noticed them one way or another
But when evening came, and the end of the month, Supervisor Davidson always found himself in trouble. Then he sat down before his typewriter, on which he pecked methodically with the rigid forefinger of his right hand. Naturally slow of thought when confronted by blank paper, the mechanical limitations put him far behind in his reports and correspondence. Naturally awkward of phrase when deprived of his picturesque vernacular, he stumbled among phrases. The monthly reports were a nightmare to him. When at last they were finished, he breathed a deep sigh, and went out into his sugar pines and spruces.
In August California John received his first inspector. At that time the Forest Service, new to the saddle, heir to the confusion left by the Land Office, knew neither its field nor its office men as well as it does now. Occasionally it made mistakes in those it sent out. Brent was one of them.
Brent was of Teutonic extraction, brought up in Brookline, educated in the Yale Forestry School, and experienced in the offices of the Bureau of Forestry before it had had charge of the nation’s estates. He possessed a methodical mind, a rather intolerant disposition, thick glasses, a very cold and precise manner, extreme personal neatness, and abysmal ignorance of the West. He disapproved of California John’s rather slipshod dress, to start with; his ingrained reticence shrank from Davidson’s informal cordiality; his orderly mind recoiled with horror from the jumble of the Supervisor’s accounts and reports. As he knew nothing whatever of the Sierras, he was quite unable to appreciate the value of trails, of fenced meadows, of a countryside of peace–those things were so much a matter of course back East that he hardly noticed them one way or another. Brent’s thoroughness burrowed deep into office failures. One by one he dragged them to the light and examined them through his near-sighted glasses. They were bad enough in all conscience; and Brent was not in the least malicious in the inferences he drew. Only he had no conception of judging the Man with the Time and the Place.
He believed in military smartness, in discipline, in ordered activities.
"It seems to me you give your rangers a great deal of freedom and latitude," said he one day.
"Well," said California John, "strikes me that’s the only way. With men like these you got to get their confidence."
Brent peered at him.
"H’m," said he sarcastically, "do you think you have done so?"
California John flushed through his tan at the implication, but he replied nothing.
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