Daylight grinned as he answered, “Drumming up trade for a free
rural delivery route.”
“Well, I’m glad I wrote that letter this afternoon,” the little
man went on, “or else I’d have missed seeing you. I’ve seen your
photo in the papers many a time, and I’ve a good memory for
faces. I recognized you at once. My name’s Ferguson.”
“Do you live hereabouts?” Daylight repeated his query.
“Oh, yes. I’ve got a little shack back here in the bush a hundred
yards, and a pretty spring, and a few fruit trees and berry
bushes.
Come in and take a look. And that spring is a dandy. You never
tasted water like it. Come in and try it.”
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Walking and leading his horse, Daylight followed the
quick-stepping eager little man through the green tunnel and
emerged abruptly upon the clearing, if clearing it might be
called, where wild nature and man’s earth-scratching were
inextricably blended. It was a tiny nook in the hills, protected
by the steep walls of a canon mouth. Here were several large
oaks, evidencing a richer soil. The erosion of ages from the
hillside had slowly formed this deposit of fat earth. Under the
oaks, almost buried in them, stood a rough, unpainted cabin, the
wide verandah of which, with chairs and hammocks, advertised an
out-of doors bedchamber. Daylight’s keen eyes took in every
thing. The clearing was irregular, following the patches of the
best soil, and every fruit tree and berry bush, and even each
vegetable plant, had the water personally conducted to it. The
tiny irrigation channels were every where, and along some of them
the water was running.
Ferguson looked eagerly into his visitor’s face for signs of
approbation.
“What do you think of it, eh?”
“Hand-reared and manicured, every blessed tree,” Daylight
laughed, but the joy and satisfaction that shone in his eyes
contented the little man.
“Why, d’ye know, I know every one of those trees as if they were
sons of mine. I planted them, nursed them, fed them, and brought
them up. Come on and peep at the spring.”
“It’s sure a hummer,” was Daylight’s verdict, after due
inspection and sampling, as they turned back for the house.
The interior was a surprise. The cooking being done in the
small, lean-to kitchen, the whole cabin formed a large living
room. A great table in the middle was comfortably littered with
books and magazines. All the available wall space, from floor to
ceiling, was occupied by filled bookshelves. It seemed to
Daylight that he had never seen so many books assembled in one
place. Skins of wildcat, ‘coon, and deer lay about on the
pine-board floor.
“Shot them myself, and tanned them, too,” Ferguson proudly
asserted.
The crowning feature of the room was a huge fireplace of rough
stones and boulders.
“Built it myself,” Ferguson proclaimed, “and, by God, she drew!
Never a wisp of smoke anywhere save in the pointed channel, and
that during the big southeasters.
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Daylight found himself charmed and made curious by the little
man. Why was he hiding away here in the chaparral, he and his
books? He was nobody’s fool, anybody could see that. Then why?
The whole affair had a tinge of adventure, and Daylight accepted
an invitation to supper, half prepared to find his host a
raw-fruit-and-nut-eater or some similar sort of health faddest.
At table, while eating rice and jack-rabbit curry (the latter
shot by Ferguson), they talked it over, and Daylight found the
little man had no food “views.” He ate whatever he liked, and
all he wanted, avoiding only such combinations that experience
had taught him disagreed with his digestion.
Next, Daylight surmised that he might be touched with religion;
but, quest about as he would, in a conversation covering the most
divergent topics, he could find no hint of queerness or
unusualness. So it was, when between them they had washed and
wiped the dishes and put them away, and had settled down to a
comfortable smoke, that Daylight put his question.
“Look here, Ferguson. Ever since we got together, I’ve been
casting about to find out what’s wrong with you, to locate a
screw loose somewhere, but I’ll be danged if I’ve succeeded.
What are you doing here, anyway? What made you come here? What
were you doing for a living before you came here? Go ahead and
elucidate yourself.”
Ferguson frankly showed his pleasure at the questions.
“First of all,” he began, “the doctors wound up by losing all
hope for me. Gave me a few months at best, and that, after a
course in sanatoriums and a trip to Europe and another to
Hawaii. They tried electricity, and forced feeding, and fasting.
I was a graduate of about everything in the curriculum. They
kept me poor with their bills while I went from bad to worse.
The trouble with me was two fold: first, I was a born weakling;
and next, I was living unnaturally–too much work, and
responsibility, and strain. I was managing editor of the
Times-Tribune–”
Daylight gasped mentally, for the Times-Tribune was the biggest
and most influential paper in San Francisco, and always had been
so.
“–and I wasn’t strong enough for the strain. Of course my body
went back on me, and my mind, too, for that matter. It had to be
bolstered up with whiskey, which wasn’t good for it any more than
was the living in clubs and hotels good for my stomach and the
rest of me. That was what ailed me; I was living all wrong.”
He shrugged his shoulders and drew at his pipe.
“When the doctors gave me up, I wound up my affairs and gave the
Burning Daylight
135
doctors up. That was fifteen years ago. I’d been hunting
through here when I was a boy, on vacations from college, and
when I was all down and out it seemed a yearning came to me to go
back to the country. So I quit, quit everything, absolutely, and
came to live in the Valley of the Moon–that’s the Indian name,
you know, for Sonoma Valley. I lived in the lean-to the first
year; then I built the cabin and sent for my books. I never knew
what happiness was before, nor health. Look at me now and dare
to tell me that I look forty-seven.”
“I wouldn’t give a day over forty,” Daylight confessed.
“Yet the day I came here I looked nearer sixty, and that was
fifteen years ago.”
They talked along, and Daylight looked at the world from new
angles. Here was a man, neither bitter nor cynical, who laughed
at the city-dwellers and called them lunatics; a man who did not
care for money, and in whom the lust for power had long since
died. As for the friendship of the city-dwellers, his host spoke
in no uncertain terms.
“What did they do, all the chaps I knew, the chaps in the clubs
with whom I’d been cheek by jowl for heaven knows how long? I
was not beholden to them for anything, and when I slipped out
there was not one of them to drop me a line and say, ‘How are
you, old man? Anything I can do for you?’ For several weeks it
was: ‘What’s become of Ferguson?” After that I became a
reminiscence and a memory. Yet every last one of them knew I had
nothing but my salary and that I’d always lived a lap ahead of
it.”
“But what do you do now?” was Daylight’s query. “You must need
cash to buy clothes and magazines?”
“A week’s work or a month’s work, now and again, ploughing in the
winter, or picking grapes in the fall, and there’s always odd
jobs with the farmers through the summer. I don’t need much, so
I don’t have to work much. Most of my time I spend fooling
around the place. I could do hack work for the magazines and
newspapers; but I prefer the ploughing and the grape picking.
Just look at me and you can see why. I’m hard as rocks. And I
like the work. But I tell you a chap’s got to break in to it.
It’s a great thing when he’s learned to pick grapes a whole long
day and come home at the end of it with that tired happy feeling,
instead of being in a state of physical collapse. That
fireplace–those big stones–I was soft, then, a little, anemic,
alcoholic degenerate, with the spunk of a rabbit and about one
per cent as much stamina, and some of those big stones nearly
broke my back and my heart. But I persevered, and used my body
in the way Nature intended it should be used–not bending over a
desk and swilling whiskey… and, well, here I am, a better man
for
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136
it, and there’s the fireplace, fine and dandy, eh?
“And now tell me about the Klondike, and how you turned San