green shade was restful as the repose of age.  The smell of them, it was like incense; incense to the deity of the woods; and when the wind blew, every old evergreen harped the age-old melodies of Pan.  And, oh, yes, there were warriors scarred from the fight, fellows with corky arms and mottled streaks where the lightning had struck and splintered.  Only the cheesy-hearted, the warriors with maggots and grubs manufacturing punk out of heart-wood, for all the world like humans infected by evil thoughts, only the hollow hearted came down to earth with a crash in the fray.

Another turn, you were among the lodge-pole pines and englemann spruce—­pure park, Wayland always thought, the delight of a Forester’s heart; warm human open park places where you kept looking for deer though you knew there weren’t any.  In riding down the backbone of the Ridge, Wayland always planned to camp under the lodge pole pines; it was so cool, so rain-proof and sun-proof, with an almost certainty of a mountain stream somewhere near, and if you had eyes to see, a game trail down to the stream.  To-night, he went on down to the Brule, a cross section of the mountain swept by fire years before the Forest Service had taken hold in the days when millmen had been permitted to take out windfall and burn free, and all a millman had to do to become a millionaire in free lumber was set the incendiary fire going to create windfall.  In his own district, Wayland knew two men who had become rich in that way; but of course, that was long ago.  The Forest men had cleared out