THE TRAINING OF A FORESTER 



ing and tyrannical, and that in a particxilar 



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 hUl- 



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 



