spring-fed, meadow-bordered streamlet. A jack-rabbit bounded
from a bush under his horse’s nose, leaped the stream, and
vanished up the opposite hillside of scrub-oak. Daylight watched
it admiringly as he rode on to the head of the meadow. Here he
startled up a many-pronged buck, that seemed to soar across the
meadow, and to soar over the stake-and-rider fence, and, still
soaring, disappeared in a friendly copse beyond.
Daylight’s delight was unbounded. It seemed to him that he had
never been so happy. His old woods’ training was aroused, and he
was keenly interested in everything in the moss on the trees and
branches; in the bunches of mistletoe hanging in the oaks; in the
nest of a wood-rat; in the water-cress growing in the sheltered
eddies of the little stream; in the butterflies drifting through
the rifted sunshine and shadow; in the blue jays that flashed in
splashes of gorgeous color across the forest aisles; in the tiny
birds, like wrens, that hopped among the bushes and imitated
certain minor quail-calls; and in the crimson-crested woodpecker
that ceased its knocking and cocked its head on one side to
survey him. Crossing the stream, he struck faint vestiges of a
wood-road, used, evidently, a generation back, when the meadow
had been cleared of its oaks. He found a hawk’s nest on the
lightning-shattered tipmost top of a six-foot redwood. And to
complete it all his horse stumbled upon several large broods of
half-grown quail, and the air was filled with the thrum of their
flight. He halted and watched the young ones “petrifying” and
disappearing on the ground before his eyes, and listening to the
anxious calls of the old ones hidden in the thickets.
“It sure beats country places and bungalows at Menlo Park,” he
communed aloud; “and if ever I get the hankering for country
life, it’s me for this every time.”
The old wood-road led him to a clearing, where a dozen acres of
grapes grew on wine-red soil. A cow-path, more trees and
thickets, and he dropped down a hillside to the southeast
exposure. Here, poised above a big forested canon, and looking
out upon Sonoma Valley, was a small farm-house. With its barn
and outhouses it snuggled into a nook in the hillside, which
protected it from west and north. It was the erosion from this
hillside, he judged, that had formed the little level stretch of
vegetable garden. The soil was fat and black, and there was
water in plenty, for he saw several faucets running wide open.
Forgotten was the brickyard. Nobody was at home, but Daylight
dismounted and ranged the vegetable garden, eating strawberries
and green peas, inspecting the old adobe barn and the rusty
plough and harrow, and rolling and smoking cigarettes while he
watched the antics of several broods of young chickens and the
mother hens. A foottrail that led down the wall of the big
canyon invited him, and he proceeded to follow it. A
water-pipe, usually above ground, paralleled the trail, which he
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124
concluded led upstream to the bed of the creek. The wall of the
canon was several hundred feet from top to bottom, and
magnificent were the untouched trees that the place was plunged
in perpetual shade. He measured with his eye spruces five and
six feet in diameter and redwoods even larger. One such he
passed, a twister that was at least ten or eleven feet through.
The trail led straight to a small dam where was the intake for
the pipe that watered the vegetable garden. Here, beside the
stream, were alders and laurel trees, and he walked through
fern-brakes higher than his head. Velvety moss was everywhere,
out of which grew maiden-hair and gold-back ferns.
Save for the dam, it was a virgin wild. No ax had invaded, and
the trees died only of old age and stress of winter storm. The
huge trunks of those that had fallen lay moss-covered, slowly
resolving back into the soil from which they sprang. Some had
lain so long that they were quite gone, though their faint
outlines, level with the mould, could still be seen. Others
bridged the stream, and from beneath the bulk of one monster half
a dozen younger trees, overthrown and crushed by the fall,
growing out along the ground, still lived and prospered, their
roots bathed by the stream, their upshooting branches catching
the sunlight through the gap that had been made in the forest
roof.
Back at the farm-house, Daylight mounted and rode on away from
the ranch and into the wilder canons and steeper steeps beyond.
Nothing could satisfy his holiday spirit now but the ascent of
Sonoma Mountain. And here on the crest, three hours afterward,
he emerged, tired and sweaty, garments torn and face and hands
scratched, but with sparkling eyes and an unwonted zestfulness of
expression. He felt the illicit pleasure of a schoolboy playing
truant. The big gambling table of San Francisco seemed very far
away. But there was more than illicit pleasure in his mood. It
was as though he were going through a sort of cleansing bath. No
room here for all the sordidness, meanness, and viciousness that
filled the dirty pool of city existence. Without pondering in
detail upon the matter at all, his sensations were of
purification and uplift. Had he been asked to state how he felt,
he would merely have said that he was having a good time; for he
was unaware in his self-consciousness of the potent charm of
nature that was percolating through his city-rotted body and
brain–potent, in that he came of an abysmal past of wilderness
dwellers, while he was himself coated with but the thinnest rind
of crowded civilization.
There were no houses in the summit of Sonoma Mountain, and, all
alone under the azure California sky, he reined in on the
southern edge of the peak. He saw open pasture country,
intersected with wooded canons, descending to the south and west
from his feet, crease on crease and roll on roll, from lower
level to lower level, to the floor of Petaluma Valley, flat as a
billiard-table, a cardboard affair, all patches and squares of
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125
geometrical regularity where the fat freeholds were farmed.
Beyond, to the west, rose range on range of mountains cuddling
purple mists of atmosphere in their valleys; and still beyond,
over the last range of all, he saw the silver sheen of the
Pacific. Swinging his horse, he surveyed the west and north,
from Santa Rosa to St. Helena, and on to the east, across Sonoma
to the chaparral-covered range that shut off the view of Napa
Valley. Here, part way up the eastern wall of Sonoma Valley, in
range of a line intersecting the little village of Glen Ellen, he
made out a scar upon a hillside. His first thought was that it
was the dump of a mine tunnel, but remembering that he was not in
gold-bearing country, he dismissed the scar from his mind and
continued the circle of his survey to the southeast, where,
across the waters of San Pablo Bay, he could see, sharp and
distant, the twin peaks of Mount Diablo. To the south was Mount
Tamalpais, and, yes, he was right, fifty miles away, where the
draughty winds of the Pacific blew in the Golden Gate, the smoke
of San Francisco made a low-lying haze against the sky.
“I ain’t seen so much country all at once in many a day,” he
thought aloud.
He was loath to depart, and it was not for an hour that he was
able to tear himself away and take the descent of the mountain.
Working out a new route just for the fun of it, late afternoon
was upon him when he arrived back at the wooded knolls. Here, on
the top of one of them, his keen eyes caught a glimpse of a shade
of green sharply differentiated from any he had seen all day.
Studying it for a minute, he concluded that it was composed of
three cypress trees, and he knew that nothing else than the hand
of man could have planted them there. Impelled by curiosity
purely boyish, he made up his mind to investigate. So densely
wooded was the knoll, and so steep, that he had to dismount and
go up on foot, at times even on hands and knees struggling hard
to force a way through the thicker underbrush. He came out
abruptly upon the cypresses. They were enclosed in a small
square of ancient fence; the pickets he could plainly see had
been hewn and sharpened by hand. Inside were the mounds of two
children’s graves. Two wooden headboards, likewise hand-hewn,
told the state Little David, born 1855, died 1859; and Little
Roy, born 1853, died 1860.
“The poor little kids,” Daylight muttered. The graves showed
signs of recent care. Withered bouquets of wild flowers were on
the mounds, and the lettering on the headboards was freshly