← catalogue

The Little Lady of the Big House

by Jack London · English · Gutenberg #6455 · 582,128 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Little Lady of the Big House
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The Little Lady of the Big House

Author: Jack London


        
Release date: September 1, 2004 [eBook #6455]
                Most recently updated: April 9, 2013

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6455

Credits: Produced by Curtis A. Weyant, David Maddock, Charles Franks
        and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LITTLE LADY OF THE BIG HOUSE ***




Produced by Curtis A. Weyant, David Maddock, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.










[Illustration: ]



THE LITTLE LADY OF THE BIG HOUSE

BY

JACK LONDON



Author of "The Valley of the Moon," "The Star Rover," "The Sea Wolf,"
Etc.





CHAPTER I



He awoke in the dark. His awakening was simple, easy, without movement
save for the eyes that opened and made him aware of darkness. Unlike
most, who must feel and grope and listen to, and contact with, the
world about them, he knew himself on the moment of awakening, instantly
identifying himself in time and place and personality. After the lapsed
hours of sleep he took up, without effort, the interrupted tale of his
days. He knew himself to be Dick Forrest, the master of broad acres,
who had fallen asleep hours before after drowsily putting a match
between the pages of "Road Town" and pressing off the electric reading
lamp.

Near at hand there was the ripple and gurgle of some sleepy fountain.
From far off, so faint and far that only a keen ear could catch, he
heard a sound that made him smile with pleasure. He knew it for the
distant, throaty bawl of King Polo--King Polo, his champion Short Horn
bull, thrice Grand Champion also of all bulls at Sacramento at the
California State Fairs. The smile was slow in easing from Dick
Forrest's face, for he dwelt a moment on the new triumphs he had
destined that year for King Polo on the Eastern livestock circuits. He
would show them that a bull, California born and finished, could
compete with the cream of bulls corn-fed in Iowa or imported overseas
from the immemorial home of Short Horns.

Not until the smile faded, which was a matter of seconds, did he reach
out in the dark and press the first of a row of buttons. There were
three rows of such buttons. The concealed lighting that spilled from
the huge bowl under the ceiling revealed a sleeping-porch, three sides
of which were fine-meshed copper screen. The fourth side was the house
wall, solid concrete, through which French windows gave access.

He pressed the second button in the row and the bright light
concentered at a particular place on the concrete wall, illuminating,
in a row, a clock, a barometer, and centigrade and Fahrenheit
thermometers. Almost in a sweep of glance he read the messages of the
dials: time 4:30; air pressure, 29:80, which was normal at that
altitude and season; and temperature, Fahrenheit, 36°. With another
press, the gauges of time and heat and air were sent back into the
darkness.

A third button turned on his reading lamp, so arranged that the light
fell from above and behind without shining into his eyes. The first
button turned off the concealed lighting overhead. He reached a mass of
proofsheets from the reading stand, and, pencil in hand, lighting a
cigarette, he began to correct.

The place was clearly the sleeping quarters of a man who worked.
Efficiency was its key note, though comfort, not altogether Spartan,
was also manifest. The bed was of gray enameled iron to tone with the
concrete wall. Across the foot of the bed, an extra coverlet, hung a
gray robe of wolfskins with every tail a-dangle. On the floor, where
rested a pair of slippers, was spread a thick-coated skin of mountain
goat.

Heaped orderly with books, magazines and scribble-pads, there was room
on the big reading stand for matches, cigarettes, an ash-tray, and a
thermos bottle. A phonograph, for purposes of dictation, stood on a
hinged and swinging bracket. On the wall, under the barometer and
thermometers, from a round wooden frame laughed the face of a girl. On
the wall, between the rows of buttons and a switchboard, from an open
holster, loosely projected the butt of a .44 Colt's automatic.

At six o'clock, sharp, after gray light had begun to filter through the
wire netting, Dick Forrest, without raising his eyes from the
proofsheets, reached out his right hand and pressed a button in the
second row. Five minutes later a soft-slippered Chinese emerged on the
sleeping-porch. In his hands he bore a small tray of burnished copper
on which rested a cup and saucer, a tiny coffee pot of silver, and a
correspondingly tiny silver cream pitcher.

"Good morning, Oh My," was Dick Forrest's greeting, and his eyes smiled
and his lips smiled as he uttered it.

"Good morning, Master," Oh My returned, as he busied himself with
making room on the reading stand for the tray and with pouring the
coffee and cream.

This done, without waiting further orders, noting that his master was
already sipping coffee with one hand while he made a correction on the
proof with the other, Oh My picked up a rosy, filmy, lacy boudoir cap
from the floor and departed. His exit was noiseless. He ebbed away like
a shadow through the open French windows.

At six-thirty, sharp to the minute, he was back with a larger tray.
Dick Forrest put away the proofs, reached for a book entitled
"Commercial Breeding of Frogs," and prepared to eat. The breakfast was
simple yet fairly substantial--more coffee, a half grape-fruit, two
soft-boiled eggs made ready in a glass with a dab of butter and piping
hot, and a sliver of bacon, not over-cooked, that he knew was of his
own raising and curing.

By this time the sunshine was pouring in through the screening and
across the bed. On the outside of the wire screen clung a number of
house-flies, early-hatched for the season and numb with the night's
cold. As Forrest ate he watched the hunting of the meat-eating
yellow-jackets. Sturdy, more frost-resistant than bees, they were
already on the wing and preying on the benumbed flies. Despite the
rowdy noise of their flight, these yellow hunters of the air, with
rarely ever a miss, pounced on their helpless victims and sailed away
with them. The last fly was gone ere Forrest had sipped his last sip of
coffee, marked "Commercial Breeding of Frogs" with a match, and taken
up his proofsheets.

After a time, the liquid-mellow cry of the meadow-lark, first vocal for
the day, caused him to desist. He looked at the clock. It marked seven.
He set aside the proofs and began a series of conversations by means of
the switchboard, which he manipulated with a practiced hand.

"Hello, Oh Joy," was his first talk. "Is Mr. Thayer up?... Very well.
Don't disturb him. I don't think he'll breakfast in bed, but find
out.... That's right, and show him how to work the hot water. Maybe he
doesn't know... Yes, that's right. Plan for one more boy as soon as you
can get him. There's always a crowd when the good weather comes on....
Sure. Use your judgment. Good-by."

"Mr. Hanley?... Yes," was his second conversation, over another switch.
"I've been thinking about the dam on the Buckeye. I want the figures on
the gravel-haul and on the rock-crushing.... Yes, that's it. I imagine
that the gravel-haul will cost anywhere between six and ten cents a
yard more than the crushed rock. That last pitch of hill is what eats
up the gravel-teams. Work out the figures. ... No, we won't be able to
start for a fortnight. ... Yes, yes; the new tractors, if they ever
deliver, will release the horses from the plowing, but they'll have to
go back for the checking.... No, you'll have to see Mr. Everan about
that. Good-by."

 And his third call:

"Mr. Dawson? Ha! Ha! Thirty-six on my porch right now. It must be white
with frost down on the levels. But it's most likely the last this
year.... Yes, they swore the tractors would be delivered two days
ago.... Call up the station agent. ... By the way, you catch Hanley for
me. I forgot to tell him to start the 'rat-catchers' out with the
second instalment of fly-traps.... Yes, pronto. There were a couple of
dozen roosting on my screen this morning.... Yes.... Good-by."

At this stage, Forrest slid out of bed in his pajamas, slipped his feet
into the slippers, and strode through the French windows to the bath,
already drawn by Oh My. A dozen minutes afterward, shaved as well, he
was back in bed, reading his frog book while Oh My, punctual to the
minute, massaged his legs.

They were the well-formed legs of a well-built, five-foot-ten man who
weighed a hundred and eighty pounds. Further, they told a tale of the
man. The left thigh was marred by a scar ten inches in length. Across
the left ankle, from instep to heel, were scattered half a dozen scars
the size of half-dollars. When Oh My prodded and pulled the left knee a
shade too severely, Forrest was guilty of a wince. The right shin was
colored with several dark scars, while a big scar, just under the knee,
was a positive dent in the bone. Midway between knee and groin was the
mark of an ancient three-inch gash, curiously dotted with the minute
scars of stitches.

A sudden, joyous nicker from without put the match between the pages of
the frog book, and, while Oh My proceeded partly to dress his master in
bed, including socks and shoes, the master, twisting partly on his
side, stared out in the direction of the nicker. Down the road, through
the swaying purple of the early lilacs, ridden by a picturesque cowboy,
paced a great horse, glinting ruddy in the morning sun-gold, flinging
free the snowy foam of his mighty fetlocks, his noble crest tossing,
his eyes roving afield, the trumpet of his love-call echoing through
the springing land.

Dick Forrest was smitten at the same instant with joy and anxiety--joy
in the glorious beast pacing down between the lilac hedges; anxiety in
that the stallion might have awakened the girl who laughed from the
round wooden frame on his wall. He glanced quickly across the
two-hundred-foot court to the long, shadowy jut of her wing of the
house. The shades of her sleeping-porch were down. They did not stir.
Again the stallion nickered, and all that moved was a flock of wild
canaries, upspringing from the flowers and shrubs of the court, rising
like a green-gold spray of light flung from the sunrise.

He watched the stallion out of sight through the lilacs, seeing visions
of fair Shire colts mighty of bone and frame and free from blemish,
then turned, as ever he turned to the immediate thing, and spoke to his
body servant.

"How's that last boy, Oh My? Showing up?"

"Him pretty good boy, I think," was the answer. "Him young boy.
Everything new. Pretty slow. All the same bime by him show up good."

"Why? What makes you think so?"

"I call him three, four morning now. Him sleep like baby. Him wake up
smiling just like you. That very good."

"Do I wake up smiling?" Forrest queried.

Oh My nodded his head violently.

"Many times, many years, I call you. Always your eyes open, your eyes
smile, your mouth smile, your face smile, you smile all over, just like
that, right away quick. That very good. A man wake up that way got
plenty good sense. I know. This new boy like that. Bime by, pretty
soon, he make fine boy. You see. His name Chow Gam. What name you call
him this place?"

Dick Forrest meditated.

"What names have we already?" he asked.

"Oh Joy, Ah Well, Ah Me, and me; I am Oh My," the Chinese rattled off.
"Oh Joy him say call new boy--"

He hesitated and stared at his master with a challenging glint of eye.
Forrest nodded.

"Oh Joy him say call new boy 'Oh Hell.'"

"Oh ho!" Forrest laughed in appreciation. "Oh Joy is a josher. A good
name, but it won't do. There is the Missus. We've got to think another
name."

"Oh Ho, that very good name."

Forrest's exclamation was still ringing in his consciousness so that he
recognized the source of Oh My's inspiration.

"Very well. The boy's name is Oh Ho."

Oh My lowered his head, ebbed swiftly through the French windows, and
as swiftly returned with the rest of Forrest's clothes-gear, helping
him into undershirt and shirt, tossing a tie around his neck for him to
knot, and, kneeling, putting on his leggings and spurs. A Baden Powell
hat and a quirt completed his appareling--the quirt, Indian-braided of
rawhide, with ten ounces of lead braided into the butt that hung from
his wrist on a loop of leather.

But Forrest was not yet free. Oh My handed him several letters, with
the explanation that they had come up from the station the previous
night after Forrest had gone to bed. He tore the right-hand ends across
and glanced at the contents of all but one with speed. The latter he
dwelt upon for a moment, with an irritated indrawing of brows, then
swung out the phonograph from the wall, pressed the button that made
the cylinder revolve, and swiftly dictated, without ever a pause for
word or idea:

"In reply to yours of March 14, 1914, I am indeed sorry to learn that
you were hit with hog cholera. I am equally sorry that you have seen
fit to charge me with the responsibility. And just as equally am I
sorry that the boar we sent you is dead.

"I can only assure you that we are quite clear of cholera here, and
that we have been clear of cholera for eight years, with the exception
of two Eastern importations, the last two years ago, both of which,
according to our custom, were segregated on arrival and were destroyed
before the contagion could be communicated to our herds.

"I feel that I must inform you that in neither case did I charge the
sellers with having sent me diseased stock. On the contrary, as you
should know, the incubation of hog cholera being nine days, I consulted
the shipping dates of the animals and knew that they had been healthy
when shipped.

"Has it ever entered your mind that the railroads are largely
responsible for the spread of cholera? Did you ever hear of a railroad
fumigating or disinfecting a car which had carried cholera? Consult the
dates: First, of shipment by me; second, of receipt of the boar by you;
and, third, of appearance of symptoms in the boar. As you say, because
of washouts, the boar was five days on the way. Not until the seventh
day after you receipted for same did the first symptoms appear. That
makes twelve days after it left my hands.

"No; I must disagree with you. I am not responsible for the disaster
that overtook your herd. Furthermore, doubly to assure you, write to
the State Veterinary as to whether or not my place is free of cholera.

"Very truly yours..."




CHAPTER II



When Forrest went through the French windows from his sleeping-porch,
he crossed, first, a comfortable dressing room, window-divaned,
many-lockered, with a generous fireplace, out of which opened a
bathroom; and, second, a long office room, wherein was all the
paraphernalia of business--desks, dictaphones, filing cabinets, book
cases, magazine files, and drawer-pigeonholes that tiered to the low,
beamed ceiling.

Midway in the office room, he pressed a button and a series of
book-freightened shelves swung on a pivot, revealing a tiny spiral
stairway of steel, which he descended with care that his spurs might
not catch, the bookshelves swinging into place behind him.

At the foot of the stairway, a press on another button pivoted more
shelves of books and gave him entrance into a long low room shelved
with books from floor to ceiling. He went directly to a case, directly
to a shelf, and unerringly laid his hand on the book he sought. A
minute he ran the pages, found the passage he was after, nodded his
head to himself in vindication, and replaced the book.

A door gave way to a pergola of square concrete columns spanned with
redwood logs and interlaced with smaller trunks of redwood, all rough
and crinkled velvet with the ruddy purple of the bark.

It was evident, since he had to skirt several hundred feet of concrete
walls of wandering house, that he had not taken the short way out.
Under wide-spreading ancient oaks, where the long hitching-rails,
bark-chewed, and the hoof-beaten gravel showed the stamping place of
many horses, he found a pale-golden, almost tan-golden, sorrel mare.
Her well-groomed spring coat was alive and flaming in the morning sun
that slanted straight under the edge of the roof of trees. She was
herself alive and flaming. She was built like a stallion, and down her
backbone ran a narrow dark strip of hair that advertised an ancestry of
many range mustangs.

"How's the Man-Eater this morning?" he queried, as he unsnapped the
tie-rope from her throat.

She laid back the tiniest ears that ever a horse possessed--ears that
told of some thoroughbred's wild loves with wild mares among the
hills--and snapped at Forrest with wicked teeth and wicked-gleaming
eyes.

She sidled and attempted to rear as he swung into the saddle, and,
sidling and attempting to rear, she went off down the graveled road.
And rear she would have, had it not been for the martingale that held
her head down and that, as well, saved the rider's nose from her
angry-tossing head.

So used was he to the mare, that he was scarcely aware of her antics.
Automatically, with slightest touch of rein against arched neck, or
with tickle of spur or press of knee, he kept the mare to the way he
willed. Once, as she whirled and danced, he caught a glimpse of the Big
House. Big it was in all seeming, and yet, such was the vagrant nature
of it, it was not so big as it seemed. Eight hundred feet across the
front face, it stretched. But much of this eight hundred feet was
composed of mere corridors, concrete-walled, tile-roofed, that
connected and assembled the various parts of the building. There were
patios and pergolas in proportion, and all the walls, with their many
right-angled juts and recessions, arose out of a bed of greenery and
bloom.

Spanish in character, the architecture of the Big House was not of the
California-Spanish type which had been introduced by way of Mexico a
hundred years before, and which had been modified by modern architects
to the California-Spanish architecture of the day. Hispano-Moresque
more technically classified the Big House in all its hybridness,
although there were experts who heatedly quarreled with the term.

Spaciousness without austerity and beauty without ostentation were the
fundamental impressions the Big House gave. Its lines, long and
horizontal, broken only by lines that were vertical and by the lines of
juts and recesses that were always right-angled, were as chaste as
those of a monastery. The irregular roof-line, however, relieved the
hint of monotony.

Low and rambling, without being squat, the square upthrusts of towers
and of towers over-topping towers gave just proportion of height
without being sky-aspiring. The sense of the Big House was solidarity.
It defied earthquakes. It was planted for a thousand years. The honest
concrete was overlaid by a cream-stucco of honest cement. Again, this
very sameness of color might have proved monotonous to the eye had it
not been saved by the many flat roofs of warm-red Spanish tile.

In that one sweeping glance while the mare whirled unduly, Dick
Forrest's eyes, embracing all of the Big House, centered for a quick
solicitous instant on the great wing across the two-hundred-foot court,
where, under climbing groups of towers, red-snooded in the morning sun,
the drawn shades of the sleeping-porch tokened that his lady still
slept.

About him, for three quadrants of the circle of the world, arose
low-rolling hills, smooth, fenced, cropped, and pastured, that melted
into higher hills and steeper wooded slopes that merged upward,
steeper, into mighty mountains. The fourth quadrant was unbounded by
mountain walls and hills. It faded away, descending easily to vast far
flatlands, which, despite the clear brittle air of frost, were too vast
and far to scan across.

