The doctor bent his head close to the Ted horse as he tightened his cinch. “I understand perfectly, Dean. The chapter is closed. You wish merely--and quite naturally--to show that girl and that buckeroo boy--that you can succeed now along lines where you failed before.” “Exactly,” said the young man, gratefully. And that night, by candlelight in his cabin, Dr. Mayfield wrote to Ginger’s favorite aunt, and he said, in closing--“And so, my dear Miss Fanny, it is quite clear that the nice lad is still head over heels in love with Ginger, and if your diagnosis of her condition is correct, we shall be able to arrange matters very satisfactorily.” He folded the sheet and slipped it into its envelope and sat smiling to himself in the soft, uneven light. It was going to be a very pleasant undertaking, he thought, to bring these two fine young things together--to be the instrument, in a world where so much went stupidly or viciously wrong, of setting something right. CHAPTER IX BEFORE he went back to San José Dr. Mayfield took keen satisfaction in introducing Dean Wolcott to the precipitous trails and the secret fastnesses of the wild land he loved, and in presenting him to the people on widely separated ranches. Always he said, with possessive pride, “I want you to shake hands with a mighty good friend of mine, your new Forest Ranger!” The regular Ranger stayed a fortnight with his deputy before he went on his leave and left the easterner in full possession of the job. The young man told himself that never in all his life--a singularly serene one, save for the months in France and the episode of Dos Pozos--had he been so solidly happy. He headquartered in a snug cottage near Post’s and his housekeeping was an amused delight to him. He had three cabins at various points on his trails and gypsy, picnicking sojourns in them were novel and fascinating. He rejoiced in a daily, almost hourly, sense of increased vigor; he had a red-blooded feeling of boundless endurance. Always he had lived--and the entire Wolcott connection, as his cousin in Boston would have expressed it--had lived--in their mentalities; they had been--and rather prided themselves on being--absent from the body and present with the brain; they had stayed upstairs in their minds. Now he was to know the hearty comfort of coming down and living lustily in his flesh; to revel frankly and sensuously in the sound young body which had come back to him. It was good to be too hot (for the sun scorched sometimes on the bare hillsides) and to go into the deep shade; to be chilled on a long ride home along the coast and to build up a roaring fire and bask in it; to be ravenously hungry, when he came late to his cabins, and to make himself an enormous meal and eat enormously of it; to be healthily, heartily tired and to tumble into bed and sleep nine dark and dreamless hours.