From his high hill of meditation he reviewed the history of the West. Based in bloody wars between the primitive races, and between the trappers and their allies, the land had passed through a thin adumbration of civilization as the stockmen drove out the buffalo and their hunters. Vigilantes, sheriff's posses (and now and again the regular army) had swept over these grassy swells on errands of retributory violence, and so the territory had been divided at last into populous States. Then politics, the great national game, had made of them a power, with Senators to represent a mere handful of miners and herdsmen. In the Congress of the United States these commonwealths had played their unscrupulous games, trading for this and for that local appropriation. Happily in some instances these Senators had been higher than their State, but in other cases they represented only too loyally the violent and conscienceless cow-man or lumber king, and now, as Redfield had said, the land-boomer was to have his term. The man who valued residents, not Wild West performers, was about to govern and despoil; this promoter, almost as selfish as the cattle king, was about to advance the State along the lines of _his_ conception of civilization; and so, perhaps, this monstrous deed, this final inexcusable inhuman offence against law and humanity, was to stand as a monument dividing the old from the new. Such, at least, was the ranger's hope. At last, far in the night, he heard the snort of a horse and the sound of voices. The law (such as it was) was creeping up the mountain-side in the person of the sheriff of Chauvenet County, and was about to relieve the ranger from his painful responsibility as guardian of the dead. At last he came, this officer of the law, attended (like a Cheyenne chief) by a dozen lesser warriors of various conditions and kinds, but among them--indeed, second only to the sheriff--was Hugh Redfield, the Forest Supervisor, hot and eager with haste. As they rode up to the fire, the officer called out: "Howdy, ranger! How about it?" Ross stated briefly, succinctly, what he had discovered; and as he talked other riders came up the hill and gathered closely around to listen in wordless silence--in guilty silence, the ranger could not help believing. The sheriff, himself a cattle-man, heard Cavanagh without comment till he had ended with a gesture. "And there they are; I turn them over to you with vast relief. I am anxious to go back to my own peaceful world, where such things do not happen." The sheriff removed his hat and wiped his brow, then swore with a mutter of awe. "Well, by God, this is the limit! You say there were three bodies?" "I lacked the courage to sort them out. I've been in battle, Mr. Sheriff, and I've seen dead men tumbled in all shapes, but someway this took the stiffening out of my knees. I rode away and left them. I don't care to see them again. My part of this work is done."