painted. Guided by these clews, Daylight cast about for a trail,
and found one leading down the side opposite to his ascent.
Circling the base of the knoll, he picked up with his horse and
rode on to the farm-house. Smoke was rising from the chimney and
he was quickly in conversation with a nervous, slender young man,
who, he learned, was only a tenant on the ranch. How large was
it? A matter of one hundred and eighty acres, though it seemed
much larger. This was because it was so irregularly shaped.
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Yes, it included the clay-pit and all the knolls, and its
boundary that ran along the big canon was over a mile long.
“You see,” the young man said, “it was so rough and broken that
when they began to farm this country the farmers bought in the
good land to the edge of it. That’s why its boundaries are all
gouged and jagged.”
“Oh, yes, he and his wife managed to scratch a living without
working too hard. They didn’t have to pay much rent. Hillard,
the owner, depended on the income from the clay-pit. Hillard was
well off, and had big ranches and vineyards down on the flat of
the valley. The brickyard paid ten cents a cubic yard for the
clay. As for the rest of the ranch, the land was good in
patches, where it was cleared, like the vegetable garden and the
vineyard, but the rest of it was too much up-and-down.
“You’re not a farmer,” Daylight said. The young man laughed and
shook his head. “No; I’m a telegraph operator. But the wife and
I decided to take a two years’ vacation, and… here we are
But the time’s about up. I’m going back into the office this
fall after I get the grapes off.”
Yes, there were about eleven acres in the vineyard–wine grapes.
The price was usually good. He grew most of what they ate. If
he owned the place, he’d clear a patch of land on the side-hill
above the vineyard and plant a small home orchard. The soil was
good. There was plenty of pasturage all over the ranch, and
there were several cleared patches, amounting to about fifteen
acres in all, where he grew as much mountain hay as could be
found. It sold for three to five dollars more a ton than the
rank-stalked valley hay.
Daylight listened, there came to him a sudden envy of this young
fellow living right in the midst of all this which Daylight had
travelled through the last few hours.
“What in thunder are you going back to the telegraph office for?”
he demanded.
The young man smiled with a certain wistfulness. “Because we
can’t get ahead here…” (he hesitated an instant), “and
because there are added expenses coming. The rent, small as it
is, counts; and besides, I’m not strong enough to effectually
farm the place. If I owned it, or if I were a real husky like
you, I’d ask nothing better. Nor would the wife.” Again the
wistful smile hovered on his face. “You see, we’re country born,
and after bucking with cities for a few years, we kind of feel we
like the country best. We’ve planned to get ahead, though, and
then some day we’ll buy a patch of land and stay with it.”
The graves of the children? Yes, he had relettered them and hoed
the weeds out. It had become the custom. Whoever lived on the
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ranch did that. For years, the story ran, the father and mother
had returned each summer to the graves. But there had come a
time when they came no more, and then old Hillard started the
custom. The scar across the valley? An old mine. It had never
paid. The men had worked on it, off and on, for years, for the
indications had been good. But that was years and years ago. No
paying mine had ever been struck in the valley, though there had
been no end of prospect-holes put down and there had been a sort
of rush there thirty years back.
A frail-looking young woman came to the door to call the young
man to supper. Daylight’s first thought was that city living had
not agreed with her. And then he noted the slight tan and
healthy glow that seemed added to her face, and he decided that
the country was the place for her. Declining an invitation to
supper, he rode on for Glen Ellen sitting slack-kneed in the
saddle and softly humming forgotten songs. He dropped down the
rough, winding road through covered pasture, with here and
there thickets of manzanita and vistas of open glades. He
listened greedily to the quail calling, and laughed outright,
once, in sheer joy, at a tiny chipmunk that fled scolding up a
bank, slipping on the crumbly surface and falling down, then
dashing across the road under his horse’s nose and, still
scolding, scrabbling up a protecting oak.
Daylight could not persuade himself to keep to the travelled
roads that day, and another cut across country to Glen Ellen
brought him upon a canon that so blocked his way that he was glad
to follow a friendly cow-path. This led him to a small frame
cabin. The doors and windows were open, and a cat was nursing a
litter of kittens in the doorway, but no one seemed at home. He
descended the trail that evidently crossed the canon. Part way
down, he met an old man coming up through the sunset. In his
hand he carried a pail of foamy milk. He wore no hat, and in his
face, framed with snow-white hair and beard, was the ruddy glow
and content of the passing summer day. Daylight thought that he
had never seen so contented-looking a being.
“How old are you, daddy?” he queried.
“Eighty-four,” was the reply. “Yes, sirree, eighty-four,and
spryer
than most.”
“You must a’ taken good care of yourself,” Daylight suggested.
“I don’t know about that. I ain’t loafed none. I walked across
the Plains with an ox-team and fit Injuns in ’51, and I was a
family man then with seven youngsters. I reckon I was as old
then as you are now, or pretty nigh on to it.”
“Don’t you find it lonely here?”
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128
The old man shifted the pail of milk and reflected. “That all
depends,” he said oracularly. “I ain’t never been lonely except
when the old wife died. Some fellers are lonely in a crowd, and
I’m one of them. That’s the only time I’m lonely, is when I go
to ‘Frisco. But I don’t go no more, thank you ‘most to death.
This is good enough for me. I’ve ben right here in this valley
since ’54–one of the first settlers after the Spaniards.”
Daylight started his horse, saying:-
“Well, good night, daddy. Stick with it. You got all the young
bloods skinned, and I guess you’ve sure buried a mighty sight of
them.”
The old man chuckled, and Daylight rode on, singularly at peace
with himself and all the world. It seemed that the old
contentment of trail and camp he had known on the Yukon had come
back to him. He could not shake from his eyes the picture of the
old pioneer coming up the trail through the sunset light. He was
certainly going some for eighty-four. The thought of following
his example entered Daylight’s mind, but the big game of San
Francisco vetoed the idea.
“Well, anyway,” he decided, “when I get old and quit the game,
I’ll settle down in a place something like this, and the city can
go to hell.”
CHAPTER IX
Instead of returning to the city on Monday, Daylight rented the
butcher’s horse for another day and crossed the bed of the valley
to its eastern hills to look at the mine. It was dryer and
rockier
here than where he had been the day before, and the ascending
slopes supported mainly chaparral, scrubby and dense and
impossible
to penetrate on horseback. But in the canyons water was
plentiful
and also a luxuriant forest growth. The mine was an abandoned
affair, but he enjoyed the half-hour’s scramble
around. He had had experience in quartz-mining before he went to
Alaska, and he enjoyed the recrudescence of his old wisdom in
such matters. The story was simple to him: good prospects that
warranted the starting of the tunnel into the sidehill; the three
months’ work and the getting short of money; the lay-off while
the men went away and got jobs; then the return and a new stretch
of work, with the “pay” ever luring and ever receding into the
mountain, until, after years of hope, the men had given up and
vanished. Most likely they were dead by now, Daylight thought,
as
he turned in the saddle and looked back across the canyon at the
ancient dump and dark mouth of the tunnel.