________________________________________________
_ 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.
As on the previous day, just for the joy of it, he followed
cattle-trails at haphazard and worked his way up toward the
summits. Coming out on a wagon road that led upward, he followed
it for several miles, emerging in a small, mountain-encircled
valley, where half a dozen poor ranchers farmed the wine-grapes
on the steep slopes. Beyond, the road pitched upward. Dense
chaparral covered the exposed hillsides but in the creases of the
canons huge spruce trees grew, and wild oats and flowers.
Half an hour later, sheltering under the summits themselves, he
came out on a clearing. Here and there, in irregular patches
where the steep and the soil favored, wine grapes were growing.
Daylight could see that it had been a stiff struggle, and that
wild nature showed fresh signs of winning--chaparral that had
invaded the clearings; patches and parts of patches of vineyard,
unpruned, grassgrown, and abandoned; and everywhere old
stake-and-rider fences vainly striving to remain intact. Here,
at a small farm-house surrounded by large outbuildings, the road
ended. Beyond, the chaparral blocked the way.
He came upon an old woman forking manure in the barnyard, and
reined in by the fence.
"Hello, mother," was his greeting; "ain't you got any men-folk
around to do that for you?"
She leaned on her pitchfork, hitched her skirt in at the waist,
and regarded him cheerfully. He saw that her toil-worn,
weather-exposed hands were like a man's, callused,
large-knuckled, and gnarled, and that her stockingless feet were
thrust into heavy man's brogans.
"Nary a man," she answered. "And where be you from, and all the
way up here? Won't you stop and hitch and have a glass of wine?"
Striding clumsily but efficiently, like a laboring-man, she led
him into the largest building, where Daylight saw a hand-press
and all the paraphernalia on a small scale for the making of
wine. It was too far and too bad a road to haul the grapes to
the valley wineries, she explained, and so they were compelled to
do it themselves. "They," he learned, were she and her daughter,
the latter a widow of forty-odd. It had been easier before the
grandson died and before he went away to fight savages in the
Philippines. He had died out there in battle.
Daylight drank a full tumbler of excellent Riesling, talked a few
minutes, and accounted for a second tumbler. Yes, they just
managed not to starve. Her husband and she had taken up this
government land in '57 and cleared it and farmed it ever since,
until he died, when she had carried it on. It actually didn't
pay for the toil, but what were they to do? There was the wine
trust, and wine was down. That Riesling? She delivered it to
the
railroad down in the valley for twenty-two cents a gallon. And
it was a long haul. It took a day for the round trip. Her
daughter was gone now with a load.
Daylight knew that in the hotels, Riesling, not quite so good
even, was charged for at from a dollar and a half to two dollars
a quart. And she got twenty-two cents a gallon. That was the
game. She was one of the stupid lowly, she and her people before
her--the ones that did the work, drove their oxen across the
Plains, cleared and broke the virgin land, toiled all days and
all hours, paid their taxes, and sent their sons and grandsons
out to fight and die for the flag that gave them such ample
protection that they were able to sell their wine for twenty-two
cents. The same wine was served to him at the St. Francis for
two dollars a quart, or eight dollars a short gallon. That was
it.
Between her and her hand-press on the mountain clearing and him
ordering his wine in the hotel was a difference of seven dollars
and seventy-eight cents. A clique of sleek men in the city got
between her and him to just about that amount. And, besides
them, there was a horde of others that took their whack. They
called it railroading, high finance, banking, wholesaling, real
estate, and such things, but the point was that they got it,
while she got what was left,--twenty-two cents. Oh, well, a
sucker was born every minute, he sighed to himself, and nobody
was to blame; it was all a game, and only a few could win, but it
was damned hard on the suckers.
"How old are you, mother?" he asked.
"Seventy-nine come next January."
"Worked pretty hard, I suppose?"
"Sense I was seven. I was bound out in Michigan state until I
was woman-grown. Then I married, and I reckon the work got
harder and harder."
"When are you going to take a rest?"
She looked at him, as though she chose to think his question
facetious, and did not reply.
"Do you believe in God?"
She nodded her head.
