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_ Many persons, themselves city-bred and city-reared, have fled to
the soil and succeeded in winning great happiness. In such cases
they have succeeded only by going through a process of savage
disillusionment. But with Dede and Daylight it was different.
They had both been born on the soil, and they knew its naked
simplicities and rawer ways. They were like two persons, after
far wandering, who had merely come home again. There was less of
the unexpected in their dealings with nature, while theirs was
all the delight of reminiscence. What might appear sordid and
squalid to the fastidiously reared, was to them eminently
wholesome and natural. The commerce of nature was to them no
unknown and untried trade. They made fewer mistakes. They
already knew, and it was a joy to remember what they had
forgotten.
And another thing they learned was that it was easier for one who
has gorged at the flesh-pots to content himself with the
meagerness of a crust, than for one who has known only the crust.
Not that their life was meagre. It was that they found keener
delights and deeper satisfactions in little things. Daylight,
who had played the game in its biggest and most fantastic
aspects, found that here, on the slopes of Sonoma Mountain, it
was still the same old game. Man had still work to perform,
forces to combat, obstacles to overcome. When he experimented in
a small way at raising a few pigeons for market, he found no less
zest in calculating in squabs than formerly when he had
calculated in millions. Achievement was no less achievement,
while the process of it seemed more rational and received the
sanction of his reason.
The domestic cat that had gone wild and that preyed on his
pigeons, he found, by the comparative standard, to be of no less
paramount menace than a Charles Klinkner in the field of finance,
trying to raid him for several millions. The hawks and weasels
and 'coons were so many Dowsetts, Lettons, and Guggenhammers that
struck at him secretly. The sea of wild vegetation that tossed
its surf against the boundaries of all his clearings and that
sometimes crept in and flooded in a single week was no mean enemy
to contend with and subdue. His fat-soiled vegetable-garden in
the nook of hills that failed of its best was a problem of
engrossing importance, and when he had solved it by putting in
drain-tile, the joy of the achievement was ever with him. He
never worked in it and found the soil unpacked and tractable
without experiencing the thrill of accomplishment.
There was the matter of the plumbing. He was enabled to purchase
the materials through a lucky sale of a number of his hair
bridles. The work he did himself, though more than once he was
forced to call in Dede to hold tight with a pipe-wrench. And in
the end, when the bath-tub and the stationary tubs were installed
and in working order, he could scarcely tear himself away from
the contemplation of what his hands had wrought. The first
evening, missing him, Dede sought and found him, lamp in hand,
staring with silent glee at the tubs. He rubbed his hand over
their smooth wooden lips and laughed aloud, and was as shamefaced
as any boy when she caught him thus secretly exulting in his own
prowess.
It was this adventure in wood-working and plumbing that brought
about the building of the little workshop, where he slowly
gathered a collection of loved tools. And he, who in the old
days, out of his millions, could purchase immediately whatever he
might desire, learned the new joy of the possession that follows
upon rigid economy and desire long delayed. He waited three
months before daring the extravagance of a Yankee screw-driver,
and his glee in the marvelous little mechanism was so keen that
Dede conceived forthright a great idea. For six months she saved
her egg-money, which was hers by right of allotment, and on his
birthday presented him with a turning-lathe of wonderful
simplicity and multifarious efficiencies. And their mutual
delight in the tool, which was his, was only equalled by their
delight in Mab's first foal, which was Dede's special private
property.
It was not until the second summer that Daylight built the huge
fireplace that outrivalled Ferguson's across the valley. For all
these things took time, and Dede and Daylight were not in a
hurry. Theirs was not the mistake of the average city-dweller
who flees in ultra-modern innocence to the soil. They did not
essay too much. Neither did they have a mortgage to clear, nor
did they desire wealth. They wanted little in the way of food,
and they had no rent to pay. So they planned unambiguously,
reserving their lives for each other and for the compensations of
country-dwelling from which the average country-dweller is
barred. From Ferguson's example, too, they profited much. Here
was a man who asked for but the plainest fare; who ministered to
his own simple needs with his own hands; who worked out as a
laborer only when he needed money to buy books and magazines; and
who saw to it that the major portion of his waking time was for
enjoyment. He loved to loaf long afternoons in the shade with
his books or to be up with the dawn and away over the hills.