The mare under him snorted. His knees tightened as he straightened her
into the road and forced her to one side. Down upon him, with a
pattering of feet on the gravel, flowed a river of white shimmering
silk. He knew it at sight for his prize herd of Angora goats, each with
a pedigree, each with a history. There had to be a near two hundred of
them, and he knew, according to the rigorous selection he commanded,
not having been clipped in the fall, that the shining mohair draping
the sides of the least of them, as fine as any human new-born baby's
hair and finer, as white as any human albino's thatch and whiter, was
longer than the twelve-inch staple, and that the mohair of the best of
them would dye any color into twenty-inch switches for women's heads
and sell at prices unreasonable and profound.

The beauty of the sight held him as well. The roadway had become a
flowing ribbon of silk, gemmed with yellow cat-like eyes that floated
past wary and curious in their regard for him and his nervous horse.
Two Basque herders brought up the rear. They were short, broad, swarthy
men, black-eyed, vivid-faced, contemplative and philosophic of
expression. They pulled off their hats and ducked their heads to him.
Forrest lifted his right hand, the quirt dangling from wrist, the
straight forefinger touching the rim of his Baden Powell in
semi-military salute.

The mare, prancing and whirling again, he held her with a touch of rein
and threat of spur, and gazed after the four-footed silk that filled
the road with shimmering white. He knew the significance of their
presence. The time for kidding was approaching and they were being
brought down from their brush-pastures to the brood-pens and shelters
for jealous care and generous feed through the period of increase. And
as he gazed, in his mind, comparing, was a vision of all the best of
Turkish and South African mohair he had ever seen, and his flock bore
the comparison well. It looked good. It looked very good.

He rode on. From all about arose the clacking whir of manure-spreaders.
In the distance, on the low, easy-sloping hills, he saw team after
team, and many teams, three to a team abreast, what he knew were his
Shire mares, drawing the plows back and forth across, contour-plowing,
turning the green sod of the hillsides to the rich dark brown of
humus-filled earth so organic and friable that it would almost melt by
gravity into fine-particled seed-bed. That was for the corn--and
sorghum-planting for his silos. Other hill-slopes, in the due course of
his rotation, were knee-high in barley; and still other slopes were
showing the good green of burr clover and Canada pea.

Everywhere about him, large fields and small were arranged in a system
of accessibility and workability that would have warmed the heart of
the most meticulous efficiency-expert. Every fence was hog-tight and
bull-proof, and no weeds grew in the shelters of the fences. Many of
the level fields were in alfalfa. Others, following the rotations, bore
crops planted the previous fall, or were in preparation for the
spring-planting. Still others, close to the brood barns and pens, were
being grazed by rotund Shropshire and French-Merino ewes, or were being
hogged off by white Gargantuan brood-sows that brought a flash of
pleasure in his eyes as he rode past and gazed.

He rode through what was almost a village, save that there were neither
shops nor hotels. The houses were bungalows, substantial, pleasing to
the eye, each set in the midst of gardens where stouter blooms,
including roses, were out and smiling at the threat of late frost.
Children were already astir, laughing and playing among the flowers or
being called in to breakfast by their mothers.

Beyond, beginning at a half-mile distant to circle the Big House, he
passed a row of shops. He paused at the first and glanced in. One smith
was working at a forge. A second smith, a shoe fresh-nailed on the
fore-foot of an elderly Shire mare that would disturb the scales at
eighteen hundred weight, was rasping down the outer wall of the hoof to
smooth with the toe of the shoe. Forrest saw, saluted, rode on, and, a
hundred feet away, paused and scribbled a memorandum in the notebook he
drew from his hip-pocket.

He passed other shops--a paint-shop, a wagon-shop, a plumbing shop, a
carpenter-shop. While he glanced at the last, a hybrid machine,
half-auto, half-truck, passed him at speed and took the main road for
the railroad station eight miles away. He knew it for the morning
butter-truck freighting from the separator house the daily output of
the dairy.

The Big House was the hub of the ranch organization. Half a mile from
it, it was encircled by the various ranch centers. Dick Forrest,
saluting continually his people, passed at a gallop the dairy center,
which was almost a sea of buildings with batteries of silos and with
litter carriers emerging on overhead tracks and automatically dumping
into waiting manure-spreaders. Several times, business-looking men,
college-marked, astride horses or driving carts, stopped him and
conferred with him. They were foremen, heads of departments, and they
were as brief and to the point as was he. The last of them, astride a
Palomina three-year-old that was as graceful and wild as a half-broken
Arab, was for riding by with a bare salute, but was stopped by his
employer.

"Good morning, Mr. Hennessy, and how soon will she be ready for Mrs.
Forrest?" Dick Forrest asked.

"I'd like another week," was Hennessy's answer. "She's well broke now,
just the way Mrs. Forrest wanted, but she's over-strung and sensitive
and I'd like the week more to set her in her ways."

Forrest nodded concurrence, and Hennessy, who was the veterinary, went
on:

"There are two drivers in the alfalfa gang I'd like to send down the
hill."

"What's the matter with them?"

"One, a new man, Hopkins, is an ex-soldier. He may know government
mules, but he doesn't know Shires."

Forrest nodded.

"The other has worked for us two years, but he's drinking now, and he
takes his hang-overs out on his horses--"

"That's Smith, old-type American, smooth-shaven, with a cast in his
left eye?" Forrest interrupted.

The veterinary nodded.

"I've been watching him," Forrest concluded. "He was a good man at
first, but he's slipped a cog recently. Sure, send him down the hill.
And send that other fellow--Hopkins, you said?--along with him. By the
way, Mr. Hennessy." As he spoke, Forrest drew forth his pad book, tore
off the last note scribbled, and crumpled it in his hand. "You've a new
horse-shoer in the shop. How does he strike you?"

"He's too new to make up my mind yet."

"Well, send him down the hill along with the other two. He can't take
your orders. I observed him just now fitting a shoe to old Alden Bessie
by rasping off half an inch of the toe of her hoof."

"He knew better."

"Send him down the hill," Forrest repeated, as he tickled his champing
mount with the slightest of spur-tickles and shot her out along the
road, sidling, head-tossing, and attempting to rear.

Much he saw that pleased him. Once, he murmured aloud, "A fat land, a
fat land." Divers things he saw that did not please him and that won a
note in his scribble pad. Completing the circle about the Big House and
riding beyond the circle half a mile to an isolated group of sheds and
corrals, he reached the objective of the ride: the hospital. Here he
found but two young heifers being tested for tuberculosis, and a
magnificent Duroc Jersey boar in magnificent condition. Weighing fully
six hundred pounds, its bright eyes, brisk movements, and sheen of hair
shouted out that there was nothing the matter with it. Nevertheless,
according to the ranch practice, being a fresh importation from Iowa,
it was undergoing the regular period of quarantine. Burgess Premier was
its name in the herd books of the association, age two years, and it
had cost Forrest five hundred dollars laid down on the ranch.

Proceeding at a hand gallop along a road that was one of the spokes
radiating from the Big House hub, Forrest overtook Crellin, his hog
manager, and, in a five-minute conference, outlined the next few months
of destiny of Burgess Premier, and learned that the brood sow, Lady
Isleton, the matron of all matrons of the O. I. C.'s and blue-ribboner
in all shows from Seattle to San Diego, was safely farrowed of eleven.
Crellin explained that he had sat up half the night with her and was
then bound home for bath and breakfast.

"I hear your oldest daughter has finished high school and wants to
enter Stanford," Forrest said, curbing the mare just as he had
half-signaled departure at a gallop.

Crellin, a young man of thirty-five, with the maturity of a long-time
father stamped upon him along with the marks of college and the
youthfulness of a man used to the open air and straight-living, showed
his appreciation of his employer's interest as he half-flushed under
his tan and nodded.

"Think it over," Forrest advised. "Make a statistic of all the college
girls--yes, and State Normal girls--you know. How many of them follow
career, and how many of them marry within two years after their degrees
and take to baby farming."

"Helen is very seriously bent on the matter," Crellin urged.

"Do you remember when I had my appendix out?" Forrest queried. "Well, I
had as fine a nurse as I ever saw and as nice a girl as ever walked on
two nice legs. She was just six months a full-fledged nurse, then. And
four months after that I had to send her a wedding present. She married
an automobile agent. She's lived in hotels ever since. She's never had
a chance to nurse--never a child of her own to bring through a bout
with colic. But... she has hopes... and, whether or not her hopes
materialize, she's confoundedly happy. But... what good was her nursing
apprenticeship?"

Just then an empty manure-spreader passed, forcing Crellin, on foot,
and Forrest, on his mare, to edge over to the side of the road. Forrest
glanced with kindling eye at the off mare of the machine, a huge,
symmetrical Shire whose own blue ribbons, and the blue ribbons of her
progeny, would have required an expert accountant to enumerate and
classify.

"Look at the Fotherington Princess," Forrest said, nodding at the mare
that warmed his eye. "She is a normal female. Only incidentally,
through thousands of years of domestic selection, has man evolved her
into a draught beast breeding true to kind. But being a draught-beast
is secondary. Primarily she is a female. Take them by and large, our
own human females, above all else, love us men and are intrinsically
maternal. There is no biological sanction for all the hurly burly of
woman to-day for suffrage and career."

"But there is an economic sanction," Crellin objected.

"True," his employer agreed, then proceeded to discount. "Our present
industrial system prevents marriage and compels woman to career. But,
remember, industrial systems come, and industrial systems go, while
biology runs on forever."

"It's rather hard to satisfy young women with marriage these days," the
hog-manager demurred.

Dick Forrest laughed incredulously.

"I don't know about that," he said. "There's your wife for an instance.
She with her sheepskin--classical scholar at that--well, what has she
done with it?... Two boys and three girls, I believe? As I remember
your telling me, she was engaged to you the whole last half of her
senior year."

"True, but--" Crellin insisted, with an eye-twinkle of appreciation of
the point, "that was fifteen years ago, as well as a love-match. We
just couldn't help it. That far, I agree. She had planned unheard-of
achievements, while I saw nothing else than the deanship of the College
of Agriculture. We just couldn't help it. But that was fifteen years
ago, and fifteen years have made all the difference in the world in the
ambitions and ideals of our young women."

"Don't you believe it for a moment. I tell you, Mr. Crellin, it's a
statistic. All contrary things are transient. Ever woman remains
Avoman, everlasting, eternal. Not until our girl-children cease from
playing with dolls and from looking at their own enticingness in
mirrors, will woman ever be otherwise than what she has always been:
first, the mother, second, the mate of man. It is a statistic. I've
been looking up the girls who graduate from the State Normal. You will
notice that those who marry by the way before graduation are excluded.
Nevertheless, the average length of time the graduates actually teach
school is little more than two years. And when you consider that a lot
of them, through ill looks and ill luck, are foredoomed old maids and
are foredoomed to teach all their lives, you can see how they cut down
the period of teaching of the marriageable ones."

"A woman, even a girl-woman, will have her way where mere men are
concerned," Crellin muttered, unable to dispute his employer's figures
but resolved to look them up.

"And your girl-woman will go to Stanford," Forrest laughed, as he
prepared to lift his mare into a gallop, "and you and I and all men, to
the end of time, will see to it that they do have their way."

Crellin smiled to himself as his employer diminished down the road; for
Crellin knew his Kipling, and the thought that caused the smile was:
"But where's the kid of your own, Mr. Forrest?" He decided to repeat it
to Mrs. Crellin over the breakfast coffee.

Once again Dick Forrest delayed ere he gained the Big House. The man he
stopped he addressed as Mendenhall, who was his horse-manager as well
as pasture expert, and who was reputed to know, not only every blade of
grass on the ranch, but the length of every blade of grass and its age
from seed-germination as well.

At signal from Forrest, Mendenhall drew up the two colts he was driving
in a double breaking-cart. What had caused Forrest to signal was a
glance he had caught, across the northern edge of the valley, of great,
smooth-hill ranges miles beyond, touched by the sun and deeply green
where they projected into the vast flat of the Sacramento Valley.

The talk that followed was quick and abbreviated to terms of
understanding between two men who knew. Grass was the subject. Mention
was made of the winter rainfall and of the chance for late spring rains
to come. Names occurred, such as the Little Coyote and Los Cuatos
creeks, the Yolo and the Miramar hills, the Big Basin, Round Valley,
and the San Anselmo and Los Banos ranges. Movements of herds and
droves, past, present, and to come, were discussed, as well as the
outlook for cultivated hay in far upland pastures and the estimates of
such hay that still remained over the winter in remote barns in the
sheltered mountain valleys where herds had wintered and been fed.

Under the oaks, at the stamping posts, Forrest was saved the trouble of
tying the Man-Eater. A stableman came on the run to take the mare, and
Forrest, scarce pausing for a word about a horse by the name of Duddy,
was clanking his spurs into the Big House.




CHAPTER III



Forrest entered a section of the Big House by way of a massive,
hewn-timber, iron-studded door that let in at the foot of what seemed a
donjon keep. The floor was cement, and doors let off in various
directions. One, opening to a Chinese in the white apron and starched
cap of a chef, emitted at the same time the low hum of a dynamo. It was
this that deflected Forrest from his straight path. He paused, holding
the door ajar, and peered into a cool, electric-lighted cement room
where stood a long, glass-fronted, glass-shelved refrigerator flanked
by an ice-machine and a dynamo. On the floor, in greasy overalls,
squatted a greasy little man to whom his employer nodded.

"Anything wrong, Thompson?" he asked.

"There _was,"_ was the answer, positive and complete.

Forrest closed the door and went on along a passage that was like a
tunnel. Narrow, iron-barred openings, like the slits for archers in
medieval castles, dimly lighted the way. Another door gave access to a
long, low room, beam-ceilinged, with a fireplace in which an ox could
have been roasted. A huge stump, resting on a bed of coals, blazed
brightly. Two billiard tables, several card tables, lounging corners,
and a miniature bar constituted the major furnishing. Two young men
chalked their cues and returned Forrest's greeting.

"Good morning, Mr. Naismith," he bantered. "--More material for the
_Breeders' Gazette?"_

Naismith, a youngish man of thirty, with glasses, smiled sheepishly and
cocked his head at his companion.

"Wainwright challenged me," he explained.

"Which means that Lute and Ernestine must still be beauty-sleeping,"
Forrest laughed.

Young Wainwright bristled to acceptance of the challenge, but before he
could utter the retort on his lips his host was moving on and
addressing Naismith over his shoulder.

"Do you want to come along at eleven:thirty? Thayer and I are running
out in the machine to look over the Shropshires. He wants about ten
carloads of rams. You ought to find good stuff in this matter of Idaho
shipments. Bring your camera along.--Seen Thayer this morning?"

"Just came in to breakfast as we were leaving," Bert Wainwright
volunteered.

"Tell him to be ready at eleven-thirty if you see him. You're not
invited, Bert... out of kindness. The girls are sure to be up then."

"Take Rita along with you anyway," Bert pleaded.

"No fear," was Forrest's reply from the door. "We're on business.
Besides, you can't pry Rita from Ernestine with block-and-tackle."

"That's why I wanted to see if you could," Bert grinned.

"Funny how fellows never appreciate their own sisters." Forrest paused
for a perceptible moment. "I always thought Rita was a real nice
sister. What's the matter with her?"

Before a reply could reach him, he had closed the door and was jingling
his spurs along the passage to a spiral stairway of broad concrete
steps. As he left the head of the stairway, a dance-time piano measure
and burst of laughter made him peep into a white morning room, flooded
with sunshine. A young girl, in rose-colored kimono and boudoir cap,
was at the instrument, while two others, similarly accoutered, in each
other's arms, were parodying a dance never learned at dancing school
nor intended by the participants for male eyes to see.

The girl at the piano discovered him, winked, and played on. Not for
another minute did the dancers spy him. They gave startled cries,
collapsed, laughing, in each other's arms, and the music stopped. They
were gorgeous, healthy young creatures, the three of them, and
Forrest's eye kindled as he looked at them in quite the same way that
it had kindled when he regarded the Fotherington Princess.

Persiflage, of the sort that obtains among young things of the human
kind, flew back and forth.

"I've been here five minutes," Dick Forrest asserted.

The two dancers, to cover their confusion, doubted his veracity and
instanced his many well-known and notorious guilts of mendacity. The
girl at the piano, Ernestine, his sister-in-law, insisted that pearls
of truth fell from his lips, that she had seen him from the moment he
began to look, and that as she estimated the passage of time he had
been looking much longer than five minutes.

"Well, anyway," Forrest broke in on their babel, "Bert, the sweet
innocent, doesn't think you are up yet."

"We're not... to him," one of the dancers, a vivacious young Venus,
retorted. "Nor are we to you either. So run along, little boy. Run
along."

"Look here, Lute," Forrest began sternly. "Just because I am a decrepit
old man, and just because you are eighteen, just eighteen, and happen
to be my wife's sister, you needn't presume to put the high and mighty
over on me. Don't forget--and I state the fact, disagreeable as it may
be, for Rita's sake--don't forget that in the past ten years I've
paddled you more disgraceful times than you care to dare me to
enumerate.

"It is true, I am not so young as I used to was, but--" He felt the
biceps of his right arm and made as if to roll up the sleeve. "--But,
I'm not all in yet, and for two cents..."

"What?" the young woman challenged belligerently.

"For two cents," he muttered darkly. "For two cents... Besides, and it
grieves me to inform you, your cap is not on straight. Also, it is not
a very tasteful creation at best. I could make a far more becoming cap
with my toes, asleep, and... yes, seasick as well."

