hardships suffered by the fighters, to quote one of them, "You bet:
only more so."

Just as this volume goes to press, comes word of fires in Washington,
Oregon, Idaho and Montana, destroying dozens of villages, hundreds of
lives and millions of dollars worth of property in the National
Forests; and it is added--"the fires are incendiary." Why this
incendiarism? The story narrated here endeavors to answer that
question.

The international incidents thinly disguised are equally founded on
fact and will be recognized by the dear but fast dwindling fraternity
of good old-timers. The mother of the boy still lives her steadfast
beautiful creed on the Upper Missouri; and the old frontiersman still
lives on the Saskatchewan, one of the most picturesque and heroic
figures in the West to-day. I may say that both missionaries support
their schools as incidentally revealed here, without Government aid
through their own efforts. Also, it was the stalwart man from
Saskatchewan who was sent searching the heirs to the estate of an
embittered Jacobite of 1745; and those heirs refused to accept either
the wealth or the position for the very reasons set forth here.
Calamity's story, too, is true--tragically true, though this is not
all, not a fraction of her life story; but her name was not Calamity.




PART I

THE MAN ON THE JOB