On occasion he accompanied Dede and Daylight on deer hunts
through the wild canons and over the rugged steeps of Hood
Mountain, though more often Dede and Daylight were out alone.
This riding was one of their chief joys. Every wrinkle and
crease in the hills they explored, and they came to know every
secret spring and hidden dell in the whole surrounding wall of
the valley. They learned all the trails and cow-paths; but
nothing delighted them more than to essay the roughest and most
impossible rides, where they were glad to crouch and crawl along
the narrowest deer-runs, Bob and Mab struggling and forcing their
way along behind. Back from their rides they brought the seeds
and bulbs of wild flowers to plant in favoring nooks on the
ranch. Along the foot trail which led down the side of the big
canon to the intake of the water-pipe, they established their
fernery. It was not a formal affair, and the ferns were left to
themselves. Dede and Daylight merely introduced new ones from
time to time, changing them from one wild habitat to another. It
was the same with the wild lilac, which Daylight had sent to him
from Mendocino County. It became part of the wildness of the
ranch, and, after being helped for a season, was left to its own
devices. they used to gather the seeds of the California poppy
and scatter them over their own acres, so that the orange-colored
blossoms spangled the fields of mountain hay and prospered in
flaming drifts in the fence corners and along the edges of the
clearings.
Dede, who had a fondness for cattails, established a fringe of
them along the meadow stream, where they were left to fight it
out with the water-cress. And when the latter was threatened
with extinction, Daylight developed one of the shaded springs
into his water-cress garden and declared war upon any invading
cattail. On her wedding day Dede had discovered a long dog-tooth
violet by the zigzag trail above the redwood spring, and here she
continued to plant more and more. The open hillside above the
tiny meadow became a colony of Mariposa lilies. This was due
mainly to her efforts, while Daylight, who rode with a
short-handled ax on his saddle-bow, cleared the little manzanita
wood on the rocky hill of all its dead and dying and overcrowded
weaklings.
They did not labor at these tasks. Nor were they tasks. Merely
in passing, they paused, from time to time, and lent a hand to
nature. These flowers and shrubs grew of themselves, and their
presence was no violation of the natural environment. The man
and the woman made no effort to introduce a flower or shrub that
did not of its own right belong. Nor did they protect them from
their enemies. The horses and the colts and the cows and the
calves ran at pasture among them or over them, and flower or
shrub had to take its chance. But the beasts were not noticeably
destructive, for they were few in number and the ranch was large.
On the other hand, Daylight could have taken in fully a dozen
horses to pasture, which would have earned him a dollar and a
half per head per month. But this he refused to do, because of
the devastation such close pasturing would produce.
Ferguson came over to celebrate the housewarming that followed
the achievement of the great stone fireplace. Daylight had
ridden across the valley more than once to confer with him about
the undertaking, and he was the only other present at the sacred
function of lighting the first fire. By removing a partition,
Daylight had thrown two rooms into one, and this was the big
living-room where Dede's treasures were placed--her books, and
paintings and photographs, her piano, the Crouched Venus, the
chafing-dish and all its glittering accessories. Already, in
addition to her own wild-animal skins, were those of deer and
coyote and one mountain-lion which Daylight had killed. The
tanning he had done himself, slowly and laboriously, in frontier
fashion.
He handed the match to Dede, who struck it and lighted the fire.
The crisp manzanita wood crackled as the flames leaped up and
assailed the dry bark of the larger logs. Then she leaned in the
shelter of her husband's arm, and the three stood and looked in
breathless suspense. When Ferguson gave judgment, it was with
beaming face and extended hand.
"She draws! By crickey, she draws" he cried.
He shook Daylight's hand ecstatically, and Daylight shook his
with equal fervor, and, bending, kissed Dede on the lips. They
were as exultant over the success of their simple handiwork as
any great captain at astonishing victory. In Ferguson's eyes was
actually a suspicious moisture while the woman pressed even more
closely against the man whose achievement it was. He caught her
up suddenly in his arms and whirled her away to the piano, crying
out: "Come on, Dede! The Gloria! The Gloria!"
And while the flames in the fireplace that worked, the triumphant
strains of the Twelfth Mass rolled forth. _
Read next: PART II: CHAPTER XXVI
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