Lute tossed her blond head defiantly, glanced at her comrades in
solicitation of support, and said:

"Oh, I don't know. It seems humanly reasonable that the three of us can
woman-handle a mere man of your elderly and insulting avoirdupois. What
do you say, girls? Let's rush him. He's not a minute under forty, and
he has an aneurism. Yes, and though loath to divulge family secrets,
he's got Meniere's Disease."

Ernestine, a small but robust blonde of eighteen, sprang from the piano
and joined her two comrades in a raid on the cushions of the deep
window seats. Side by side, a cushion in each hand, and with proper
distance between them cannily established for the swinging of the
cushions, they advanced upon the foe.

Forrest prepared for battle, then held up his hand for parley.

"'Fraid cat!" they taunted, in several at first, and then in chorus.

He shook his head emphatically.

"Just for that, and for all the rest of your insolences, the three of
you are going to get yours. All the wrongs of a lifetime are rising now
in my brain in a dazzling brightness. I shall go Berserk in a moment.
But first, and I speak as an agriculturist, and I address myself to
you, Lute, in all humility, in heaven's name what is Meniere's Disease?
Do sheep catch it?"

"Meniere's Disease is," Lute began,... "is what you've got. Sheep are
the only known living creatures that get it."

Ensued red war and chaos. Forrest made a football rush of the sort that
obtained in California before the adoption of Rugby; and the girls
broke the line to let him through, turned upon him, flanked him on
either side, and pounded him with cushions.

He turned, with widespread arms, extended fingers, each finger a hook,
and grappled the three. The battle became a whirlwind, a be-spurred man
the center, from which radiated flying draperies of flimsy silk,
disconnected slippers, boudoir caps, and hairpins. There were thuds
from the cushions, grunts from the man, squeals, yelps and giggles from
the girls, and from the totality of the combat inextinguishable
laughter and a ripping and tearing of fragile textures.

Dick Forrest found himself sprawled on the floor, the wind half knocked
out of him by shrewdly delivered cushions, his head buzzing from the
buffeting, and, in one hand, a trailing, torn, and generally disrupted
girdle of pale blue silk and pink roses.

In one doorway, cheeks flaming from the struggle, stood Rita, alert as
a fawn and ready to flee. In the other doorway, likewise flame-checked,
stood Ernestine in the commanding attitude of the Mother of the
Gracchi, the wreckage of her kimono wrapped severely about her and held
severely about her by her own waist-pressing arm. Lute, cornered behind
the piano, attempted to run but was driven back by the menace of
Forrest, who, on hands and knees, stamped loudly with the palms of his
hands on the hardwood floor, rolled his head savagely, and emitted
bull-like roars.

"And they still believe that old prehistoric myth," Ernestine
proclaimed from safety, "that once he, that wretched semblance of a
man-thing prone in the dirt, captained Berkeley to victory over
Stanford."

Her breasts heaved from the exertion, and he marked the pulsating of
the shimmering cherry-colored silk with delight as he flung his glance
around to the other two girls similarly breathing.

The piano was a miniature grand--a dainty thing of rich white and gold
to match the morning room. It stood out from the wall, so that there
was possibility for Lute to escape around either way of it. Forrest
gained his feet and faced her across the broad, flat top of the
instrument. As he threatened to vault it, Lute cried out in horror:

"But your spurs, Dick! Your spurs!"

"Give me time to take them off," he offered.

As he stooped to unbuckle them, Lute darted to escape, but was herded
back to the shelter of the piano.

"All right," he growled. "On your head be it. If the piano's scratched
I'll tell Paula."

"I've got witnesses," she panted, indicating with her blue joyous eyes
the young things in the doorways.

"Very well, my dear." Forrest drew back his body and spread his resting
palms. "I'm coming over to you."

Action and speech were simultaneous. His body, posited sidewise from
his hands, was vaulted across, the perilous spurs a full foot above the
glossy white surface. And simultaneously Lute ducked and went under the
piano on hands and knees. Her mischance lay in that she bumped her
head, and, before she could recover way, Forrest had circled the piano
and cornered her under it.

"Come out!" he commanded. "Come out and take your medicine!"

"A truce," she pleaded. "A truce, Sir Knight, for dear love's sake and
all damsels in distress."

"I ain't no knight," Forrest announced in his deepest bass. "I'm an
ogre, a filthy, debased and altogether unregenerate ogre. I was born in
the tule-swamps. My father was an ogre and my mother was more so. I was
lulled to slumber on the squalls of infants dead, foreordained, and
predamned. I was nourished solely on the blood of maidens educated in
Mills Seminary. My favorite chophouse has ever been a hardwood floor, a
loaf of Mills Seminary maiden, and a roof of flat piano. My father, as
well as an ogre, was a California horse-thief. I am more reprehensible
than my father. I have more teeth. My mother, as well as an ogress, was
a Nevada book-canvasser. Let all her shame be told. She even solicited
subscriptions for ladies' magazines. I am more terrible than my mother.
I have peddled safety razors."

"Can naught soothe and charm your savage breast?" Lute pleaded in
soulful tones while she studied her chances for escape.

"One thing only, miserable female. One thing only, on the earth, over
the earth, and under its ruining waters--"

A squawk of recognized plagiarism interrupted him from Ernestine.

"See Ernest Dowson, page seventy-nine, a thin book of thin verse ladled
out with porridge to young women detentioned at Mills Seminary,"
Forrest went on. "As I had already enunciated before I was so rudely
interrupted, the one thing only that can balm and embalm this savage
breast is the 'Maiden's Prayer.' Listen, with all your ears ere I chew
them off in multitude and gross! Listen, silly, unbeautiful, squat,
short-legged and ugly female under the piano! Can you recite the
'Maiden's Prayer'?"

Screams of delight from the young things in the doorways prevented the
proper answer and Lute, from under the piano, cried out to young
Wainwright, who had appeared:

"A rescue, Sir Knight! A rescue!"

"Unhand the maiden!" was Bert's challenge.

"Who art thou?" Forrest demanded.

"King George, sirrah!--I mean, er, Saint George."

"Then am I thy dragon," Forrest announced with due humility. "Spare
this ancient, honorable, and only neck I have."

"Off with his head!" the young things encouraged.

"Stay thee, maidens, I pray thee," Bert begged. "I am only a Small
Potato. Yet am I unafraid. I shall beard the dragon. I shall beard him
in his gullet, and, while he lingeringly chokes to death over my
unpalatableness and general spinefulness, do you, fair damsels, flee to
the mountains lest the valleys fall upon you. Yolo, Petaluma, and West
Sacramento are about to be overwhelmed by a tidal wave and many big
fishes."

"Off with his head!" the young things chanted. "Slay him in his blood
and barbecue him!"

"Thumbs down," Forrest groaned. "I am undone. Trust to the unstrained
quality of mercy possessed by Christian young women in the year 1914
who will vote some day if ever they grow up and do not marry
foreigners. Consider my head off, Saint George. I am expired. Further
deponent sayeth not."

And Forrest, with sobs and slubberings, with realistic shudders and
kicks and a great jingling of spurs, lay down on the floor and expired.

Lute crawled out from under the piano, and was joined by Rita and
Ernestine in an extemporized dance of the harpies about the slain.

In the midst of it, Forrest sat up, protesting. Also, he was guilty of
a significant and privy wink to Lute.

"The hero!" he cried. "Forget him not. Crown him with flowers."

And Bert was crowned with flowers from the vases, unchanged from the
day before. When a bunch of water-logged stems of early tulips,
propelled by Lute's vigorous arm, impacted soggily on his neck under
the ear, he fled. The riot of pursuit echoed along the hall and died
out down the stairway toward the stag room. Forrest gathered himself
together, and, grinning, went jingling on through the Big House.

He crossed two patios on brick walks roofed with Spanish tile and
swamped with early foliage and blooms, and gained his wing of the
house, still breathing from the fun, to find, in the office, his
secretary awaiting him.

"Good morning, Mr. Blake," he greeted. "Sorry I was delayed." He
glanced at his wrist-watch. "Only four minutes, however. I just
couldn't get away sooner."




CHAPTER IV



From nine till ten Forrest gave himself up to his secretary, achieving
a correspondence that included learned societies and every sort of
breeding and agricultural organization and that would have compelled
the average petty business man, unaided, to sit up till midnight to
accomplish.

For Dick Forrest was the center of a system which he himself had built
and of which he was secretly very proud. Important letters and
documents he signed with his ragged fist. All other letters were
rubber-stamped by Mr. Blake, who, also, in shorthand, in the course of
the hour, put down the indicated answers to many letters and received
the formula designations of reply to many other letters. Mr. Blake's
private opinion was that he worked longer hours than his employer,
although it was equally his private opinion that his employer was a
wonder for discovering work for others to perform.

At ten, to the stroke of the clock, as Pittman, Forrest's show-manager,
entered the office, Blake, burdened with trays of correspondence,
sheafs of documents, and phonograph cylinders, faded away to his own
office.

From ten to eleven a stream of managers and foremen flowed in and out.
All were well disciplined in terseness and time-saving. As Dick Forrest
had taught them, the minutes spent with him were not minutes of
cogitation. They must be prepared before they reported or suggested.
Bonbright, the assistant secretary, always arrived at ten to replace
Blake; and Bonbright, close to shoulder, with flying pencil, took down
the rapid-fire interchange of question and answer, statement and
proposal and plan. These shorthand notes, transcribed and typed in
duplicate, were the nightmare and, on occasion, the Nemesis, of the
managers and foremen. For, first, Forrest had a remarkable memory; and,
second, he was prone to prove its worth by reference to those same
notes of Bonbright.

A manager, at the end of a five or ten minute session, often emerged
sweating, limp and frazzled. Yet for a swift hour, at high tension,
Forrest met all comers, with a master's grip handling them and all the
multifarious details of their various departments. He told Thompson,
the machinist, in four flashing minutes, where the fault lay in the
dynamo to the Big House refrigerator, laid the fault home to Thompson,
dictated a note to Bonbright, with citation by page and chapter to a
volume from the library to be drawn by Thompson, told Thompson that
Parkman, the dairy manager, was not satisfied with the latest wiring up
of milking machines, and that the refrigerating plant at the slaughter
house was balking at its accustomed load.

Each man was a specialist, yet Forrest was the proved master of their
specialties. As Paulson, the head plowman, complained privily to
Dawson, the crop manager: "I've worked here twelve years and never have
I seen him put his hands to a plow, and yet, damn him, he somehow seems
to know. He's a genius, that's what he is. Why, d'ye know, I've seen
him tear by a piece of work, his hands full with that Man-Eater of his
a-threatenin' sudden funeral, an', next morning, had 'm mention
casually to a half-inch how deep it was plowed an' what plows'd done
the plowin'!--Take that plowin' of the Poppy Meadow, up above Little
Meadow, on Los Cuatos. I just couldn't see my way to it, an' had to cut
out the cross-sub-soiling, an' thought I could slip it over on him.
After it was all finished he kind of happened up that way--I was
lookin' an' he didn't seem to look--an', well, next A.M. I got mine in
the office. No; I didn't slip it over. I ain't tried to slip nothing
over since."

At eleven sharp, Wardman, his sheep manager, departed with an
engagement scheduled at eleven: thirty to ride in the machine along
with Thayer, the Idaho buyer, to look over the Shropshire rams. At
eleven, Bonbright having departed with Wardman to work up his notes,
Forrest was left alone in the office. From a wire tray of unfinished
business--one of many wire trays superimposed in groups of five--he
drew a pamphlet issued by the State of Iowa on hog cholera and
proceeded to scan it.

Five feet, ten inches in height, weighing a clean-muscled one hundred
and eighty pounds, Dick Forrest was anything but insignificant for a
forty years' old man. The eyes were gray, large, over-arched by bone of
brow, and lashes and brows were dark. The hair, above an ordinary
forehead, was light brown to chestnut. Under the forehead, the cheeks
showed high-boned, with underneath the slight hollows that necessarily
accompany such formation. The jaws were strong without massiveness, the
nose, large-nostriled, was straight enough and prominent enough without
being too straight or prominent, the chin square without harshness and
uncleft, and the mouth girlish and sweet to a degree that did not hide
the firmness to which the lips could set on due provocation. The skin
was smooth and well-tanned, although, midway between eyebrows and hair,
the tan of forehead faded in advertisement of the rim of the Baden
Powell interposed between him and the sun.

Laughter lurked in the mouth corners and eye-corners, and there were
cheek lines about the mouth that would seem to have been formed by
laughter. Equally strong, however, every line of the face that meant
blended things carried a notice of surety. Dick Forrest was sure--sure,
when his hand reached out for any object on his desk, that the hand
would straightly attain the object without a fumble or a miss of a
fraction of an inch; sure, when his brain leaped the high places of the
hog cholera text, that it was not missing a point; sure, from his
balanced body in the revolving desk-chair to the balanced back-head of
him; sure, in heart and brain, of life and work, of all he possessed,
and of himself.

He had reason to be sure. Body, brain, and career were long-proven
sure. A rich man's son, he had not played ducks and drakes with his
father's money. City born and reared, he had gone back to the land and
made such a success as to put his name on the lips of breeders wherever
breeders met and talked. He was the owner, without encumbrance, of two
hundred and fifty thousand acres of land--land that varied in value
from a thousand dollars an acre to a hundred dollars, that varied from
a hundred dollars to ten cents an acre, and that, in stretches, was not
worth a penny an acre. The improvements on that quarter of a million
acres, from drain-tiled meadows to dredge-drained tule swamps, from
good roads to developed water-rights, from farm buildings to the Big
House itself, constituted a sum gaspingly ungraspable to the
country-side.

Everything was large-scale but modern to the last tick of the clock.
His managers lived, rent-free, with salaries commensurate to ability,
in five--and ten-thousand-dollar houses--but they were the cream of
specialists skimmed from the continent from the Atlantic to the
Pacific. When he ordered gasoline-tractors for the cultivation of the
flat lands, he ordered a round score. When he dammed water in his
mountains he dammed it by the hundreds of millions of gallons. When he
ditched his tule-swamps, instead of contracting the excavation, he
bought the huge dredgers outright, and, when there was slack work on
his own marshes, he contracted for the draining of the marshes of
neighboring big farmers, land companies, and corporations for a hundred
miles up and down the Sacramento River.

He had brain sufficient to know the need of buying brains and to pay a
tidy bit over the current market price for the most capable brains. And
he had brain sufficient to direct the brains he bought to a profitable
conclusion.

And yet, he was just turned forty was clear-eyed, calm-hearted,
hearty-pulsed, man-strong; and yet, his history, until he was thirty,
had been harum-scarum and erratic to the superlative. He had run away
from a millionaire home when he was thirteen. He had won enviable
college honors ere he was twenty-one and after that he had known all
the purple ports of the purple seas, and, with cool head, hot heart,
and laughter, played every risk that promised and provided in the wild
world of adventure that he had lived to see pass under the sobriety of
law.

In the old days of San Francisco Forrest had been a name to conjure
with. The Forrest Mansion had been one of the pioneer palaces on Nob
Hill where dwelt the Floods, the Mackays, the Crockers, and the
O'Briens. "Lucky" Richard Forrest, the father, had arrived, via the
Isthmus, straight from old New England, keenly commercial, interested
before his departure in clipper ships and the building of clipper
ships, and interested immediately after his arrival in water-front real
estate, river steamboats, mines, of course, and, later, in the draining
of the Nevada Comstock and the construction of the Southern Pacific.

He played big, he won big, he lost big; but he won always more than he
lost, and what he paid out at one game with one hand, he drew back with
his other hand at another game. His winnings from the Comstock he sank
into the various holes of the bottomless Daffodil Group in Eldorado
County. The wreckage from the Benicia Line he turned into the Napa
Consolidated, which was a quicksilver venture, and it earned him five
thousand per cent. What he lost in the collapse of the Stockton boom
was more than balanced by the realty appreciation of his key-holdings
at Sacramento and Oakland.

And, to cap it all, when "Lucky" Richard Forrest had lost everything in
a series of calamities, so that San Francisco debated what price his
Nob Hill palace would fetch at auction, he grubstaked one, Del Nelson,
to a prospecting in Mexico. As soberly set down in history, the result
of the said Del Nelson's search for quartz was the Harvest Group,
including the fabulous and inexhaustible Tattlesnake, Voice, City,
Desdemona, Bullfrog, and Yellow Boy claims. Del Nelson, astounded by
his achievement, within the year drowned himself in an enormous
quantity of cheap whisky, and, the will being incontestible through
lack of kith and kin, left his half to Lucky Richard Forrest.

Dick Forrest was the son of his father. Lucky Richard, a man of
boundless energy and enterprise, though twice married and twice
widowed, had not been blessed with children. His third marriage
occurred in 1872, when he was fifty-eight, and in 1874, although he
lost the mother, a twelve-pound boy, stout-barreled and husky-lunged,
remained to be brought up by a regiment of nurses in the palace on Nob
Hill.

Young Dick was precocious. Lucky Richard was a democrat. Result: Young
Dick learned in a year from a private teacher what would have required
three years in the grammar school, and used all of the saved years in
playing in the open air. Also, result of precocity of son and democracy
of father, Young Dick was sent to grammar school for the last year in
order to learn shoulder-rubbing democracy with the sons and daughters
of workmen, tradesmen, saloon-keepers and politicians.

