The smoke of the fire could be distinctly seen from the town of Camp Crook, and after Ballenger left for the scene several of the men went into the second storey of a building to look at it. While there, someone dropped a match or cigar-end, with the result that the building was soon in flames. As all the forest rangers and most of the citizens had gone to the forest to put out the fire there, the few who remained could do nothing to extinguish the blaze, and most of the town was destroyed, including the head-quarters of the Forest Service, so that when poor Ballenger and his weary comrades returned they found they had lost all their possessions except the clothes they stood in! [Illustration: MAKING A HOLE TO PLANT A YOUNG TREE IN. _From a Photograph._] At present the rangers have to care for no fewer than a hundred and sixty-six of these national forests, so called because they are controlled by the American Government. They cover a territory which is in all nearly five times the size of England. In many places past fires as well as storms and the work of the lumbermen have destroyed so many trees, that miles and miles of the woodland are ruined. From these devastated tracks spring only bushes and shrubs, with an occasional young tree. The ground is covered with charred trunks, while the skeletons of what were once forest monarchs rise skyward. To reafforest these denuded tracts is a part of the duty of the rangers, and the supervisors and their men have the work of cultivating young trees and setting them out in such places. To obtain the necessary tree-shoots for planting they grow them from seed. For instance, young pines are secured by taking the seed from pine cones, which are opened by exposing them to the rays of the sun. Then the seed is sown in the forest nurseries. There are eight of these, situated on reserves in various parts of the West. They contain enough land to grow five million trees at one time, and as the nurseries have been in existence for several years, each year a million or more of these trees are large enough to be taken to the denuded lands and planted. Already a large area of land made worthless by the ravages of man and the elements has been reafforested in this way, and will again be ready to furnish a timber supply at the end of the next twenty years or so. [Illustration: A TYPICAL STRETCH OF FOREST CLEARED OF PARASITICAL UNDERGROWTH AND GUARDED BY THE GOVERNMENT RANGERS. _From a Photograph._]