Adventure Magazine Cover — page 160: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

=F 3 S < = Cat v) . _ otal - The Weight of _— ation éy Harrison R Howard ha) LV é Vi =) = ee {/ A if - ea PCL dae XG Bora)! | oo pH Sa al 7\ Loe “te ~e = I x see seas & Author of “Afraid of the Ber,” “‘Partnership,” e EW are they, leading active lives, who have not learned the great truth that difficulties and dangers appear far more forbidding in the advancing future than in the immediate present. Paradoxically, distance exerts a magnifying influence. Men look ahead to untoward events with fear or misgiving, only to find when the events take place that they can be met gracefully and with equanimity. Fore-fear is the very mad- ness of fear; the leaven of imagination raises it out of all just proportion. Ranger Elmer Randolph of the old Forest Service had not learned this truth—simply because he had never permitted danger to get out of the distance and close to him. He had viewed it at a distance times with- out number, but there his relation with it ceased; and he had never had opportunity of comparing its appearance afar with its appearance at close hand—the only method by which one may discover the great truth. From which it must not be assumed that Ranger Randolph was a coward. Indeed, he did not possess so much as the funda- mentals of cowardice. Simply he was cau- tious. He gracefully sidestepped difficul- ties; dangers he rode around; diligently he pursued the lines of least resistance. In - the popular phrase, he very carefully ob- served his footing. Now in a more modern day, in the quiet functioning of an established and efficient— if not wholly effective—Service, Ranger Randolph would doubtless have achieved modest success and in the fulness of time’ would have been promoted to District Ranger or perhaps to the soft cushions of a luxurious office in San Francisco or Port- land. But in the riotous old days when the Service was still in the very hell of birthpangs and opposition to it was various and lusty, the pioneers who bore its ideal- istic though tattered banners had to be men of pertinacity rather than tact, eager to carry out its principles to the last syl- lable no matter at what personal hazard. Therefore like all those born before their ° time Ranger Elmer Randolph was a square > peg in a round hole; and when, at the fag end of a beautiful August day, he tracked his quarry to a homestead in a pine clearing he did not attempt to carry the stronghold by heroic measures, but seated himself in a safe thicket at the clearing’s edge and calmly waited for darkness. When the dim, last-quarter moon slipped above the tips of the encircling pines, Ran- dolph unstrapped his hand-ax from the saddle of his mount and cut several light hazel boughs which he bound securely to- gether. The foliage of the completed whole was intended to furnish a screen behind which he could not be seen, and which was light enough to be easily pushed forward along the ground from a prone position behind it. He circled the cabin thrice before he decided upon the most effective and pro- tective sector of attack. He determined finally upon the north wall, from which 146 : : _ . a