In class recitation or spelling match his father's millions did not aid
him in competing with Patsy Halloran, the mathematical prodigy whose
father was a hod-carrier, nor with Mona Sanguinetti who was a wizard at
spelling and whose widowed mother ran a vegetable store. Nor were his
father's millions and the Nob Hill palace of the slightest assistance
to Young Dick when he peeled his jacket and, bareknuckled, without
rounds, licking or being licked, milled it to a finish with Jimmy
Botts, Jean Choyinsky, and the rest of the lads that went out over the
world to glory and cash a few years later, a generation of
prizefighters that only San Francisco, raw and virile and yeasty and
young, could have produced.

The wisest thing Lucky Richard did for his boy was to give him this
democratic tutelage. In his secret heart, Young Dick never forgot that
he lived in a palace of many servants and that his father was a man of
power and honor. On the other hand, Young Dick learned two-legged,
two-fisted democracy. He learned it when Mona Sanguinetti spelled him
down in class. He learned it when Berney Miller out-dodged and out-ran
him when running across in Black Man.

And when Tim Hagan, with straight left for the hundredth time to
bleeding nose and mangled mouth, and with ever reiterant right hook to
stomach, had him dazed and reeling, the breath whistling and sobbing
through his lacerated lips--was no time for succor from palaces and
bank accounts. On his two legs, with his two fists, it was either he or
Tim. And it was right there, in sweat and blood and iron of soul, that
Young Dick learned how not to lose a losing fight. It had been uphill
from the first blow, but he stuck it out until in the end it was agreed
that neither could best the other, although this agreement was not
reached until they had first lain on the ground in nausea and
exhaustion and with streaming eyes wept their rage and defiance at each
other. After that, they became chums and between them ruled the
schoolyard.

Lucky Richard died the same month Young Dick emerged from grammar
school. Young Dick was thirteen years old, with twenty million dollars,
and without a relative in the world to trouble him. He was the master
of a palace of servants, a steam yacht, stables, and, as well, of a
summer palace down the Peninsula in the nabob colony at Menlo. One
thing, only, was he burdened with: guardians.

On a summer afternoon, in the big library, he attended the first
session of his board of guardians. There were three of them, all
elderly, and successful, all legal, all business comrades of his
father. Dick's impression, as they explained things to him, was that,
although they meant well, he had no contacts with them. In his
judgment, their boyhood was too far behind them. Besides that, it was
patent that him, the particular boy they were so much concerned with,
they did not understand at all. Furthermore, in his own sure way he
decided that he was the one person in the world fitted to know what was
best for himself.

Mr. Crockett made a long speech, to which Dick listened with alert and
becoming attention, nodding his head whenever he was directly addressed
or appealed to. Messrs. Davidson and Slocum also had their say and were
treated with equal consideration. Among other things, Dick learned what
a sterling, upright man his father had been, and the program already
decided upon by the three gentlemen which would make him into a
sterling and upright man.

When they were quite done, Dick took it upon himself to say a few
things.

"I have thought it over," he announced, "and first of all I shall go
traveling."

"That will come afterward, my boy," Mr. Slocum explained soothingly.
"When--say--when you are ready to enter the university. At that time a
year abroad would be a very good thing... a very good thing indeed."

"Of course," Mr. Davidson volunteered quickly, having noted the annoyed
light in the lad's eyes and the unconscious firm-drawing and setting of
the lips, "of course, in the meantime you could do some traveling, a
limited amount of traveling, during your school vacations. I am sure my
fellow guardians will agree--under the proper management and
safeguarding, of course--that such bits of travel sandwiched between
your school-terms, would be advisable and beneficial."

"How much did you say I am worth?" Dick asked with apparent irrelevance.

"Twenty millions--at a most conservative estimate--that is about the
sum," Mr. Crockett answered promptly.

"Suppose I said right now that I wanted a hundred dollars!" Dick went
on.

"Why--er--ahem." Mr. Slocum looked about him for guidance.

"We would be compelled to ask what you wanted it for," answered Mr.
Crockett.

"And suppose," Dick said very slowly, looking Mr. Crockett squarely in
the eyes, "suppose I said that I was very sorry, but that I did not
care to say what I wanted it for?"

"Then you wouldn't get it," Mr. Crockett said so immediately that there
was a hint of testiness and snap in his manner.

Dick nodded slowly, as if letting the information sink in.

"But, of course, my boy," Mr. Slocum took up hastily, "you understand
you are too young to handle money yet. We must decide that for you."

"You mean I can't touch a penny without your permission?"

"Not a penny," Mr. Crockett snapped.

Dick nodded his head thoughtfully and murmured, "Oh, I see."

"Of course, and quite naturally, it would only be fair, you know, you
will have a small allowance for your personal spending," Mr. Davidson
said. "Say, a dollar, or, perhaps, two dollars, a week. As you grow
older this allowance will be increased. And by the time you are
twenty-one, doubtlessly you will be fully qualified--with advice, of
course--to handle your own affairs."

"And until I am twenty-one my twenty million wouldn't buy me a hundred
dollars to do as I please with?" Dick queried very subduedly.

Mr. Davidson started to corroborate in soothing phrases, but was waved
to silence by Dick, who continued:

"As I understand it, whatever money I handle will be by agreement
between the four of us?"

The Board of Guardians nodded.

"That is, whatever we agree, goes?"

Again the Board of Guardians nodded.

"Well, I'd like to have a hundred right now," Dick announced.

"What for?" Mr. Crockett demanded.

"I don't mind telling you," was the lad's steady answer. "To go
traveling."

"You'll go to bed at eight:thirty this evening," Mr. Crockett retorted.
"And you don't get any hundred. The lady we spoke to you about will be
here before six. She is to have, as we explained, daily and hourly
charge of you. At six-thirty, as usual, you will dine, and she will
dine with you and see you to bed. As we told you, she will have to
serve the place of a mother to you--see that your ears are clean, your
neck washed--"

"And that I get my Saturday night bath," Dick amplified meekly for him.

"Precisely."

"How much are you--am I--paying the lady for her services?" Dick
questioned in the disconcerting, tangential way that was already
habitual to him, as his school companions and teachers had learned to
their cost.

Mr. Crockett for the first time cleared his throat for pause.

"I'm paying her, ain't I?" Dick prodded. "Out of the twenty million,
you know."

"The spit of his father," said Mr. Slocum in an aside.

"Mrs. Summerstone, the lady as you elect to call her, receives one
hundred and fifty a month, eighteen hundred a year in round sum," said
Mr. Crockett.

"It's a waste of perfectly good money," Dick sighed. "And board and
lodging thrown in!"

He stood up--not the born aristocrat of the generations, but the reared
aristocrat of thirteen years in the Nob Hill palace. He stood up with
such a manner that his Board of Guardians left their leather chairs to
stand up with him. But he stood up as no Lord Fauntleroy ever stood up;
for he was a mixer. He had knowledge that human life was many-faced and
many-placed. Not for nothing had he been spelled down by Mona
Sanguinetti. Not for nothing had he fought Tim Hagan to a standstill
and, co-equal, ruled the schoolyard roost with him.

He was birthed of the wild gold-adventure of Forty-nine. He was a
reared aristocrat and a grammar-school-trained democrat. He knew, in
his precocious immature way, the differentiations between caste and
mass; and, behind it all, he was possessed of a will of his own and of
a quiet surety of self that was incomprehensible to the three elderly
gentlemen who had been given charge of his and his destiny and who had
pledged themselves to increase his twenty millions and make a man of
him in their own composite image.

"Thank you for your kindness," Young Dick said generally to the three.
"I guess we'll get along all right. Of course, that twenty millions is
mine, and of course you've got to take care of it for me, seeing I know
nothing of business--"

"And we'll increase it for you, my boy, we'll increase it for you in
safe, conservative ways," Mr. Slocum assured him.

"No speculation," Young Dick warned. "Dad's just been lucky--I've heard
him say that times have changed and a fellow can't take the chances
everybody used to take."

From which, and from much which has already passed, it might
erroneously be inferred that Young Dick was a mean and money-grubbing
soul. On the contrary, he was at that instant entertaining secret
thoughts and plans so utterly regardless and disdainful of his twenty
millions as to place him on a par with a drunken sailor sowing the
beach with a three years' pay-day.

"I am only a boy," Young Dick went on. "But you don't know me very well
yet. We'll get better acquainted by and by, and, again thanking you...."

He paused, bowed briefly and grandly as lords in Nob Hill palaces early
learn to bow, and, by the quality of the pause, signified that the
audience was over. Nor did the impact of dismissal miss his guardians.
They, who had been co-lords with his father, withdrew confused and
perplexed. Messrs. Davidson and Slocum were on the point of resolving
their perplexity into wrath, as they went down the great stone stairway
to the waiting carriage, but Mr. Crockett, the testy and snappish,
muttered ecstatically: "The son of a gun! The little son of a gun!"

The carriage carried them down to the old Pacific Union Club, where,
for another hour, they gravely discussed the future of Young Dick
Forrest and pledged themselves anew to the faith reposed in them by
Lucky Richard Forrest. And down the hill, on foot, where grass grew on
the paved streets too steep for horse-traffic, Young Dick hurried. As
the height of land was left behind, almost immediately the palaces and
spacious grounds of the nabobs gave way to the mean streets and wooden
warrens of the working people. The San Francisco of 1887 as
incontinently intermingled its slums and mansions as did the old cities
of Europe. Nob Hill arose, like any medieval castle, from the mess and
ruck of common life that denned and laired at its base.

Young Dick came to pause alongside a corner grocery, the second story
of which was rented to Timothy Hagan Senior, who, by virtue of being a
policeman with a wage of a hundred dollars a month, rented this high
place to dwell above his fellows who supported families on no more than
forty and fifty dollars a month.

In vain Young Dick whistled up through the unscreened, open windows.
Tim Hagan Junior was not at home. But Young Dick wasted little wind in
the whistling. He was debating on possible adjacent places where Tim
Hagan might be, when Tim himself appeared around the corner, bearing a
lidless lard-can that foamed with steam beer. He grunted greeting, and
Young Dick grunted with equal roughness, just as if, a brief space
before, he had not, in most lordly fashion, terminated an audience with
three of the richest merchant-kings of an imperial city. Nor did his
possession of twenty increasing millions hint the slightest betrayal in
his voice or mitigate in the slightest the gruffness of his grunt.

"Ain't seen yeh since yer old man died," Tim Hagan commented.

"Well, you're seein' me now, ain't you?" was Young Dick's retort. "Say,
Tim, I come to see you on business."

"Wait till I rush the beer to the old man," said Tim, inspecting the
state of the foam in the lard-can with an experienced eye. "He'll roar
his head off if it comes in flat."

"Oh, you can shake it up," Young Dick assured him. "Only want to see
you a minute. I'm hitting the road to-night. Want to come along?"

Tim's small, blue Irish eyes flashed with interest.

"Where to?" he queried.

"Don't know. Want to come? If you do, we can talk it over after we
start? You know the ropes. What d'ye say?"

"The old man'll beat the stuffin' outa me," Tim demurred.

"He's done that before, an' you don't seem to be much missing," Young
Dick callously rejoined. "Say the word, an' we'll meet at the Ferry
Building at nine to-night. What d'ye say? I'll be there."

"Supposin' I don't show up?" Tim asked.

"I'll be on my way just the same." Young Dick turned as if to depart,
paused casually, and said over his shoulder, "Better come along."

Tim shook up the beer as he answered with equal casualness, "Aw right.
I'll be there."

After parting from Tim Hagan Young Dick spent a busy hour or so looking
up one, Marcovich, a Slavonian schoolmate whose father ran a chop-house
in which was reputed to be served the finest twenty-cent meal in the
city. Young Marcovich owed Young Dick two dollars, and Young Dick
accepted the payment of a dollar and forty cents as full quittance of
the debt.

Also, with shyness and perturbation, Young Dick wandered down
Montgomery Street and vacillated among the many pawnshops that graced
that thoroughfare. At last, diving desperately into one, he managed to
exchange for eight dollars and a ticket his gold watch that he knew was
worth fifty at the very least.

Dinner in the Nob Hill palace was served at six-thirty. He arrived at
six-forty-five and encountered Mrs. Summerstone. She was a stout,
elderly, decayed gentlewoman, a daughter of the great Porter-Rickington
family that had shaken the entire Pacific Coast with its financial
crash in the middle seventies. Despite her stoutness, she suffered from
what she called shattered nerves.

"This will never, never do, Richard," she censured. "Here is dinner
waiting fifteen minutes already, and you have not yet washed your face
and hands."

"I am sorry, Mrs. Summerstone," Young Dick apologized. "I won't keep
you waiting ever again. And I won't bother you much ever."

At dinner, in state, the two of them alone in the great dining room,
Young Dick strove to make things easy for the lady, whom, despite his
knowledge that she was on his pay-roll, he felt toward as a host must
feel toward a guest.

"You'll be very comfortable here," he promised, "once you are settled
down. It's a good old house, and most of the servants have been here
for years."

"But, Richard," she smiled seriously to him; "it is not the servants
who will determine my happiness here. It is you."

"I'll do my best," he said graciously. "Better than that. I'm sorry I
came in late for dinner. In years and years you'll never see me late
again. I won't bother you at all. You'll see. It will be just as though
I wasn't in the house."

When he bade her good night, on his way to bed, he added, as a last
thought:

"I'll warn you of one thing: Ah Sing. He's the cook. He's been in our
house for years and years--oh, I don't know, maybe twenty-five or
thirty years he's cooked for father, from long before this house was
built or I was born. He's privileged. He's so used to having his own
way that you'll have to handle him with gloves. But once he likes you
he'll work his fool head off to please you. He likes me that way. You
get him to like you, and you'll have the time of your life here. And,
honest, I won't give you any trouble at all. It'll be a regular snap,
just as if I wasn't here at all."




CHAPTER V

 AT nine in the evening, sharp to the second, clad in his oldest
clothes, Young Dick met Tim Hagan at the Ferry Building.

"No use headin' north," said Tim. "Winter'll come on up that way and
make the sleepin' crimpy. D'ye want to go East--that means Nevada and
the deserts."

"Any other way?" queried Young Dick. "What's the matter with south? We
can head for Los Angeles, an' Arizona, an' New Mexico--oh, an' Texas."

"How much money you got?" Tim demanded.

"What for?" Young Dick countered.

"We gotta get out quick, an' payin' our way at the start is quickest.
Me--I'm all hunkydory; but you ain't. The folks that's lookin' after
you'll raise a roar. They'll have more detectives out than you can
shake at stick at. We gotta dodge 'em, that's what."

"Then we will dodge," said Young Dick. "We'll make short jumps this way
and that for a couple of days, layin' low most of the time, paying our
way, until we can get to Tracy. Then we'll quit payin' an' beat her
south."

All of which program was carefully carried out. They eventually went
through Tracy as pay passengers, six hours after the local deputy
sheriff had given up his task of searching the trains. With an excess
of precaution Young Dick paid beyond Tracy and as far as Modesto. After
that, under the teaching of Tim, he traveled without paying, riding
blind baggage, box cars, and cow-catchers. Young Dick bought the
newspapers, and frightened Tim by reading to him the lurid accounts of
the kidnapping of the young heir to the Forrest millions.

Back in San Francisco the Board of Guardians offered rewards that
totaled thirty thousand dollars for the recovery of their ward. And Tim
Hagan, reading the same while they lay in the grass by some water-tank,
branded forever the mind of Young Dick with the fact that honor beyond
price was a matter of neither place nor caste and might outcrop in the
palace on the height of land or in the dwelling over a grocery down on
the flat.

"Gee!" Tim said to the general landscape. "The old man wouldn't raise a
roar if I snitched on you for that thirty thousand. It makes me scared
to think of it."

And from the fact that Tim thus openly mentioned the matter, Young Dick
concluded that there was no possibility of the policeman's son
betraying him.

Not until six weeks afterward, in Arizona, did Young Dick bring up the
subject.

"You see, Tim," he said, "I've got slathers of money. It's growing all
the time, and I ain't spending a cent of it, not so as you can
notice... though that Mrs. Summerstone is getting a cold eighteen
hundred a year out of me, with board and carriages thrown in, while you
an' I are glad to get the leavings of firemen's pails in the
round-houses. Just the same, my money's growing. What's ten per cent,
on twenty dollars?"

Tim Hagan stared at the shimmering heat-waves of the desert and tried
to solve the problem.

"What's one-tenth of twenty million?" Young Dick demanded irritably.

"Huh!--two million, of course."

"Well, five per cent's half of ten per cent. What does twenty million
earn at five per cent, for one year?"

Tim hesitated.

"Half of it, half of two million!" Young Dick cried. "At that rate I'm
a million richer every year. Get that, and hang on to it, and listen to
me. When I'm good and willing to go back--but not for years an'
years--we'll fix it up, you and I. When I say the word, you'll write to
your father. He'll jump out to where we are waiting, pick me up, and
cart me back. Then he'll collect the thirty thousand reward from my
guardians, quit the police force, and most likely start a saloon."

"Thirty thousand's a hell of a lot of money," was Tim's nonchalant way
of expressing his gratitude.

"Not to me," Young Dick minimized his generosity. "Thirty thousand goes
into a million thirty-three times, and a million's only a year's
turnover of my money."

But Tim Hagan never lived to see his father a saloon keeper. Two days
later, on a trestle, the lads were fired out of an empty box-car by a
brake-man who should have known better. The trestle spanned a dry
ravine. Young Dick looked down at the rocks seventy feet below and
demurred.

"There's room on the trestle," he said; "but what if the train starts
up?"

"It ain't goin' to start--beat it while you got time," the brakeman
insisted. "The engine's takin' water at the other side. She always
takes it here."

