This story was suggested to me by a Land Office man--one of the men on the firing line--who has stood the brunt of the fight against the freebooters for twenty years and wrested many a victory. I may state that he is _still_ in the Service and will, I hope, remain in it for many a year; but these episodes are hinged round the Ranger, rather than the Land Office or Reclamation men, because, though the latter are fighting the same splendid fight, their work is of its very nature transitory--dealing with the beginning of things; while the Ranger is the man out on the job who remains on the firing line; unless--as my Land Office friend suggested--unless "he gets fired." As to the hardships suffered by the fighters, to quote one of them, "You bet: only more so." Just as this volume goes to press, comes word of fires in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana, destroying dozens of villages, hundreds of lives and millions of dollars worth of property in the National Forests; and it is added--"the fires are incendiary." Why this incendiarism? The story narrated here endeavors to answer that question. The international incidents thinly disguised are equally founded on fact and will be recognized by the dear but fast dwindling fraternity of good old-timers. The mother of the boy still lives her steadfast beautiful creed on the Upper Missouri; and the old frontiersman still lives on the Saskatchewan, one of the most picturesque and heroic figures in the West to-day. I may say that both missionaries support their schools as incidentally revealed here, without Government aid through their own efforts. Also, it was the stalwart man from Saskatchewan who was sent searching the heirs to the estate of an embittered Jacobite of 1745; and those heirs refused to accept either the wealth or the position for the very reasons set forth here. Calamity's story, too, is true--tragically true, though this is not all, not a fraction of her life story; but her name was not Calamity. PART I THE MAN ON THE JOB FREEBOOTERS OF THE WILDERNESS CHAPTER I TO STRADDLE OR FIGHT "Well," she asked, "are you going to straddle or fight?" How like a woman, how like a child, how typical of the outsider's shallow view of any struggle! As if all one had to do--was stand up and fight! Mere fighting--that was easy; but to fight to the last ditch only to find yourself beaten! That gave a fellow pause about bucking the challenge of everyday life. Wayland punched both fists in the jacket pockets of his sage-green Service suit, and kicked a log back to the camp fire that smouldered in front of his cabin. If she had been his wife he would have explained what a fool-thing it was to argue that all a man had to do was fight. Or if she had belonged to the general class--women--he could have met her with the condescending silence of the general class--man; but for him, she had never belonged to any general class.