The Ranger had absorbed the average amount of Sunday school pabulum that floats round in the mental atmosphere of all youth, that, if you keep on doing right and doing it hard, things will turn out all right in the end.  Well, he told himself bluntly, he had been doing right and doing it hard, just as hundreds of the Land Office field men and Land Office attorneys had been doing right in their vain endeavour to stop public loot;—­and things had turned out all wrong.  What did his four years’ fight stand for, anyway?  Marking time, that was all.  Nothing accomplished except the wasting of four years of his own life; and, while that may be small enough in the sum total of things, where a thousand seeds go to waste for one that bears fruit, it is overwhelmingly big to the individual man.  If he had been the one and only failure of the Civil Service workers, he could have accused himself and taken the Senator’s advice to “chuck” the fool-theory of men in public service fighting for right; but he was only one of a multitude of men, paid public money to prevent the looting of public property; whose work was blocked, non-suited, pigeon-holed, bluffed, hampered, or, worst of all, carried up to investigating committees whose sole purpose was to conceal and wear the public out with interminable wrangles over technicalities that were irrelevant.

Better men than he had fought doggedly only to be downed.  There was the Land Office man in Oregon dismissed for the slip of a wrong entry in his field book because he had quite unintentionally unearthed the frauds of a member of the land-loot ring who happened to be a congressman.  There was the Federal attorney hounded from his home city because he prosecuted bribe-givers and objected to being shot while on duty in the court room.  There was that other Federal Law man, shot at the shaft of a coal mine stolen from public lands.  There was the Army Engineer demoted from his life work because he fought for a free harbor for a great city and offended the railroad fighting to keep that harbor closed.  There were the two Forest Service men dismissed for giving facts to the public.  Then, there was the Alaska Case—­Wayland laughed; and the laugh was a little bitter.  Surely the crowning farce of all:  that had gone up easily to investigation with a blare of trumpets and a flare of news headlines.  That was the easiest of all.

It made good politics, yet—­it was so involved in technicalities, while it offered a bit of by-play to the gallery, that there had never from the first, even for the fraction of an instant, been the faintest hope of anything but confusion emerging from the investigation; but it played into the game without hurting anybody.  If they had really wanted to investigate, why didn’t they take a case in which there were no technicalities of law, the looted red-lands of California, for instance; or the half-million of timber openly stolen each year for a certain smelting ring; or the two thousand acres