"Far from it. She's a mountain girl if one ever lived. Perhaps you don't know the recent policy of the forest service to hire women when they can be obtained. It was a policy started in wartimes and kept up now because it is economical and efficient. She and a girl from college have a cabin not five miles from here on old Bald Mountain, and they're doing lookout duty." Dan wondered intensely what lookout duty might be. His thoughts went back to his early study of forestry. "You see, Dan," Lennox said in explanation, "the government loses thousands of dollars every year by forest fire. A fire can be stopped easily if it is seen soon after it starts. But let it burn awhile, in this dry season, and it's a terror--a wall of flame that races through the forests and can hardly be stopped. And maybe you don't realize how enormous this region is--literally hundreds of miles across. We're the last outpost--there are four cabins, if you can find them, in the first seventy miles back to town. So they have to put lookouts on the high points, and now they're coming to the use of aëroplanes so they can keep even a better watch. All summer and until the rains come in the fall, they have to guard every minute, and even then sometimes the fires get away from them. And one of the first things a forester learns, Dan, is to be careful with fire." "Is that the way they are started--from the carelessness of campers?" "Partly. There's an old rule in the hills: put out every fire before you leave it. Be careful with the cigar butts, too--even the coals of a pipe. But of course the lightning starts many fires, and, I regret to say, hundreds of them are started with matches." "But why on earth--" "It doesn't make very good sense, does it? Well, one reason is that certain stockmen think that a burned forest makes good range--that the undervegetation that springs up when the trees are burned makes good feed for stock. And you must know, too, that there are two kinds of men in the mountains. One kind--the real mountain man, such as your grandfather was--lives just as well, just as clean as the ranchers in the valley. Some of this kind are trappers or herders. But there's another class too--the most unbelievably shiftless, ignorant people in America. They have a few acres to raise crops, and they kill deer for their hides, and most of all they make their living fighting forest fires. A fire means work for every hill-billy in the region--often five or six dollars a day and better food than they're used to. Moreover, they can loaf on the job, put in claims for extra hours, and make what to them is a fortune.