THE TRAINING OF A FORESTER 



ing and tyrannical, and that in a particular 

 case it had driven out of his home a citizen 

 known to the Senator, and had left him and 

 his family to wander houseless upon the hill- 

 side, and that for no good reason whatsoever. 

 This statement, if it had been true, would 

 at once have destroyed the standing of the 

 Service in the minds of many of its friends, 

 and would have led to immediate defeat in 

 the fight then going on. Fortunately, the 

 records of the Service were so complete, and 

 the knowledge of field conditions on the part 

 of the men in Washington was so thorough, 

 that the mere mention of the general locality 

 of the supposed outrage by the Senator 

 made it easy to identify the individual case. 

 The man in question, instead of being an 

 honest settler with a wife and family, was 

 the keeper of a disreputable saloon and 

 dance hall, a well-known law-breaker whom 



the local authorities had tried time and again 



38 



