"I was pretty well done for before--it seems to me everybody I met kept talking about you--but the boarding-house business finished me completely. There were you--you'd lost more than all that trash put together, and had been badly treated, and all--but you held your head high and never peeped and made that dining-table a thing to look forward to beyond everything. No wonder the landlady hated you. I could have kneeled down and kissed your little boots--not that you'd have cared about it especially." He laughed his boyish, embarrassed laugh again. "But to go back a bit--how apt would you have been to have taken me--after your experiences and that cur down at your office, besides--if I'd have trotted up and told you how I felt and asked you please to have me? How apt would you have been? I got the license and kept it dark and bided my time. There was nothing else to do--then." They were standing again, facing one another, wide-eyed, and both rather breathless. The girl turned away. "I won't be humble," she whispered to herself tremulously. "I won't. It's a wretched policy for women, and the effects are dreadful on men." She trailed away towards the other end of the room. "I'm not Ikey any more. I'm not the Wandering Jew. The thirteenth move is a glorious move, and I've come home--to a man in a million." Aloud she observed disdainfully, "The whole performance from beginning to end has been unspeakable--simply unspeakable; and I insist----" She had reached the bay-window and pressed her little nose tight against the window-pane. "I insist you're no gentleman," came her muffled, shaky voice from behind the curtains, "or I wouldn't have to be standing here quite by myself, waiting for you to come over here and--and kiss me." [Illustration] GIFFORD PINCHOT, FORESTER BY WILL C. BARNES ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS For almost a century the unoccupied government lands of the West have been used as a public commons. The stockmen have used the grass and water; the mining, sawmill, and railroad men the timber; until--simply because no one made it his business to object to the spoliation that was going on--what had been done wholly on the suffrance of the national government had come to be regarded and most lustily defended as an inherent privilege and right. [Illustration: GIFFORD PINCHOT] And so when, a decade ago, the tall, pleasant-voiced young man from the far East, now known throughout the United States as Gifford Pinchot, the national forester, appeared in the West, and suggested to the stockmen that they were ruining the country by over-grazing, they laughed him to scorn.