ranch. Wait till you see the big canon. There are ‘coons down
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there, and back here on the Sonoma there are mink. And deer!–
why, that mountain’s sure thick with them, and I reckon we can
scare up a mountain-lion if we want to real hard. And, say,
there’s a little meadow=-well, I ain’t going to tell you another
word. You wait and see for yourself.”
They turned in at the gate, where the road to the clay-pit
crossed the fields, and both sniffed with delight as the warm
aroma of the ripe hay rose in their nostrils. As on his first
visit, the larks were uttering their rich notes and fluttering up
before the horses until the woods and the flower-scattered glades
were reached, when the larks gave way to blue jays and
woodpeckers.
“We’re on our land now,” he said, as they left the hayfield
behind. “It runs right across country over the roughest parts.
Just you wait and see.”
As on the first day, he turned aside from the clay-pit and worked
through the woods to the left, passing the first spring and
jumping the horses over the ruined remnants of the
stake-and-rider fence. From here on, Dede was in an unending
ecstasy. By the spring that gurgled among the redwoods grew
another great wild lily, bearing on its slender stalk the
prodigious outburst of white waxen bells. This time he did not
dismount, but led the way to the deep canon where the stream had
cut a passage among the knolls. He had been at work here, and a
steep and slippery horse trail now crossed the creek, so they
rode up beyond, through the somber redwood twilight, and, farther
on, through a tangled wood of oak and madrono. They came to a
small clearing of several acres, where the grain stood waist
high.
“Ours,” Daylight said.
She bent in her saddle, plucked a stalk of the ripe grain, and
nibbled it between her teeth.
“Sweet mountain hay,” she cried. “The kind Mab likes.”
And throughout the ride she continued to utter cries and
ejaculations of surprise and delight.
“And you never told me all this!” she reproached him, as they
looked across the little clearing and over the descending slopes
of woods to the great curving sweep of Sonoma Valley.
“Come,” he said; and they turned and went back through the forest
shade, crossed the stream and came to the lily by the spring.
Here, also, where the way led up the tangle of the steep hill, he
had cut a rough horse trail. As they forced their way up the
zigzags, they caught glimpses out and down through the sea of
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foliage. Yet always were their farthest glimpses stopped by the
closing vistas of green, and, yet always, as they climbed, did
the forest roof arch overhead, with only here and there rifts
that permitted shattered shafts of sunlight to penetrate. And
all about them were ferns, a score of varieties, from the tiny
gold-backs and maidenhair to huge brakes six and eight feet tall.
Below them, as they mounted, they glimpsed great gnarled trunks
and branches of ancient trees, and above them were similar great
gnarled branches.
Dede stopped her horse and sighed with the beauty of it all.
“It is as if we are swimmers,” she said, “rising out of a deep
pool of green tranquillity. Up above is the sky and the sun, but
this is a pool, and we are fathoms deep.”
They started their horses, but a dog-tooth violet, shouldering
amongst the maidenhair, caught her eye and made her rein in
again.
They cleared the crest and emerged from the pool as if into
another world, for now they were in the thicket of velvet-trunked
young madronos and looking down the open, sun-washed hillside,
across the nodding grasses, to the drifts of blue and white
nemophilae that carpeted the tiny meadow on either side the tiny
stream. Dede clapped her hands.
“It’s sure prettier than office furniture,” Daylight remarked.
“It sure is,” she answered.
And Daylight, who knew his weakness in the use of the particular
word sure, knew that she had repeated it deliberately and with
love.
They crossed the stream and took the cattle track over the low
rocky hill and through the scrub forest of manzanita, till they
emerged on the next tiny valley with its meadow-bordered
streamlet.
“If we don’t run into some quail pretty soon, I’ll be surprised
some,” Daylight said.
And as the words left his lips there was a wild series of
explosive thrumming as the old quail arose from all about Wolf,
while the young ones scuttled for safety and disappeared
miraculously before the spectators’ very eyes.
He showed her the hawk’s nest he had found in the
lightning-shattered top of the redwood, and she discovered a
wood-rat’s nest which he had not seen before. Next they took the
old wood-road and came out on the dozen acres of clearing where
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the
wine grapes grew in the wine-colored volcanic soil. Then they
followed the cow-path through more woods and thickets and
scattered glades, and dropped down the hillside to where the
farm-house, poised on the lip of the big canon, came into view
only when they were right upon it.
Dede stood on the wide porch that ran the length of the house
while Daylight tied the horses. To Dede it was very quiet. It
was the dry, warm, breathless calm of California midday. All the
world seemed dozing. From somewhere pigeons were cooing lazily.
With a deep sigh of satisfaction, Wolf, who had drunk his fill at
all the streams along the way, dropped down in the cool shadow of
the porch. She heard the footsteps of Daylight returning, and
caught her breath with a quick intake. He took her hand in his,
and, as he turned the door-knob, felt her hesitate. Then he put
his arm around her; the door swung open, and together they passed
in.
CHAPTER XXV
Many persons, themselves city-bred and city-reared, have fled to
the soil and succeeded in winning great happiness. In such cases
they have succeeded only by going through a process of savage
disillusionment. But with Dede and Daylight it was different.
They had both been born on the soil, and they knew its naked
simplicities and rawer ways. They were like two persons, after
far wandering, who had merely come home again. There was less of
the unexpected in their dealings with nature, while theirs was
all the delight of reminiscence. What might appear sordid and
squalid to the fastidiously reared, was to them eminently
wholesome and natural. The commerce of nature was to them no
unknown and untried trade. They made fewer mistakes. They
already knew, and it was a joy to remember what they had
forgotten.
And another thing they learned was that it was easier for one who
has gorged at the flesh-pots to content himself with the
meagerness of a crust, than for one who has known only the crust.
Not that their life was meagre. It was that they found keener
delights and deeper satisfactions in little things. Daylight,
who had played the game in its biggest and most fantastic
aspects, found that here, on the slopes of Sonoma Mountain, it
was still the same old game. Man had still work to perform,
forces to combat, obstacles to overcome. When he experimented in
a small way at raising a few pigeons for market, he found no less
zest in calculating in squabs than formerly when he had
calculated in millions. Achievement was no less achievement,
while the process of it seemed more rational and received the
sanction of his reason.
The domestic cat that had gone wild and that preyed on his
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pigeons, he found, by the comparative standard, to be of no less
paramount menace than a Charles Klinkner in the field of finance,
trying to raid him for several millions. The hawks and weasels
and ‘coons were so many Dowsetts, Lettons, and Guggenhammers that
struck at him secretly. The sea of wild vegetation that tossed
its surf against the boundaries of all his clearings and that
sometimes crept in and flooded in a single week was no mean enemy
to contend with and subdue. His fat-soiled vegetable-garden in
the nook of hills that failed of its best was a problem of
engrossing importance, and when he had solved it by putting in
drain-tile, the joy of the achievement was ever with him. He
never worked in it and found the soil unpacked and tractable
without experiencing the thrill of accomplishment.
There was the matter of the plumbing. He was enabled to purchase
the materials through a lucky sale of a number of his hair
bridles. The work he did himself, though more than once he was
forced to call in Dede to hold tight with a pipe-wrench. And in
the end, when the bath-tub and the stationary tubs were installed