become cook, waitress, and chambermaid because she did not happen
to possess a household of servants. On the other hand,
chafing-dish suppers in the big living-room for their camping
guests were a common happening, at which times Daylight allotted
them their chores and saw that they were performed. For one who
stopped only for the night it was different. Likewise it was
different with her brother, back from Germany, and again able to
sit a horse. On his vacations he became the third in the family,
and to him was given the building of the fires, the sweeping, and
the washing of the dishes.
Daylight devoted himself to the lightening of Dede’s labors, and
it was her brother who incited him to utilize the splendid
water-power of the ranch that was running to waste. It required
Daylight’s breaking of extra horses to pay for the materials, and
the brother devoted a three weeks’ vacation to assisting, and
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together they installed a Pelting wheel. Besides sawing wood and
turning his lathe and grindstone, Daylight connected the power
with the churn; but his great triumph was when he put his arm
around Dede’s waist and led her out to inspect a washing-machine,
run by the Pelton wheel, which really worked and really washed
clothes.
Dede and Ferguson, between them, after a patient struggle, taught
Daylight poetry, so that in the end he might have been often
seen, sitting slack in the saddle and dropping down the mountain
trails through the sun-flecked woods, chanting aloud Kipling’s
“Tomlinson,” or, when sharpening his ax, singing into the
whirling grindstone Henley’s “Song of the Sword.” Not that he
ever became consummately literary in the way his two teachers
were. Beyond “Fra Lippo Lippi” and “Caliban and Setebos,” he
found nothing in Browning, while George Meredith was ever his
despair. It was of his own initiative, however, that he invested
in a violin, and practised so assiduously that in time he and
Dede beguiled many a happy hour playing together after night had
fallen.
So all went well with this well-mated pair. Time never dragged.
There were always new wonderful mornings and still cool twilights
at the end of day; and ever a thousand interests claimed him, and
his interests were shared by her. More thoroughly than he knew,
had he come to a comprehension of the relativity of things. In
this new game he played he found in little things all the
intensities of gratification and desire that he had found in the
frenzied big things when he was a power and rocked half a
continent with the fury of the blows he struck. With head and
hand, at risk of life and limb, to bit and break a wild colt and
win it to the service of man, was to him no less great an
achievement. And this new table on which he played the game was
clean. Neither lying, nor cheating, nor hypocrisy was here. The
other game had made for decay and death, while this new one made
for clean strength and life. And so he was content, with Dede at
his side, to watch the procession of the days and seasons from
the farm-house perched on the canon-lip; to ride through crisp
frosty mornings or under burning summer suns; and to shelter in
the big room where blazed the logs in the fireplace he had built,
while outside the world shuddered and struggled in the
storm-clasp of a southeaster.
Once only Dede asked him if he ever regretted, and his answer was
to crush her in his arms and smother her lips with his. His
answer, a minute later, took speech.
“Little woman, even if you did cost thirty millions, you are sure
the cheapest necessity of life I ever indulged in.” And then
he added, “Yes, I do have one regret, and a monstrous big one,
too. I’d sure like to have the winning of you all over again.
I’d like to go sneaking around the Piedmont hills looking for
you. I’d like to meander into those rooms of yours at Berkeley
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for the first time. And there’s no use talking, I’m plumb
soaking with regret that I can’t put my arms around you again
that time you leaned your head on my breast and cried in the wind
and rain.”
CHAPTER XXVII
But there came the day, one year, in early April, when Dede sat
in an easy chair on the porch, sewing on certain small garments,
while Daylight read aloud to her. It was in the afternoon, and a
bright sun was shining down on a world of new green. Along the
irrigation channels of the vegetable garden streams of water were
flowing, and now and again Daylight broke off from his reading to
run out and change the flow of water. Also, he was teasingly
interested in the certain small garments on which Dede worked,
while she was radiantly happy over them, though at times, when
his tender fun was too insistent, she was rosily confused or
affectionately resentful.
From where they sat they could look out over the world. Like the
curve of a skirting blade, the Valley of the Moon stretched
before them, dotted with farm-houses and varied by pasture-lands,
hay-fields, and vineyards. Beyond rose the wall of the valley,
every crease and wrinkle of which Dede and Daylight knew, and at
one place, where the sun struck squarely, the white dump of the
abandoned mine burned like a jewel. In the foreground, in the
paddock by the barn, was Mab, full of pretty anxieties for the
early spring foal that staggered about her on tottery legs. The
air shimmered with heat, and altogether it was a lazy, basking
day. Quail whistled to their young from the thicketed hillside
behind the house. there was a gentle cooing of pigeons, and from
the green depths of the big canon arose the sobbing wood note of
a mourning dove. Once, there was a warning chorus from the
foraging hens and a wild rush for cover, as a hawk, high in the
blue, cast its drifting shadow along the ground.
It was this, perhaps, that aroused old hunting memories in Wolf.
At any rate, Dede and Daylight became aware of excitement in the
paddock, and saw harmlessly reenacted a grim old tragedy of the
Younger World. Curiously eager, velvet-footed and silent as a
ghost, sliding and gliding and crouching, the dog that was mere
domesticated wolf stalked the enticing bit of young life that Mab
had brought so recently into the world. And the mare, her own
ancient instincts aroused and quivering, circled ever between the
foal and this menace of the wild young days when all her ancestry
had known fear of him and his hunting brethren. Once, she
whirled and tried to kick him, but usually she strove to strike
him with her fore-hoofs, or rushed upon him with open mouth and
ears laid back in an effort to crunch his backbone between her
teeth. And the wolf-dog, with ears flattened down and crouching,
would slide silkily away, only to circle up to the foal from the
other side and give cause to the mare for new alarm. Then
Daylight, urged on by Dede’s solicitude, uttered a low
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threatening cry; and Wolf, drooping and sagging in all the body
of him in token of his instant return to man’s allegiance, slunk
off behind the barn.
It was a few minutes later that Daylight, breaking off from his
reading to change the streams of irrigation, found that the water
had ceased flowing. He shouldered a pick and shovel, took a
hammer and a pipe-wrench from the tool-house, and returned to
Dede on the porch.
“I reckon I’ll have to go down and dig the pipe out,” he told
her. “It’s that slide that’s threatened all winter. I guess
she’s come down at last.”
“Don’t you read ahead, now,” he warned, as he passed around the
house and took the trail that led down the wall of the canon.
Halfway down the trail, he came upon the slide. It was a small
affair, only a few tons of earth and crumbling rock; but,
starting from fifty feet above, it had struck the water pipe with
force sufficient to break it at a connection. Before proceeding
to work, he glanced up the path of the slide, and he glanced with
the eye of the earth-trained miner. And he saw what made his
eyes startle and cease for the moment from questing farther.
“Hello,” he communed aloud, “look who’s here.”
His glance moved on up the steep broken surface, and across it
from side to side. Here and there, in places, small twisted
manzanitas were rooted precariously, but in the main, save for
weeds and grass, that portion of the canon was bare. There were
signs of a surface that had shifted often as the rains poured a
flow of rich eroded soil from above over the lip of the canon.