“Even my father,” she continued, “though he is intelligent and educated and can look back upon worth-while things, has grown as narrow as the rest. They are bored to death, and don’t even know it, so they hate themselves and each other, and squabble over trifles that——” “Well, they needn’t take out their spite on the forest service,” Pat grumbled, just to keep her going. “Oh, but they do!” she came back at him eagerly, her eyes alight with interest in her subject. “You’re—meaning the forest service—the only thing they can all band together to fight, don’t you see? Once you take that community spirit away from them, I don’t know what would happen. It’s the primitive impulse of self-preservation, working out in a normal, primitive way. It requires a common enemy—hunger, the menace of some terrible creature of the wild, protection against some element that would destroy, and which no one man is strong enough to conquer alone; just as the cave men gathered on the cliffs and rolled rocks down upon the saber-toothed tiger. We call it community spirit, in our psychology classes—that’s where I learned it. “Here, they have plenty to sustain life according to their standards, and there aren’t any saber-toothed tigers, so—they pretend to themselves that the forest service is a menace, and they band together for the fight. He’s an outlet for their emotions, Mr. O’Neill. A psychological safety valve. Also,” she added, forestalling an Irish rebellion which she may have seen rising in his eyes, “it’s misdirected energy, of course. But it explains my father’s awful conduct, doesn’t it?” Patrick O’Neill gave her a keen look. “It explains your father,” he admitted, “but sure, and it don’t change the temper of him, divil a bit!” Then he laughed. “So the answer seems to be, Miss Boyce, that since they are bored with the monotony of their existence and must have some excitement, I’m to wallop the livin’ daylights out of the lot of them! And it’s not so sorry a prospect as you might suppose,” he added dryly. “I don’t mean that at all, and you know it!” she flashed, showing a hint of her father’s temper—though she showed it very prettily, O’Neill thought. “You seem intelligent. Why don’t you use your personality——” “I will, Miss Boyce, and my fists along with it!” “Your personality,” she went on, ignoring him, “to give them a pride in the forest service? Make them see that it is really their best friend, that it protects their range and gives each one a fair share of the grazing. If you can win them over to yourself as a man, you can win them over to the forest service as an institution which has their welfare at heart.” “And force them back to whippin’ pups for excitement, and fightin’ each other. I don’t see——”