"Then you get it all back," he assured her; but in his heart he
was wondering about God, that allowed so many suckers to be born
and that did not break up the gambling game by which they were
robbed from the cradle to the grave.
"How much of that Riesling you got?"
She ran her eyes over the casks and calculated. "Just short of
eight hundred gallons."
He wondered what he could do with all of it, and speculated as to
whom he could give it away.
"What would you do if you got a dollar a gallon for it?" he
asked.
"Drop dead, I suppose."
"No; speaking seriously."
"Get me some false teeth, shingle the house, and buy a new wagon.
The road's mighty hard on wagons."
"And after that?"
"Buy me a coffin."
"Well, they're yours, mother, coffin and all."
She looked her incredulity.
"No; I mean it. And there's fifty to bind the bargain. Never
mind
the receipt. It's the rich ones that need watching, their
memories
being so infernal short, you know. Here's my address. You've
got
to deliver it to the railroad. And now, show me the way out of
here. I want to get up to the top."
On through the chaparral he went, following faint cattle.
trails and working slowly upward till he came out on the divide
and gazed down into Napa Valley and back across to Sonoma
Mountain... "A sweet land," he muttered, "an almighty sweet
land."
Circling around to the right and dropping down along the
cattle-trails, he quested for another way back to Sonoma Valley;
but the cattle-trails seemed to fade out, and the chaparral to
grow thicker with a deliberate viciousness and even when he won
through in places, the canon and small feeders were too
precipitous for his horse, and turned him back. But there was no
irritation about it. He enjoyed it all, for he was back at his
old game of bucking nature. Late in the afternoon he broke
through, and followed a well-defined trail down a dry canon.
Here he got a fresh thrill. He had heard the baying of the hound
some minutes before, and suddenly, across the bare face of the
hill above him, he saw a large buck in flight. And not far
behind came the deer-hound, a magnificent animal. Daylight sat
tense in his saddle and watched until they disappeared, his
breath just a trifle shorter, as if he, too, were in the chase,
his nostrils distended, and in his bones the old hunting ache and
memories of the days before he came to live in cities.
The dry canon gave place to one with a slender ribbon of running
water. The trail ran into a wood-road, and the wood-road emerged
across a small flat upon a slightly travelled county road. There
were no farms in this immediate section, and no houses. The soil
was meagre, the bed-rock either close to the surface or
constituting the surface itself. Manzanita and scrub-oak,
however, flourished and walled the road on either side with a
jungle growth. And out a runway through this growth a man
suddenly scuttled in a way that reminded Daylight of a rabbit.
He was a little man, in patched overalls; bareheaded, with a
cotton shirt open at the throat and down the chest. The sun was
ruddy-brown in his face, and by it his sandy hair was bleached on
the ends to peroxide blond. He signed to Daylight to halt, and
held up a letter. "If you're going to town, I'd be obliged if
you mail this."
"I sure will." Daylight put it into his coat pocket.
"Do you live hereabouts, stranger?"
But the little man did not answer. He was gazing at Daylight in
a surprised and steadfast fashion.
"I know you," the little man announced. "You're Elam
Harnish--Burning Daylight, the papers call you. Am I right?"
Daylight nodded.
"But what under the sun are you doing here in the chaparral?"
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."
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.
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
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
it, and there's the fireplace, fine and dandy, eh?
"And now tell me about the Klondike, and how you turned San
Francisco upside down with that last raid of yours. You're a
bonny fighter, you know, and you touch my imagination, though my
cooler reason tells me that you are a lunatic like the rest. The
lust for power! It's a dreadful affliction. Why didn't you stay
in your Klondike? Or why don't you clear out and live a natural
life, for instance, like mine? You see, I can ask questions,
too. Now you talk and let me listen for a while."
It was not until ten o'clock that Daylight parted from Ferguson.
As he rode along through the starlight, the idea came to him of
buying the ranch on the other side of the valley. There was no
thought in his mind of ever intending to live on it. His game
was
in San Francisco. But he liked the ranch, and as soon as he got
back to the office he would open up negotiations with Hillard.
Besides, the ranch included the clay-pit, and it would give him
the
whip-hand over Holdsworthy if he ever tried to cut up any didoes. _
Read next: PART II: CHAPTER X
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