But for once the engine did not take water. The evidence at the inquest
developed that the engineer had found no water in the tank and started
on. Scarcely had the two boys dropped from the side-door of the
box-car, and before they had made a score of steps along the narrow way
between the train and the abyss, than the train began to move. Young
Dick, quick and sure in all his perceptions and adjustments, dropped on
the instant to hands and knees on the trestle. This gave him better
holding and more space, because he crouched beneath the overhang of the
box-cars. Tim, not so quick in perceiving and adjusting, also overcome
with Celtic rage at the brakeman, instead of dropping to hands and
knees, remained upright to flare his opinion of the brakeman, to the
brakeman, in lurid and ancestral terms.

"Get down!--drop!" Young Dick shouted.

But the opportunity had passed. On a down grade, the engine picked up
the train rapidly. Facing the moving cars, with empty air at his back
and the depth beneath, Tim tried to drop on hands and knees. But the
first twist of his shoulders brought him in contact with the car and
nearly out-balanced him. By a miracle he recovered equilibrium. But he
stood upright. The train was moving faster and faster. It was
impossible to get down.

Young Dick, kneeling and holding, watched. The train gathered way. The
cars moved more swiftly. Tim, with a cool head, his back to the fall,
his face to the passing cars, his arms by his sides, with nowhere save
under his feet a holding point, balanced and swayed. The faster the
train moved, the wider he swayed, until, exerting his will, he
controlled himself and ceased from swaying.

And all would have been well with him, had it not been for one car.
Young Dick knew it, and saw it coming. It was a "palace horse-car,"
projecting six inches wider than any car on the train. He saw Tim see
it coming. He saw Tim steel himself to meet the abrupt subtraction of
half a foot from the narrow space wherein he balanced. He saw Tim
slowly and deliberately sway out, sway out to the extremest limit, and
yet not sway out far enough. The thing was physically inevitable. An
inch more, and Tim would have escaped the car. An inch more and he
would have fallen without impact from the car. It caught him, in that
margin of an inch, and hurled him backward and side-twisting. Twice he
whirled sidewise, and two and a half times he turned over, ere he
struck on his head and neck on the rocks.

He never moved after he struck. The seventy-foot fall broke his neck
and crushed his skull. And right there Young Dick learned death--not
the ordered, decent death of civilization, wherein doctors and nurses
and hypodermics ease the stricken one into the darkness, and ceremony
and function and flowers and undertaking institutions conspire to give
a happy leave-taking and send-off to the departing shade, but sudden
death, primitive death, ugly and ungarnished, like the death of a steer
in the shambles or a fat swine stuck in the jugular.

And right there Young Dick learned more--the mischance of life and
fate; the universe hostile to man; the need to perceive and to act, to
see and know, to be sure and quick, to adjust instantly to all instant
shiftage of the balance of forces that bear upon the living. And right
there, beside the strangely crumpled and shrunken remnant of what had
been his comrade the moment before, Young Dick learned that illusion
must be discounted, and that reality never lied.

In New Mexico, Young Dick drifted into the Jingle-bob Ranch, north of
Roswell, in the Pecos Valley. He was not yet fourteen, and he was
accepted as the mascot of the ranch and made into a "sure-enough"
cowboy by cowboys who, on legal papers, legally signed names such as
Wild Horse, Willie Buck, Boomer Deacon, and High Pockets.

Here, during a stay of six months, Young Dick, soft of frame and
unbreakable, achieved a knowledge of horses and horsemanship, and of
men in the rough and raw, that became a life asset. More he learned.
There was John Chisum, owner of the Jingle-bob, the Bosque Grande, and
of other cattle ranches as far away as the Black River and beyond. John
Chisum was a cattle king who had foreseen the coming of the farmer and
adjusted from the open range to barbed wire, and who, in order to do
so, had purchased every forty acres carrying water and got for nothing
the use of the millions of acres of adjacent range that was worthless
without the water he controlled. And in the talk by the camp-fire and
chuck wagon, among forty-dollar-a-month cowboys who had not foreseen
what John Chisum foresaw, Young Dick learned precisely why and how John
Chisum had become a cattle king while a thousand of his contemporaries
worked for him on wages.

But Young Dick was no cool-head. His blood was hot. He had passion, and
fire, and male pride. Ready to cry from twenty hours in the saddle, he
learned to ignore the thousand aching creaks in his body and with the
stoic brag of silence to withstain from his blankets until the
hard-bitten punchers led the way. By the same token he straddled the
horse that was apportioned him, insisted on riding night-herd, and knew
no hint of uncertainty when it came to him to turn the flank of a
stampede with a flying slicker. He could take a chance. It was his joy
to take a chance. But at such times he never failed of due respect for
reality. He was well aware that men were soft-shelled and cracked
easily on hard rocks or under pounding hoofs. And when he rejected a
mount that tangled its legs in quick action and stumbled, it was not
because he feared to be cracked, but because, when he took a chance on
being cracked, he wanted, as he told John Chisum himself, "an even
break for his money."

It was while at the Jingle-bob, but mailed by a cattleman from Chicago,
that Young Dick wrote a letter to his guardians. Even then, so careful
was he, that the envelope was addressed to Ah Sing. Though unburdened
by his twenty millions, Young Dick never forgot them, and, fearing his
estate might be distributed among remote relatives who might possibly
inhabit New England, he warned his guardians that he was still alive
and that he would return home in several years. Also, he ordered them
to keep Mrs. Summerstone on at her regular salary.

But Young Dick's feet itched. Half a year, he felt, was really more
than he should have spent at the Jingle-bob. As a boy hobo, or
road-kid, he drifted on across the United States, getting acquainted
with its peace officers, police judges, vagrancy laws, and jails. And
he learned vagrants themselves at first hand, and floating laborers and
petty criminals. Among other things, he got acquainted with farms and
farmers, and, in New York State, once picked berries for a week with a
Dutch farmer who was experimenting with one of the first silos erected
in the United States. Nothing of what he learned came to him in the
spirit of research. He had merely the human boy's curiosity about all
things, and he gained merely a huge mass of data concerning human
nature and social conditions that was to stand him in good stead in
later years, when, with the aid of the books, he digested and
classified it.

His adventures did not harm him. Even when he consorted with jail-birds
in jungle camps, and listened to their codes of conduct and
measurements of life, he was not affected. He was a traveler, and they
were alien breeds. Secure in the knowledge of his twenty millions,
there was neither need nor temptation for him to steal or rob. All
things and all places interested him, but he never found a place nor a
situation that could hold him. He wanted to see, to see more and more,
and to go on seeing.

At the end of three years, nearly sixteen, hard of body, weighing a
hundred and thirty pounds, he judged it time to go home and open the
books. So he took his first long voyage, signing on as boy on a
windjammer bound around the Horn from the Delaware Breakwater to San
Francisco. It was a hard voyage, of one hundred and eighty days, but at
the end he weighed ten pounds the more for having made it.

Mrs. Summerstone screamed when he walked in on her, and Ah Sing had to
be called from the kitchen to identify him. Mrs. Summerstone screamed a
second time. It was when she shook hands with him and lacerated her
tender skin in the fisty grip of his rope-calloused palms.

He was shy, almost embarrassed, as he greeted his guardians at the
hastily summoned meeting. But this did not prevent him from talking
straight to the point.

"It's this way," he said. "I am not a fool. I know what I want, and I
want what I want. I am alone in the world, outside of good friends like
you, of course, and I have my own ideas of the world and what I want to
do in it. I didn't come home because of a sense of duty to anybody
here. I came home because it was time, because of my sense of duty to
myself. I'm all the better from my three years of wandering about, and
now it's up to me to go on with my education--my book education, I
mean."

"The Belmont Academy," Mr. Slocum suggested. "That will fit you for the
university--"

Dick shook his head decidedly.

"And take three years to do it. So would a high school. I intend to be
in the University of California inside one year. That means work. But
my mind's like acid. It'll bite into the books. I shall hire a coach,
or half a dozen of them, and go to it. And I'll hire my coaches
myself--hire and fire them. And that means money to handle."

"A hundred a month," Mr. Crockett suggested.

Dick shook his head.

"I've taken care of myself for three years without any of my money. I
guess. I can take care of myself along with some of my money here in
San Francisco. I don't care to handle my business affairs yet, but I do
want a bank account, a respectable-sized one. I want to spend it as I
see fit, for what I see fit."

The guardians looked their dismay at one another.

"It's ridiculous, impossible," Mr. Crockett began. "You are as
unreasonable as you were before you went away."

"It's my way, I guess," Dick sighed. "The other disagreement was over
my money. It was a hundred dollars I wanted then."

"Think of our position, Dick," Mr. Davidson urged. "As your guardians,
how would it be looked upon if we gave you, a lad of sixteen, a free
hand with money."

"What's the _Freda_ worth, right now?" Dick demanded irrelevantly.

"Can sell for twenty thousand any time," Mr. Crockett answered.

"Then sell her. She's too large for me, and she's worth less every
year. I want a thirty-footer that I can handle myself for knocking
around the Bay, and that won't cost a thousand. Sell the _Freda_ and
put the money to my account. Now what you three are afraid of is that
I'll misspend my money--taking to drinking, horse-racing, and running
around with chorus girls. Here's my proposition to make you easy on
that: let it be a drawing account for the four of us. The moment any of
you decide I am misspending, that moment you can draw out the total
balance. I may as well tell you, that just as a side line I'm going to
get a business college expert to come here and cram me with the
mechanical side of the business game."

Dick did not wait for their acquiescence, but went on as from a matter
definitely settled.

"How about the horses down at Menlo?--never mind, I'll look them over
and decide what to keep. Mrs. Summerstone will stay on here in charge
of the house, because I've got too much work mapped out for myself
already. I promise you you won't regret giving me a free hand with my
directly personal affairs. And now, if you want to hear about the last
three years, I'll spin the yarn for you."

 Dick Forrest had been right when he told his guardians that his mind
was acid and would bite into the books. Never was there such an
education, and he directed it himself--but not without advice. He had
learned the trick of hiring brains from his father and from John Chisum
of the Jingle-bob. He had learned to sit silent and to think while cow
men talked long about the campfire and the chuck wagon. And, by virtue
of name and place, he sought and obtained interviews with professors
and college presidents and practical men of affairs; and he listened to
their talk through many hours, scarcely speaking, rarely asking a
question, merely listening to the best they had to offer, content to
receive from several such hours one idea, one fact, that would help him
to decide what sort of an education he would go in for and how.

Then came the engaging of coaches. Never was there such an engaging and
discharging, such a hiring and firing. He was not frugal in the matter.
For one that he retained a month, or three months, he discharged a
dozen on the first day, or the first week. And invariably he paid such
dischargees a full month although their attempts to teach him might not
have consumed an hour. He did such things fairly and grandly, because
he could afford to be fair and grand.

He, who had eaten the leavings from firemen's pails in round-houses and
"scoffed" mulligan-stews at water-tanks, had learned thoroughly the
worth of money. He bought the best with the sure knowledge that it was
the cheapest. A year of high school physics and a year of high school
chemistry were necessary to enter the university. When he had crammed
his algebra and geometry, he sought out the heads of the physics and
chemistry departments in the University of California. Professor Carey
laughed at him... at the first.

"My dear boy," Professor Carey began.

Dick waited patiently till he was through. Then Dick began, and
concluded.

"I'm not a fool, Professor Carey. High school and academy students are
children. They don't know the world. They don't know what they want, or
why they want what is ladled out to them. I know the world. I know what
I want and why I want it. They do physics for an hour, twice a week,
for two terms, which, with two vacations, occupy one year. You are the
top teacher on the Pacific Coast in physics. The college year is just
ending. In the first week of your vacation, giving every minute of your
time to me, I can get the year's physics. What is that week worth to
you?"

"You couldn't buy it for a thousand dollars," Professor Carey rejoined,
thinking he had settled the matter.

"I know what your salary is--" Dick began.

"What is it?" Professor Carey demanded sharply.

"It's not a thousand a week," Dick retorted as sharply. "It's not five
hundred a week, nor two-fifty a week--" He held up his hand to stall
off interruption. "You've just told me I couldn't buy a week of your
time for a thousand dollars. I'm not going to. But I am going to buy
that week for two thousand. Heavens!--I've only got so many years to
live--"

"And you can buy years?" Professor Carey queried slyly.

"Sure. That's why I'm here. I buy three years in one, and the week from
you is part of the deal."

"But I have not accepted," Professor Carey laughed.

"If the sum is not sufficient," Dick said stiffly, "why name the sum
you consider fair."

And Professor Carey surrendered. So did Professor Barsdale, head of the
department of chemistry.

Already had Dick taken his coaches in mathematics duck hunting for
weeks in the sloughs of the Sacramento and the San Joaquin. After his
bout with physics and chemistry he took his two coaches in literature
and history into the Curry County hunting region of southwestern
Oregon. He had learned the trick from his father, and he worked, and
played, lived in the open air, and did three conventional years of
adolescent education in one year without straining himself. He fished,
hunted, swam, exercised, and equipped himself for the university at the
same time. And he made no mistake. He knew that he did it because his
father's twenty millions had invested him with mastery. Money was a
tool. He did not over-rate it, nor under-rate it. He used it to buy
what he wanted.

"The weirdest form of dissipation I ever heard," said Mr. Crockett,
holding up Dick's account for the year. "Sixteen thousand for
education, all itemized, including railroad fares, porters' tips, and
shot-gun cartridges for his teachers."

"He passed the examinations just the same," quoth Mr. Slocum.

"And in a year," growled Mr. Davidson. "My daughter's boy entered
Belmont at the same time, and, if he's lucky, it will be two years yet
before he enters the university."

"Well, all I've got to say," proclaimed Mr. Crockett, "is that from now
on what that boy says in the matter of spending his money goes."

"And now I'll have a snap," Dick told his guardians. "Here I am, neck
and neck again, and years ahead of them in knowledge of the world. Why,
I know things, good and bad, big and little, about men and women and
life that sometimes I almost doubt myself that they're true. But I know
them.

"From now on, I'm not going to rush. I've caught up, and I'm going
through regular. All I have to do is to keep the speed of the classes,
and I'll be graduated when I'm twenty-one. From now on I'll need less
money for education--no more coaches, you know--and more money for a
good time."

Mr. Davidson was suspicious.

"What do you mean by a good time?"

"Oh, I'm going in for the frats, for football, hold my own, you
know--and I'm interested in gasoline engines. I'm going to build the
first ocean-going gasoline yacht in the world--"

"You'll blow yourself up," Mr. Crockett demurred. "It's a fool notion
all these cranks are rushing into over gasoline."

"I'll make myself safe," Dick answered, "and that means experimenting,
and it means money, so keep me a good drawing account--same old
way--all four of us can draw."




CHAPTER VI



Dick Forrest proved himself no prodigy at the university, save that he
cut more lectures the first year than any other student. The reason for
this was that he did not need the lectures he cut, and he knew it. His
coaches, while preparing him for the entrance examinations, had carried
him nearly through the first college year. Incidentally, he made the
Freshman team, a very scrub team, that was beaten by every high school
and academy it played against.

But Dick did put in work that nobody saw. His collateral reading was
wide and deep, and when he went on his first summer cruise in the
ocean-going gasoline yacht he had built no gay young crowd accompanied
him. Instead, his guests, with their families, were professors of
literature, history, jurisprudence, and philosophy. It was long
remembered in the university as the "high-brow" cruise. The professors,
on their return, reported a most enjoyable time. Dick returned with a
greater comprehension of the general fields of the particular
professors than he could have gained in years at their class-lectures.
And time thus gained, enabled him to continue to cut lectures and to
devote more time to laboratory work.

Nor did he miss having his good college time. College widows made love
to him, and college girls loved him, and he was indefatigable in his
dancing. He never cut a smoker, a beer bust, or a rush, and he toured
the Pacific Coast with the Banjo and Mandolin Club.

And yet he was no prodigy. He was brilliant at nothing. Half a dozen of
his fellows could out-banjo and out-mandolin him. A dozen fellows were
adjudged better dancers than he. In football, and he gained the Varsity
in his Sophomore year, he was considered a solid and dependable player,
and that was all. It seemed never his luck to take the ball and go down
the length of the field while the Blue and Gold host tore itself and
the grandstand to pieces. But it was at the end of heart-breaking,
grueling slog in mud and rain, the score tied, the second half imminent
to its close, Stanford on the five-yard line, Berkeley's ball, with two
downs and three yards to gain--it was then that the Blue and Gold arose
and chanted its demand for Forrest to hit the center and hit it hard.

He never achieved super-excellence at anything. Big Charley Everson
drank him down at the beer busts. Harrison Jackson, at hammer-throwing,
always exceeded his best by twenty feet. Carruthers out-pointed him at
boxing. Anson Burge could always put his shoulders to the mat, two out
of three, but always only by the hardest work. In English composition a
fifth of his class excelled him. Edlin, the Russian Jew, out-debated
him on the contention that property was robbery. Schultz and Debret
left him with the class behind in higher mathematics; and Otsuki, the
Japanese, was beyond all comparison with him in chemistry.

But if Dick Forrest did not excel at anything, he failed in nothing. He
displayed no superlative strength, he betrayed no weakness nor
deficiency. As he told his guardians, who, by his unrelenting good
conduct had been led into dreaming some great career for him; as he
told them, when they asked what he wanted to become:

"Nothing. Just all around. You see, I don't have to be a specialist. My
father arranged that for me when he left me his money. Besides, I
couldn't be a specialist if I wanted to. It isn't me."

