The young fellow on the back seat slowly said: "I don't complain of Lize sellin' bad whiskey, but the grub she sets up is fierce."
"The grub ain't so bad; it's the way she stacks it up," remarked another. "But, then, these little fly-bit cow-towns are all alike and all bad, so far as hotels are concerned."
Lee Virginia, crimson and burning hot, was in agony lest they should go further in their criticism.
She knew that her mother kept a boarding-house; and while she was not proud of it, there was nothing precisely disgraceful in it--many widowed women found it the last resort; but this brutal comment on the way in which her business was carried on was like a slash of mud in the face. Her joy in the ride, her impersonal exultant admiration of the mountains was gone, and with flaming cheeks and beating heart she sat, tense and bent, dreading some new and keener thrust.
Happily the conversation turned aside and fell upon the Government's forest policy, and Sam Gregg, a squat, wide-mouthed, harsh-voiced individual, cursed the action of Ross Cavanagh the ranger in the district above the Fork. "He thinks he's Secretary of War, but I reckon he won't after I interview him. He can't shuffle my sheep around over the hills at his own sweet will."
The young fellow on the back seat quietly interposed. "You want to be sure you've got the cinch on Cavanagh good and square, Sam, or he'll be a-ridin' _you_."
"He certainly is an arbitrary cuss," said the old woman. "They say he was one of Teddy's Rough-riders in the war. He sure can ride and handle a gun. 'Pears like he thinks he's runnin' the whole range," she continued, after a pause. "Cain't nobody so much as shoot a grouse since he came on, and the Supervisor upholds him in it."
Lee Virginia wondered about all this supervision, for it was new to her.
Gregg, the sheepman, went on: "As I tell Redfield, I don't object to the forest policy--it's a good thing for me; I get my sheep pastured cheaper than I could do any other way, but it makes me hot to have grazing lines run on me and my herders jacked up every time they get over the line. Ross run one bunch off the reservation last Friday. I'm going to find out about that. He'll learn he can't get 'arbitrary' with me."