And thus so well-keyed was he, that he expressed clearly his key. He
had no flare for anything. He was that rare individual, normal,
average, balanced, all-around.

When Mr. Davidson, in the presence of his fellow guardians, stated his
pleasure in that Dick had shown no wildness since he had settled down,
Dick replied:

"Oh, I can hold myself when I want to."

"Yes," said Mr. Slocum gravely. "It's the finest thing in the world
that you sowed your wild oats early and learned control."

Dick looked at him curiously.

"Why, that boyish adventure doesn't count," he said. "That wasn't
wildness. I haven't gone wild yet. But watch me when I start. Do you
know Kipling's 'Song of Diego Valdez'? Let me quote you a bit of it.
You see, Diego Valdez, like me, had good fortune. He rose so fast to be
High Admiral of Spain that he found no time to take the pleasure he had
merely tasted. He was lusty and husky, but he had no time, being too
busy rising. But always, he thought, he fooled himself with the
thought, that his lustiness and huskiness would last, and, after he
became High Admiral he could then have his pleasure. Always he
remembered:

  "'--comrades--
       Old playmates on new seas--
     When as we traded orpiment
       Among the savages--
     A thousand leagues to south'ard
       And thirty years removed--
     They knew not noble Valdez,
       But me they knew and loved.

  "'Then they that found good liquor
       They drank it not alone,
    And they that found fair plunder,
       They told us every one,
    Behind our chosen islands
       Or secret shoals between,
     When, walty from far voyage,
       We gathered to careen.

  "'There burned our breaming-fagots,
       All pale along the shore:
    There rose our worn pavilions--
       A sail above an oar:
    As flashed each yearning anchor
       Through mellow seas afire,
     So swift our careless captains
       Rowed each to his desire.

  "'Where lay our loosened harness?
       Where turned our naked feet?
    Whose tavern mid the palm-trees?
       What quenchings of what heat?
    Oh fountain in the desert!
       Oh cistern in the waste!
     Oh bread we ate in secret!
       Oh cup we spilled in haste!

  "'The youth new-taught of longing,
       The widow curbed and wan--
    The good wife proud at season,
       And the maid aware of man;
     All souls, unslaked, consuming,
       Defrauded in delays,
     Desire not more than quittance
       Than I those forfeit days!'

"Oh, get him, get him, you three oldsters, as I've got him! Get what he
saws next:

  "'I dreamed to wait my pleasure,
       Unchanged my spring would bide:
     Wherefore, to wait my pleasure,
       I put my spring aside,
    Till, first in face of Fortune,
       And last in mazed disdain,
     I made Diego Valdez
       High Admiral of Spain!'

"Listen to me, guardians!" Dick cried on, his face a flame of passion.
"Don't forget for one moment that I am anything but unslaked,
consuming. I am. I burn. But I hold myself. Don't think I am a dead one
because I am a darn nice, meritorious boy at college. I am young. I am
alive. I am all lusty and husky. But I make no mistake. I hold myself.
I don't start out now to blow up on the first lap. I am just getting
ready. I am going to have my time. I am not going to spill my cup in
haste. And in the end I am not going to lament as Diego Valdez did:

  "'There walks no wind 'neath heaven
       Nor wave that shall restore
     The old careening riot
       And the clamorous, crowded shore--
     The fountain in the desert,
       The cistern in the waste,
     The bread we ate in secret,
       The cup we spilled in haste.'

"Listen, guardians! Do you know what it is to hit your man, to hit him
in hot blood--square to the jaw--and drop him cold? I want that. And I
want to love, and kiss, and risk, and play the lusty, husky fool. I
want to take my chance. I want my careening riot, and I want it while I
am young, but not while I am too young. And I'm going to have it. And
in the meantime I play the game at college, I hold myself, I equip
myself, so that when I turn loose I am going to have the best chance of
my best. Oh, believe me, I do not always sleep well of nights."

"You mean?" queried Mr. Crockett.

"Sure. That's just what I mean. I haven't gone wild yet, but just watch
me when I start."

"And you will start when you graduate?"

The remarkable youngster shook his head.

"After I graduate I'm going to take at least a year of post-graduate
courses in the College of Agriculture. You see, I'm developing a
hobby--farming. I want to do something ... something constructive. My
father wasn't constructive to amount to anything. Neither were you
fellows. You struck a new land in pioneer days, and you picked up money
like a lot of sailors shaking out nuggets from the grass roots in a
virgin placer--"

"My lad, I've some little experience in Californian farming," Mr.
Crockett interrupted in a hurt way.

"Sure you have, but you weren't constructive. You were--well, facts are
facts--you were destructive. You were a bonanza farmer. What did you
do? You took forty thousand acres of the finest Sacramento Valley soil
and you grew wheat on it year after year. You never dreamed of
rotation. You burned your straw. You exhausted your humus. You plowed
four inches and put a plow-sole like a cement sidewalk just four inches
under the surface. You exhausted that film of four inches and now you
can't get your seed back.

"You've destroyed. That's what my father did. They all did it. Well,
I'm going to take my father's money and construct. I'm going to take
worked-out wheat-land that I can buy as at a fire-sale, rip out the
plow-sole, and make it produce more in the end than it did when you
fellows first farmed it."

It was at the end of his Junior year that Mr. Crockett again mentioned
Dick's threatened period of wildness.

"Soon as I'm done with cow college," was his answer. "Then I'm going to
buy, and stock, and start a ranch that'll be a ranch. And then I'll set
out after my careening riot."

"About how large a ranch will you start with?" Mr. Davidson asked.

"Maybe fifty thousand acres, maybe five hundred thousand. It all
depends. I'm going to play unearned increment to the limit. People
haven't begun to come to California yet. Without a tap of my hand or a
turn over, fifteen years from now land that I can buy for ten dollars
an acre will be worth fifty, and what I can buy for fifty will be worth
five hundred."

"A half million acres at ten dollars an acre means five million
dollars," Mr. Crockett warned gravely.

"And at fifty it means twenty-five million," Dick laughed.

But his guardians never believed in the wild oats pilgrimage he
threatened. He might waste his fortune on new-fangled farming, but to
go literally wild after such years of self-restraint was an unthinkable
thing.

Dick took his sheepskin with small honor. He was twenty-eighth in his
class, and he had not set the college world afire. His most notable
achievement had been his resistance and bafflement of many nice girls
and of the mothers of many nice girls. Next, after that, he had
signalized his Senior year by captaining the Varsity to its first
victory over Stanford in five years. It was in the day prior to
large-salaried football coaches, when individual play meant much; but
he hammered team-work and the sacrifice of the individual into his
team, so that on Thanksgiving Day, over a vastly more brilliant eleven,
the Blue and Gold was able to serpentine its triumph down Market Street
in San Francisco.

In his post-graduate year in cow college, Dick devoted himself to
laboratory work and cut all lectures. In fact, he hired his own
lecturers, and spent a sizable fortune on them in mere traveling
expenses over California. Jacques Ribot, esteemed one of the greatest
world authorities on agricultural chemistry, who had been seduced from
his two thousand a year in France by the six thousand offered by the
University of California, who had been seduced to Hawaii by the ten
thousand of the sugar planters, Dick Forrest seduced with fifteen
thousand and the more delectable temperate climate of California on a
five years' contract.

Messrs. Crockett, Slocum, and Davidson threw up their hands in horror
and knew that this was the wild career Dick Forrest had forecast.

But this was only one of Dick Forrest's similar dissipations. He stole
from the Federal Government, at a prodigal increase of salary, its star
specialist in livestock breeding, and by similar misconduct he robbed
the University of Nebraska of its greatest milch cow professor, and
broke the heart of the Dean of the College of Agriculture of the
University of California by appropriating Professor Nirdenhammer, the
wizard of farm management.

"Cheap at the price, cheap at the price," Dick explained to his
guardians. "Wouldn't you rather see me spend my money in buying
professors than in buying race horses and actresses? Besides, the
trouble with you fellows is that you don't know the game of buying
brains. I do. That's my specialty. I'm going to make money out of them,
and, better than that, I'm going to make a dozen blades of grass grow
where you fellows didn't leave room for half a blade in the soil you
gutted."

So it can be understood how his guardians could not believe in his
promise of wild career, of kissing and risking, and hitting men hot on
the jaw. "One year more," he warned, while he delved in agricultural
chemistry, soil analysis, farm management, and traveled California with
his corps of high-salaried experts. And his guardians could only
apprehend a swift and wide dispersal of the Forrest millions when Dick
attained his majority, took charge of the totality of his fortune, and
actually embarked on his agricultural folly.

The day he was twenty-one the purchase of his principality, that
extended west from the Sacramento River to the mountain tops, was
consummated.

"An incredible price," said Mr. Crockett.

"Incredibly cheap," said Dick. "You ought to see my soil reports. You
ought to see my water-reports. And you ought to hear me sing. Listen,
guardians, to a song that is a true song. I am the singer and the song."

Whereupon, in the queer quavering falsetto that is the sense of song to
the North American Indian, the Eskimo, and the Mongol, Dick sang:

  "Hu'-tim yo'-kim koi-o-di'!
    Wi'-hi yan'-ning koi-o-di'!
    Lo'-whi yan'-ning koi-o-di'!
    Yo-ho' Nai-ni', hal-u'-dom yo nai, yo-ho' nai-nim'!"

"The music is my own," he murmured apologetically, "the way I think it
ought to have sounded. You see, no man lives who ever heard it sung.
The Nishinam got it from the Maidu, who got it from the Konkau, who
made it. But the Nishinam and the Maidu and the Konkau are gone. Their
last rancheria is not. You plowed it under, Mr. Crockett, with you
bonanza gang-plowing, plow-soling farming. And I got the song from a
certain ethnological report, volume three, of the United States Pacific
Coast Geographical and Geological Survey. Red Cloud, who was formed out
of the sky, first sang this song to the stars and the mountain flowers
in the morning of the world. I shall now sing it for you in English."

And again, in Indian falsetto, ringing with triumph, vernal and
bursting, slapping his thighs and stamping his feet to the accent, Dick
sang:

  "The acorns come down from heaven!
    I plant the short acorns in the valley!
    I plant the long acorns in the valley!
    I sprout, I, the black-oak acorn, sprout, I sprout!"

Dick Forrest's name began to appear in the newspapers with appalling
frequency. He leaped to instant fame by being the first man in
California who paid ten thousand dollars for a single bull. His
livestock specialist, whom he had filched from the Federal Government,
in England outbid the Rothschilds' Shire farm for Hillcrest Chieftain,
quickly to be known as Forrest's Folly, paying for that kingly animal
no less than five thousand guineas.

"Let them laugh," Dick told his ex-guardians. "I am importing forty
Shire mares. I'll write off half his price the first twelvemonth. He
will be the sire and grandsire of many sons and grandsons for which the
Californians will fall over themselves to buy of me at from three to
five thousand dollars a clatter."

Dick Forrest was guilty of many similar follies in those first months
of his majority. But the most unthinkable folly of all was, after he
had sunk millions into his original folly, that he turned it over to
his experts personally to develop along the general broad lines laid
down by him, placed checks upon them that they might not go
catastrophically wrong, bought a ticket in a passenger brig to Tahiti,
and went away to run wild.

Occasionally his guardians heard from him. At one time he was owner and
master of a four-masted steel sailing ship that carried the English
flag and coals from Newcastle. They knew that much, because they had
been called upon for the purchase price, because they read Dick's name
in the papers as master when his ship rescued the passengers of the
ill-fated _Orion_, and because they collected the insurance when Dick's
ship was lost with most of all hands in the great Fiji hurricane. In
1896, he was in the Klondike; in 1897, he was in Kamchatka and
scurvy-stricken; and, next, he erupted with the American flag into the
Philippines. Once, although they could never learn how nor why, he was
owner and master of a crazy tramp steamer, long since rejected by
Lloyd's, which sailed under the aegis of Siam.

From time to time business correspondence compelled them to hear from
him from various purple ports of the purple seas. Once, they had to
bring the entire political pressure of the Pacific Coast to bear upon
Washington in order to get him out of a scrape in Russia, of which
affair not one line appeared in the daily press, but which affair was
secretly provocative of ticklish joy and delight in all the
chancellories of Europe.

Incidentally, they knew that he lay wounded in Mafeking; that he pulled
through a bout with yellow fever in Guayaquil; and that he stood trial
for brutality on the high seas in New York City. Thrice they read in
the press dispatches that he was dead: once, in battle, in Mexico; and
twice, executed, in Venezuela. After such false flutterings, his
guardians refused longer to be thrilled when he crossed the Yellow Sea
in a sampan, was "rumored" to have died of beri-beri, was captured from
the Russians by the Japanese at Mukden, and endured military
imprisonment in Japan.

The one thrill of which they were still capable, was when, true to
promise, thirty years of age, his wild oats sown, he returned to
California with a wife to whom, as he announced, he had been married
several years, and whom all his three guardians found they knew. Mr.
Slocum had dropped eight hundred thousand along with the totality of
her father's fortune in the final catastrophe at the Los Cocos mine in
Chihuahua when the United States demonetized silver. Mr. Davidson had
pulled a million out of the Last Stake along with her father when he
pulled eight millions from that sunken, man-resurrected, river bed in
Amador County. Mr. Crockett, a youth at the time, had "spooned" the
Merced bottom with her father in the late 'fifties, had stood up best
man with him at Stockton when he married her mother, and, at Grant's
Pass, had played poker with him and with the then Lieutenant U.S. Grant
when all the little the western world knew of that young lieutenant was
that he was a good Indian fighter but a poor poker player.

And Dick Forrest had married the daughter of Philip Desten! It was not
a case of wishing Dick luck. It was a case of garrulous insistence on
the fact that he did not know how lucky he was. His guardians forgave
him all his wildness. He had made good. At last he had performed a
purely rational act. Better; it was a stroke of genius. Paula Desten!
Philip Desten's daughter! The Desten blood! The Destens and the
Forrests! It was enough. The three aged comrades of Forrest and Desten
of the old Gold Days, of the two who had played and passed on, were
even severe with Dick. They warned him of the extreme value of his
treasure, of the sacred duty such wedlock imposed on him, of all the
traditions and virtues of the Desten and Forrest blood, until Dick
laughed and broke in with the disconcerting statement that they were
talking like a bunch of fanciers or eugenics cranks--which was
precisely what they were talking like, although they did not care to be
told so crassly.

At any rate, the simple fact that he had married a Desten made them nod
unqualified approbation when he showed them the plans and building
estimates of the Big House. Thanks to Paula Desten, for once they were
agreed that he was spending wisely and well. As for his farming, it was
incontestible that the Harvest Group was unfalteringly producing, and
he might be allowed his hobbies. Nevertheless, as Mr. Slocum put it:
"Twenty-five thousand dollars for a mere work-horse stallion is a
madness. Work-horses are work-horses; now had it been running stock...."




CHAPTER VII



While Dick Forrest scanned the pamphlet on hog cholera issued by the
State of Iowa, through his open windows, across the wide court, began
to come sounds of the awakening of the girl who laughed from the wooden
frame by his bed and who had left on the floor of his sleeping porch,
not so many hours before, the rosy, filmy, lacy, boudoir cap so
circumspectly rescued by Oh My.

Dick heard her voice, for she awoke, like a bird, with song. He heard
her trilling, in and out through open windows, all down the long wing
that was hers. And he heard her singing in the patio garden, where,
also, she desisted long enough to quarrel with her Airedale and scold
the collie pup unholily attracted by the red-orange, divers-finned, and
many-tailed Japanese goldfish in the fountain basin.

He was aware of pleasure that she was awake. It was a pleasure that
never staled. Always, up himself for hours, he had a sense that the Big
House was not really awake until he heard Paula's morning song across
the patio.

But having tasted the pleasure of knowing her to be awake, Dick, as
usual, forgot her in his own affairs. She went out of his consciousness
as he became absorbed again in the Iowa statistics on hog cholera.

"Good morning, Merry Gentleman," was the next he heard, always adorable
music in his ears; and Paula flowed in upon him, all softness of
morning kimono and stayless body, as her arm passed around his neck and
she perched, half in his arms, on one accommodating knee of his. And he
pressed her, and advertised his awareness of her existence and
nearness, although his eyes lingered a full half minute longer on the
totals of results of Professor Kenealy's hog inoculations on Simon
Jones' farm at Washington, Iowa.

"My!" she protested. "You are too fortunate. You are sated with riches.
Here is your Lady Boy, your 'little haughty moon,' and you haven't even
said, 'Good morning, Little Lady Boy, was your sleep sweet and gentle?'"

And Dick Forrest forsook the statistical columns of Professor Kenealy's
inoculations, pressed his wife closer, kissed her, but with insistent
right fore-finger maintained his place in the pages of the pamphlet.

Nevertheless, the very terms of her "reproof prevented him from asking
what he should have asked--the prosperity of her night since the
boudoir cap had been left upon his sleeping porch. He shut the pamphlet
on his right fore-finger, at the place he intended to resume, and added
his right arm to his left about her.

"Oh!" she cried. "Oh! Oh! Listen!"

From without came the flute-calls of quail. She quivered against him
with the joy she took in the mellow-sweet notes.

"The coveys are breaking up," he said.

"It means spring," Paula cried.

"And the sign that good weather has come."

"And love!"

"And nest-building and egg-laying," Dick laughed. "Never has the world
seemed more fecund than this morning. Lady Isleton is farrowed of
eleven. The angoras were brought down this morning for the kidding. You
should have seen them. And the wild canaries have been discussing
matrimony in the patio for hours. I think some free lover is trying to
break up their monogamic heaven with modern love-theories. It's a
wonder you slept through the discussion. Listen! There they go now. Is
that applause? Or is it a riot?"

Arose a thin twittering, like elfin pipings, with sharp pitches and
excited shrillnesses, to which Dick and Paula lent delighted ears,
till, suddenly, with the abruptness of the trump of doom, all the
microphonic chorus of the tiny golden lovers was swept away,
obliterated, in a Gargantuan blast of sound--no less wild, no less
musical, no less passionate with love, but immense, dominant,
compelling by very vastitude of volume.

The eager eyes of the man and woman sought instantly the channel past
open French windows and the screen of the sleeping porch to the road
through the lilacs, while they waited breathlessly for the great
stallion to appear who trumpeted his love-call before him. Again,
unseen, he trumpeted, and Dick said:

"I will sing you a song, my haughty moon. It is not my song. It is the
Mountain Lad's. It is what he nickers. Listen! He sings it again. This
is what he says: 'Hear me! I am Eros. I stamp upon the hills. I fill
the wide valleys. The mares hear me, and startle, in quiet pastures;
for they know me. The grass grows rich and richer, the land is filled
with fatness, and the sap is in the trees. It is the spring. The spring
is mine. I am monarch of my kingdom of the spring. The mares remember
my voice. They know me aforetime through their mothers before them.
Hear me! I am Eros. I stamp upon the hills, and the wide valleys are my
heralds, echoing the sound of my approach.'"

And Paula pressed closer to her husband, and was pressed, as her lips
touched his forehead, and as the pair of them, gazing at the empty road
among the lilacs, saw it filled with the eruptive vision of Mountain
Lad, majestic and mighty, the gnat-creature of a man upon his back
absurdly small; his eyes wild and desirous, with the blue sheen that
surfaces the eyes of stallions; his mouth, flecked with the froth and
fret of high spirit, now brushed to burnished knees of impatience, now
tossed skyward to utterance of that vast, compelling call that shook
the air.

Almost as an echo, from afar off, came a thin-sweet answering whinney.

"It is the Fotherington Princess," Paula breathed softly.

Again Mountain Lad trumpeted his call, and Dick chanted:

"Hear me! I am Eros! I stamp upon the hills!"

And almost, for a flash of an instant, circled soft and close in his
arms, Paula knew resentment of her husband's admiration for the
splendid beast. And the next instant resentment vanished, and, in
acknowledgment of due debt, she cried gaily:

"And now, Red Cloud! the Song of the Acorn!" Dick glanced half absently
to her from the pamphlet folded on his finger, and then, with equal
pitch of gaiety, sang:

   "The acorns come down from heaven!
    I plant the short acorns in the valley!
    I plant the long acorns in the valley!
    I sprout, I, the black-oak acorn, sprout, I sprout!"

She had impressed herself very close against him during his moment of
chanting, but, in the first moments that succeeded she felt the
restless movement of the hand that held the finger-marked hog-pamphlet
and caught the swift though involuntary flash of his eye to the clock
on his desk that marked 11:25. Again she tried to hold him, although,
with equal involuntariness, her attempt was made in mild terms of
resentment.

"You are a strange and wonderful Red Cloud," she said slowly.
"Sometimes almost am I convinced that you are utterly Red Cloud,
planting your acorns and singing your savage joy of the planting. And,
sometimes, almost you are to me the ultramodern man, the last word of
the two-legged, male human that finds Trojan adventures in sieges of
statistics, and, armed with test tubes and hypodermics, engages in
gladiatorial contests with weird microorganisms. Almost, at times, it
seems you should wear glasses and be bald-headed; almost, it seems...."

"That I have no right of vigor to possess an armful of girl," he
completed for her, drawing her still closer. "That I am a silly
scientific brute who doesn't merit his 'vain little breath of sweet
rose-colored dust.' Well, listen, I have a plan. In a few days...."

But his plan died in birth, for, at their backs, came a discreet cough
of warning, and, both heads turning as one they saw Bonbright, the
assistant secretary, with a sheaf of notes on yellow sheets in his hand.

"Four telegrams," he murmured apologetically. "Mr. Blake is confident
that two of them are very important. One of them concerns that Chile
shipment of bulls...."

And Paula, slowly drawing away from her husband and rising to her feet,
could feel him slipping from her toward his tables of statistics, bills
of lading, and secretaries, foremen, and managers.

"Oh, Paula," Dick called, as she was fading through the doorway; "I've
christened the last boy--he's to be known as 'Oh Ho.' How do you like
it?"

Her reply began with a hint of forlornness that vanished with her
smile, as she warned:

"You _will_ play ducks and drakes with the house-boys' names."

"I never do it with pedigreed stock," he assured her with a solemnity
belied by the challenging twinkle in his eyes.

"I didn't mean that," was her retort. "I meant that you were exhausting
the possibilities of the language. Before long you'll have to be
calling them Oh Bel, Oh Hell, and Oh Go to Hell. Your 'Oh' was a
mistake. You should have started with 'Red.' Then you could have had
Red Bull, Red Horse, Red Dog, Red Frog, Red Fern--and, and all the rest
of the reds."

She mingled her laughter with his, as she vanished, and, the next
moment, the telegram before him, he was immersed in the details of the
shipment, at two hundred and fifty dollars each, F. O. B., of three
hundred registered yearling bulls to the beef ranges of Chile. Even so,
vaguely, with vague pleasure, he heard Paula sing her way back across
the patio to her long wing of house; though he was unaware that her
voice was a trifle, just the merest trifle, subdued.




CHAPTER VIII



Five minutes after Paula had left him, punctual to the second, the four
telegrams disposed of, Dick was getting into a ranch motor car, along
with Thayer, the Idaho buyer, and Naismith, the special correspondent
for the _Breeders' Gazette_. Wardman, the sheep manager, joined them at
the corrals where several thousand young Shropshire rams had been
assembled for inspection.

There was little need for conversation. Thayer was distinctly
disappointed in this, for he felt that the purchase of ten carloads of
such expensive creatures was momentous enough to merit much
conversation.

"They speak for themselves," Dick had assured him, and turned aside to
give data to Naismith for his impending article on Shropshires in
California and the Northwest.

"I wouldn't advise you to bother to select them," Dick told Thayer ten
minutes later. "The average is all top. You could spend a week picking
your ten carloads and have no higher grade than if you had taken the
first to hand."

This cool assumption that the sale was already consummated so perturbed
Thayer, that, along with the sure knowledge that he had never seen so
high a quality of rams, he was nettled into changing his order to
twenty carloads.

As he told Naismith, after they had regained the Big House and as they
chalked their cues to finish the interrupted game:

"It's my first visit to Forrest's. He's a wizard. I've been buying in
the East and importing. But those Shropshires won my judgment. You
noticed I doubled my order. Those Idaho buyers will be wild for them. I
only had buying orders straight for six carloads, and contingent on my
judgment for two carloads more; but if every buyer doesn't double his
order, straight and contingent, when he sees them rams, and if there
isn't a stampede for what's left, I don't know sheep. They're the
goods. If they don't jump up the sheep game of Idaho ... well, then
Forrest's no breeder and I'm no buyer, that's all."

As the warning gong for lunch rang out--a huge bronze gong from Korea
that was never struck until it was first indubitably ascertained that
Paula was awake--Dick joined the young people at the goldfish fountain
in the big patio. Bert Wainwright, variously advised and commanded by
his sister, Rita, and by Paula and her sisters, Lute and Ernestine, was
striving with a dip-net to catch a particularly gorgeous flower of a
fish whose size and color and multiplicity of fins and tails had led
Paula to decide to segregate him for the special breeding tank in the
fountain of her own secret patio. Amid high excitement, and much
squealing and laughter, the deed was accomplished, the big fish
deposited in a can and carried away by the waiting Italian gardener.

"And what have you to say for yourself?" Ernestine challenged, as Dick
joined them.

"Nothing," he answered sadly. "The ranch is depleted. Three hundred
beautiful young bulls depart to-morrow for South America, and
Thayer--you met him last night--is taking twenty carloads of rams. All
I can say is that my congratulations are extended to Idaho and Chile."

"Plant more acorns," Paula laughed, her arms about her sisters, the
three of them smilingly expectant of an inevitable antic.

"Oh, Dick, sing your acorn song," Lute begged.

He shook his head solemnly.

"I've got a better one. It's purest orthodoxy. It's got Red Cloud and
his acorn song skinned to death. Listen! This is the song of the little
East-sider, on her first trip to the country under the auspices of her
Sunday School. She's quite young. Pay particular attention to her lisp."

And then Dick chanted, lisping:

  "The goldfish thwimmeth in the bowl,
    The robin thiths upon the tree;
    What maketh them thit so eathily?
    Who stuckth the fur upon their breasths?
      God! God! He done it!"

"Cribbed," was Ernestine's judgment, as the laughter died away.

"Sure," Dick agreed. "I got it from the _Rancher and Stockman_, that
got it from the _Swine Breeders' Journal_, that got it from the
_Western Advocate_, that got it from _Public Opinion_, that got it,
undoubtedly, from the little girl herself, or, rather from her Sunday
School teacher. For that matter I am convinced it was first printed in
_Our Dumb Animals_."

The bronze gong rang out its second call, and Paula, one arm around
Dick, the other around Rita, led the way into the house, while,
bringing up the rear, Bert Wainwright showed Lute Ernestine a new tango
step.

"One thing, Thayer," Dick said in an aside, after releasing himself
from the girls, as they jostled in confusion where they met Thayer and
Naismith at the head of the stairway leading down to the dining room.
"Before you leave us, cast your eyes over those Merinos. I really have
to brag about them, and American sheepmen will have to come to them. Of
course, started with imported stock, but I've made a California strain
that will make the French breeders sit up. See Wardman and take your
pick. Get Naismith to look them over with you. Stick half a dozen of
them in your train-load, with my compliments, and let your Idaho
sheepmen get a line on them."

They seated at a table, capable of indefinite extension, in a long, low
dining room that was a replica of the hacienda dining rooms of the
Mexican land-kings of old California. The floor was of large brown
tiles, the beamed ceiling and the walls were whitewashed, and the huge,
undecorated, cement fireplace was an achievement in massiveness and
simplicity. Greenery and blooms nodded from without the deep-embrasured
windows, and the room expressed the sense of cleanness, chastity, and
coolness.

On the walls, but not crowded, were a number of canvases--most
ambitious of all, in the setting of honor, all in sad grays, a twilight
Mexican scene by Xavier Martinez, of a peon, with a crooked-stick plow
and two bullocks, turning a melancholy furrow across the foreground of
a sad, illimitable, Mexican plain. There were brighter pictures, of
early Mexican-Californian life, a pastel of twilight eucalyptus with a
sunset-tipped mountain beyond, by Reimers, a moonlight by Peters, and a
Griffin stubble-field across which gleamed and smoldered California
summer hills of tawny brown and purple-misted, wooded canyons.

"Say," Thayer muttered in an undertone across to Naismith, while Dick
and the girls were in the thick of exclamatory and giggling banter,
"here's some stuff for that article of yours, if you touch upon the Big
House. I've seen the servants' dining room. Forty head sit down to it
every meal, including gardeners, chauffeurs, and outside help. It's a
boarding house in itself. Some head, some system, take it from me. That
Chiney boy, Oh Joy, is a wooz. He's housekeeper, or manager, of the
whole shebang, or whatever you want to call his job--and, say, it runs
that smooth you can't hear it."

"Forrest's the real wooz," Naismith nodded. "He's the brains that picks
brains. He could run an army, a campaign, a government, or even a
three-ring circus."

"Which last is some compliment," Thayer concurred heartily.

"Oh, Paula," Dick said across to his wife. "I just got word that Graham
arrives to-morrow morning. Better tell Oh Joy to put him in the
watch-tower. It's man-size quarters, and it's possible he may carry out
his threat and work on his book."

"Graham?--Graham?" Paula queried aloud of her memory. "Do I know him?"

"You met him once two years ago, in Santiago, at the Café Venus. He had
dinner with us."

"Oh, one of those naval officers?"

Dick shook his head.

"The civilian. Don't you remember that big blond fellow--you talked
music with him for half an hour while Captain Joyce talked our heads
off to prove that the United States should clean Mexico up and out with
the mailed fist."

"Oh, to be sure," Paula vaguely recollected. "He'd met you somewhere
before... South Africa, wasn't it? Or the Philippines?"

"That's the chap. South Africa, it was. Evan Graham. Next time we met
was on the _Times_ dispatch boat on the Yellow Sea. And we crossed
trails a dozen times after that, without meeting, until that night in
the Café Venus.

"Heavens--he left Bora-Bora, going east, two days before I dropped
anchor bound west on my way to Samoa. I came out of Apia, with letters
for him from the American consul, the day before he came in. We missed
each other by three days at Levuka--I was sailing the _Wild Duck_ then.
He pulled out of Suva as guest on a British cruiser. Sir Everard Im
Thurm, British High Commissioner of the South Seas, gave me more
letters for Graham. I missed him at Port Resolution and at Vila in the
New Hebrides. The cruiser was junketing, you see. I beat her in and out
of the Santa Cruz Group. It was the same thing in the Solomons. The
cruiser, after shelling the cannibal villages at Langa-Langa, steamed
out in the morning. I sailed in that afternoon. I never did deliver
those letters in person, and the next time I laid eyes on him was at
the Café Venus two years ago."

"But who about him, and what about him?" Paula queried. "And what's the
book?"

"Well, first of all, beginning at the end, he's broke--that is, for
him, he's broke. He's got an income of several thousand a year left,
but all that his father left him is gone. No; he didn't blow it. He got
in deep, and the 'silent panic' several years ago just about cleaned
him. But he doesn't whimper.

"He's good stuff, old American stock, a Yale man. The book--he expects
to make a bit on it--covers last year's trip across South America, west
coast to east coast. It was largely new ground. The Brazilian
government voluntarily voted him a honorarium of ten thousand dollars
for the information he brought out concerning unexplored portions of
Brazil. Oh, he's a man, all man. He delivers the goods. You know the
type--clean, big, strong, simple; been everywhere, seen everything,
knows most of a lot of things, straight, square, looks you in the
eyes--well, in short, a man's man."

Ernestine clapped her hands, flung a tantalizing, man-challenging,
man-conquering glance at Bert Wainwright, and exclaimed: "And he comes
tomorrow!"

Dick shook his head reprovingly.

"Oh, nothing in that direction, Ernestine. Just as nice girls as you
have tried to hook Evan Graham before now. And, between ourselves, I
couldn't blame them. But he's had good wind and fast legs, and they've
always failed to run him down or get him into a corner, where, dazed
and breathless, he's mechanically muttered 'Yes' to certain
interrogatories and come out of the trance to find himself, roped,
thrown, branded, and married. Forget him, Ernestine. Stick by golden
youth and let it drop its golden apples. Pick them up, and golden youth
with them, making a noise like stupid failure all the time you are
snaring swift-legged youth. But Graham's out of the running. He's old
like me--just about the same age--and, like me, he's run a lot of those
queer races. He knows how to make a get-away. He's been cut by barbed
wire, nose-twitched, neck-burnt, cinched to a fare-you-well, and he
remains subdued but uncatchable. He doesn't care for young things. In
fact, you may charge him with being wobbly, but I plead guilty, by
proxy, that he is merely old, hard bitten, and very wise."




CHAPTER IX



"Where's my Boy in Breeches?" Dick shouted, stamping with jingling
spurs through the Big House in quest of its Little Lady.

He came to the door that gave entrance to her long wing. It was a door
without a knob, a huge panel of wood in a wood-paneled wall. But Dick
shared the secret of the hidden spring with his wife, pressed the
spring, and the door swung wide.

"Where's my Boy in Breeches?" he called and stamped down the length of
her quarters.

A glance into the bathroom, with its sunken Roman bath and descending
marble steps, was fruitless, as were the glances he sent into Paula's
wardrobe room and dressing room. He passed the short, broad stairway
that led to her empty window-seat divan in what she called her Juliet
Tower, and thrilled at sight of an orderly disarray of filmy, pretty,
lacy woman's things that he knew she had spread out for her own
sensuous delight of contemplation. He fetched up for a moment at a
drawing easel, his reiterant cry checked on his lips, and threw a laugh
of recognition and appreciation at the sketch, just outlined, of an
awkward, big-boned, knobby, weanling colt caught in the act of madly
whinneying for its mother.

"Where's my Boy in Breeches?" he shouted before him, out to the
sleeping porch; and found only a demure, brow-troubled Chinese woman of
thirty, who smiled self-effacing embarrassment into his eyes.

This was Paula's maid, Oh Dear, so named by Dick, many years before,
because of a certain solicitous contraction of her delicate brows that
made her appear as if ever on the verge of saying, "Oh dear!" In fact,
Dick had taken her, as a child almost, for Paula's service, from a
fishing village on the Yellow Sea where her widow-mother earned as much
as four dollars in a prosperous year at making nets for the fishermen.
Oh Dear's first service for Paula had been aboard the three-topmast
schooner, _All Away_, at the same time that Oh Joy, cabin-boy, had
begun to demonstrate the efficiency that enabled him, through the
years, to rise to the majordomoship of the Big House.

"Where is your mistress, Oh Dear?" Dick asked.

Oh Dear shrank away in an agony of bashfulness.

Dick waited.

"She maybe with 'm young ladies--I don't know," Oh Dear stammered; and
Dick, in very mercy, swung away on his heel.

"Where's my Boy in Breeches?" he shouted, as he stamped out under the
porte cochère just as a ranch limousine swung around the curve among
the lilacs.

"I'll be hanged if I know," a tall, blond man in a light summer suit
responded from the car; and the next moment Dick Forrest and Evan
Graham were shaking hands.

Oh My and Oh Ho carried in the hand baggage, and Dick accompanied his
guest to the watch tower quarters.

"You'll have to get used to us, old man," Dick was explaining. "We run
the ranch like clockwork, and the servants are wonders; but we allow
ourselves all sorts of loosenesses. If you'd arrived two minutes later
there'd have been no one to welcome you but the Chinese boys. I was
just going for a ride, and Paula--Mrs. Forrest--has disappeared."

The two men were almost of a size, Graham topping his host by perhaps
an inch, but losing that inch in the comparative breadth of shoulders
and depth of chest. Graham was, if anything, a clearer blond than
Forrest, although both were equally gray of eye, equally clear in the
whites of the eyes, and equally and precisely similarly bronzed by sun
and weather-beat. Graham's features were in a slightly larger mold; his
eyes were a trifle longer, although this was lost again by a heavier
droop of lids. His nose hinted that it was a shade straighter as well
as larger than Dick's, and his lips were a shade thicker, a shade
redder, a shade more bowed with fulsome-ness.

Forrest's hair was light brown to chestnut, while Graham's carried a
whispering advertisement that it would have been almost golden in its
silk had it not been burned almost to sandiness by the sun. The cheeks
of both were high-boned, although the hollows under Forrest's
cheek-bones were more pronounced. Both noses were large-nostriled and
sensitive. And both mouths, while generously proportioned, carried the
impression of girlish sweetness and chastity along with the muscles
that could draw the lips to the firmness and harshness that would not
give the lie to the square, uncleft chins beneath.

But the inch more in height and the inch less in chest-girth gave Evan
Graham a grace of body and carriage that Dick Forrest did not possess.
In this particular of build, each served well as a foil to the other.
Graham was all light and delight, with a hint--but the slightest of
hints--of Prince Charming. Forrest's seemed a more efficient and
formidable organism, more dangerous to other life, stouter-gripped on
its own life.

Forrest threw a glance at his wrist watch as he talked, but in that
glance, without pause or fumble of focus, with swift certainty of
correlation, he read the dial.

"Eleven-thirty," he said. "Come along at once, Graham. We don't eat
till twelve-thirty. I am sending out a shipment of bulls, three hundred
of them, and I'm downright proud of them. You simply must see them.
Never mind your riding togs. Oh Ho--fetch a pair of my leggings. You,
Oh Joy, order Altadena saddled.--What saddle do you prefer, Graham?"

"Oh, anything, old man."

"English?--Australian?--McClellan?--Mexican?" Dick insisted.

"McClellan, if it's no trouble," Graham surrendered.

 They sat their horses by the side of the road and watched the last of
the herd beginning its long journey to Chili disappear around the bend.

"I see what you're doing--it's great," Graham said with sparkling eyes.
"I've fooled some myself with the critters, when I was a youngster,
down in the Argentine. If I'd had beef-blood like that to build on, I
mightn't have taken the cropper I did."

"But that was before alfalfa and artesian wells," Dick smoothed for
him. "The time wasn't ripe for the Shorthorn. Only scrubs could survive
the droughts. They were strong in staying powers but light on the
scales. And refrigerator steamships hadn't been invented. That's what
revolutionized the game down there."

"Besides, I was a mere youngster," Graham added. "Though that meant
nothing much. There was a young German tackled it at the same time I
did, with a tenth of my capital. He hung it out, lean years, dry years,
and all. He's rated in seven figures now."

They turned their horses back for the Big House. Dick flirted his wrist
to see his watch.

"Lots of time," he assured his guest. "I'm glad you saw those
yearlings. There was one reason why that young German stuck it out. He
had to. You had your father's money to fall back on, and, I imagine not
only that your feet itched, but that your chief weakness lay in that
you could afford to solace the itching."

 "Over there are the fish ponds," Dick said, indicating with a nod of
his head to the right an invisible area beyond the lilacs. "You'll have
plenty of opportunity to catch a mess of trout, or bass, or even
catfish. You see, I'm a miser. I love to make things work. There may be
a justification for the eight-hour labor day, but I make the work-day
of water just twenty-four hours' long. The ponds are in series,
according to the nature of the fish. But the water starts working up in
the mountains. It irrigates a score of mountain meadows before it makes
the plunge and is clarified to crystal clearness in the next few rugged
miles; and at the plunge from the highlands it generates half the power
and all the lighting used on the ranch. Then it sub-irrigates lower
levels, flows in here to the fish ponds, and runs out and irrigates
miles of alfalfa farther on. And, believe me, if by that time it hadn't
reached the flat of the Sacramento, I'd be pumping out the drainage for
more irrigation."

"Man, man," Graham laughed, "you could make a poem on the wonder of
water. I've met fire-worshipers, but you're the first real
water-worshiper I've ever encountered. And you're no desert-dweller,
either. You live in a land of water--pardon the bull--but, as I was
saying..."

Graham never completed his thought. From the right, not far away, came
the unmistakable ring of shod hoofs on concrete, followed by a mighty
splash and an outburst of women's cries and laughter. Quickly the cries
turned to alarm, accompanied by the sounds of a prodigious splashing
and floundering as of some huge, drowning beast. Dick bent his head and
leaped his horse through the lilacs, Graham, on Altadena, followed at
his heels. They emerged in a blaze of sunshine, on an open space among
the trees, and Graham came upon as unexpected a picture as he had ever
chanced upon in his life.

Tree-surrounded, the heart of the open space was a tank, four-sided of
concrete. The upper end of the tank, full width, was a broad spillway,
sheened with an inch of smooth-slipping water. The sides were
perpendicular. The lower end, roughly corrugated, sloped out gently to
solid footing. Here, in distress that was consternation, and in fear
that was panic, excitedly bobbed up and down a cowboy in bearskin
chaps, vacuously repeating the exclamation, "Oh God! Oh God!"--the
first division of it rising in inflection, the second division
inflected fallingly with despair. On the edge of the farther side,
facing him, in bathing suits, legs dangling toward the water, sat three
terrified nymphs.

And in the tank, the center of the picture, a great horse, bright bay
and wet and ruddy satin, vertical in the water, struck upward and
outward into the free air with huge fore-hoofs steel-gleaming in the
wet and sun, while on its back, slipping and clinging, was the white
form of what Graham took at first to be some glorious youth. Not until
the stallion, sinking, emerged again by means of the powerful beat of
his legs and hoofs, did Graham realize that it was a woman who rode
him--a woman as white as the white silken slip of a bathing suit that
molded to her form like a marble-carven veiling of drapery. As marble
was her back, save that the fine delicate muscles moved and crept under
the silken suit as she strove to keep her head above water. Her slim
round arms were twined in yards of half-drowned stallion-mane, while
her white round knees slipped on the sleek, wet, satin pads of the
great horse's straining shoulder muscles. The white toes of her dug for
a grip into the smooth sides of the animal, vainly seeking a hold on
the ribs beneath.

In a breath, or the half of a breath, Graham saw the whole breathless
situation, realized that the white wonderful creature was a woman, and
sensed the smallness and daintiness of her despite her gladiatorial
struggles. She reminded him of some Dresden china figure set absurdly
small and light and strangely on the drowning back of a titanic beast.
So dwarfed was she by the bulk of the stallion that she was a midget,
or a tiny fairy from fairyland come true.

As she pressed her cheek against the great arching neck, her
golden-brown hair, wet from being under, flowing and tangled, seemed
tangled in the black mane of the stallion. But it was her face that
smote Graham most of all. It was a boy's face; it was a woman's face;
it was serious and at the same time amused, expressing the pleasure it
found woven with the peril. It was a white woman's face--and modern;
and yet, to Graham, it was all-pagan. This was not a creature and a
situation one happened upon in the twentieth century. It was straight
out of old Greece. It was a Maxfield Parrish reminiscence from the
Arabian Nights. Genii might be expected to rise from those troubled
depths, or golden princes, astride winged dragons, to swoop down out of
the blue to the rescue.

The stallion, forcing itself higher out of water, missed, by a shade,
from turning over backward as it sank. Glorious animal and glorious
rider disappeared together beneath the surface, to rise together, a
second later, the stallion still pawing the air with fore-hoofs the
size of dinner plates, the rider still clinging to the sleek,
satin-coated muscles. Graham thought, with a gasp, what might have
happened had the stallion turned over. A chance blow from any one of
those four enormous floundering hoofs could have put out and quenched
forever the light and sparkle of that superb, white-bodied,
fire-animated woman.

"Ride his neck!" Dick shouted. "Catch his foretop and get on his neck
till he balances out!"

The woman obeyed, digging her toes into the evasive muscle-pads for the
quick effort, and leaping upward, one hand twined in the wet mane, the
other hand free and up-stretched, darting between the ears and
clutching the foretop. The next moment, as the stallion balanced out
horizontally in obedience to her shiftage of weight, she had slipped
back to the shoulders. Holding with one hand to the mane, she waved a
white arm in the air and flashed a smile of acknowledgment to Forrest;
and, as Graham noted, she was cool enough to note him on his horse
beside Forrest. Also, Graham realized that the turning of her head and
the waving of her arm was only partly in bravado, was more in aesthetic
wisdom of the picture she composed, and was, most of all, sheer joy of
daring and emprise of the blood and the flesh and the life that was she.

"Not many women'd tackle that," Dick said quietly, as Mountain Lad,
easily retaining his horizontal position once it had been attained,
swam to the lower end of the tank and floundered up the rough slope to
the anxious cowboy.

The latter swiftly adjusted the halter with a turn of chain between the
jaws. But Paula, still astride, leaned forward, imperiously took the
lead-part from the cowboy, whirled Mountain Lad around to face Forrest,
and saluted.

"Now you will have to go away," she called. "This is our hen party, and
the stag public is not admitted."

Dick laughed, saluted acknowledgment, and led the way back through the
lilacs to the road.

"Who ... who was it?" Graham queried.

"Paula--Mrs. Forrest--the boy girl, the child that never grew up, the
grittiest puff of rose-dust that was ever woman."

"My breath is quite taken away," Graham said. "Do your people do such
stunts frequently?"

"First time she ever did that," Forrest replied. "That was Mountain
Lad. She rode him straight down the spill-way--tobogganed with him,
twenty-two hundred and forty pounds of him."

"Risked his neck and legs as well as her own," was Graham's comment.

"Thirty-five thousand dollars' worth of neck and legs," Dick smiled.
"That's what a pool of breeders offered me for him last year after he'd
cleaned up the Coast with his get as well as himself. And as for Paula,
she could break necks and legs at that price every day in the year
until I went broke--only she doesn't. She never has accidents."

"I wouldn't have given tuppence for her chance if he'd turned over."

"But he didn't," Dick answered placidly. "That's Paula's luck. She's
tough to kill. Why, I've had her under shell-fire where she was
actually disappointed because she didn't get hit, or killed, or
near-killed. Four batteries opened on us, shrapnel, at mile-range, and
we had to cover half a mile of smooth hill-brow for shelter. I really
felt I was justified in charging her with holding back. She did admit a
'trifle.' We've been married ten or a dozen years now, and, d'ye know,
sometimes it seems to me I don't know her at all, and that nobody knows
her, and that she doesn't know herself--just the same way as you and I
can look at ourselves in a mirror and wonder who the devil we are
anyway. Paula and I have one magic formula: _Damn the expense when fun
is selling_. And it doesn't matter whether the price is in dollars,
hide, or life. It's our way and our luck. It works. And, d'ye know,
we've never been gouged on the price yet."




CHAPTER X



It was a stag lunch. As Forrest explained, the girls were
"hen-partying."

"I doubt you'll see a soul of them till four o'clock, when Ernestine,
that's one of Paula's sisters, is going to wallop me at tennis--at
least so she's threatened and pledged."

And Graham sat through the lunch, where only men sat, took his part in
the conversation on breeds and breeding, learned much, contributed a
mite from his own world-experiences, and was unable to shake from his
eyes the persistent image of his hostess, the vision of the rounded and
delicate white of her against the dark wet background of the swimming
stallion. And all the afternoon, looking over prize Merinos and
Berkshire gilts, continually that vision burned up under his eyelids.
Even at four, in the tennis court, himself playing against Ernestine,
he missed more than one stroke because the image of the flying ball
would suddenly be eclipsed by the image of a white marble figure of a
woman that strove and clung on the back of a great horse.

Graham, although an outlander, knew his California, and, while every
girl of the swimming suits was gowned for dinner, was not surprised to
find no man similarly accoutered. Nor had he made the mistake of so
being himself, despite the Big House and the magnificent scale on which
it operated.

Between the first and second gongs, all the guests drifted into the
long dining room. Sharp after the second gong, Dick Forrest arrived and
precipitated cocktails. And Graham impatiently waited the appearance of
the woman who had worried his eyes since noon. He was prepared for all
manner of disappointment. Too many gorgeous stripped athletes had he
seen slouched into conventional garmenting, to expect too much of the
marvelous creature in the white silken swimming suit when it should
appear garbed as civilized women garb.

He caught his breath with an imperceptible gasp when she entered. She
paused, naturally, for just the right flash of an instant in the arched
doorway, limned against the darkness behind her, the soft glow of the
indirect lighting full upon her. Graham's lips gasped apart, and
remained apart, his eyes ravished with the beauty and surprise of her
he had deemed so small, so fairy-like. Here was no delicate midget of a
child-woman or boy-girl on a stallion, but a grand lady, as only a
small woman can be grand on occasion.

Taller in truth was she, as well as in seeming, than he had judged her,
and as finely proportioned in her gown as in her swimming suit. He
noted her shining gold-brown hair piled high; the healthy tinge of her
skin that was clean and clear and white; the singing throat, full and
round, incomparably set on a healthy chest; and the gown, dull blue, a
sort of medieval thing with half-fitting, half-clinging body, with
flowing sleeves and trimmings of gold-jeweled bands.

She smiled an embracing salutation and greeting. Graham recognized it
as kin to the one he had seen when she smiled from the back of the
stallion. When she started forward, he could not fail to see the
inimitable way she carried the cling and weight of her draperies with
her knees--round knees, he knew, that he had seen press desperately
into the round muscle-pads of Mountain Lad. Graham observed, also, that
she neither wore nor needed corseting. Nor could he fail, as she
crossed the floor, to see two women: one, the grand lady, the mistress
of the Big House; one, the lovely equestrienne statue beneath the
dull-blue, golden-trimmed gown, that no gowning could ever make his
memory forget.

She was upon them, among them, and Graham's hand held hers in the
formal introduction as he was made welcome to the Big House and all the
hacienda in a voice that he knew was a singing voice and that could
proceed only from a throat that pillared, such as hers, from a chest
deep as hers despite her smallness.

At table, across the corner from her, he could not help a surreptitious
studying of her. While he held his own in the general fun and
foolishness, it was his hostess that mostly filled the circle of his
eye and the content of his mind.

It was as bizarre a company as Graham had ever sat down to dinner with.
The sheep-buyer and the correspondent for the _Breeders' Gazette_ were
still guests. Three machine-loads of men, women, and girls, totaling
fourteen, had arrived shortly before the first gong and had remained to
ride home in the moonlight. Graham could not remember their names; but
he made out that they came from some valley town thirty miles away
called Wickenberg, and that they were of the small-town banking,
professional, and wealthy-farmer class. They were full of spirits,
laughter, and the latest jokes and catches sprung in the latest slang.

"I see right now," Graham told Paula, "if your place continues to be
the caravanserai which it has been since my arrival, that I might as
well give up trying to remember names and people."

"I don't blame you," she laughed concurrence. "But these are neighbors.
They drop in any time. Mrs. Watson, there, next to Dick, is of the old
land-aristocracy. Her grandfather, Wicken, came across the Sierras in
1846. Wickenberg is named after him. And that pretty dark-eyed girl is
her daughter...."

And while Paula gave him a running sketch of the chance guests, Graham
heard scarce half she said, so occupied was he in trying to sense his
way to an understanding of her. Naturalness was her keynote, was his
first judgment. In not many moments he had decided that her key-note
was joy. But he was dissatisfied with both conclusions, and knew he had
not put his finger on her. And then it came to him--pride. That was it!
It was in her eye, in the poise of her head, in the curling tendrils of
her hair, in her sensitive nostrils, in the mobile lips, in the very
pitch and angle of the rounded chin, in her hands, small, muscular and
veined, that he knew at sight to be the hard-worked hands of one who
had spent long hours at the piano. Pride it was, in every muscle,
nerve, and quiver of her--conscious, sentient, stinging pride.

She might be joyous and natural, boy and woman, fun and frolic; but
always the pride was there, vibrant, tense, intrinsic, the basic stuff
of which she was builded. She was a woman, frank, outspoken,
straight-looking, plastic, democratic; but toy she was not. At times,
to him, she seemed to glint an impression of steel--thin, jewel-like
steel. She seemed strength in its most delicate terms and fabrics. He
fondled the impression of her as of silverspun wire, of fine leather,
of twisted hair-sennit from the heads of maidens such as the Marquesans
make, of carven pearl-shell for the lure of the bonita, and of barbed
ivory at the heads of sea-spears such as the Eskimos throw.

"All right, Aaron," they heard Dick Forrest's voice rising, in a lull,
from the other end of the table. "Here's something from Phillips Brooks
for you to chew on. Brooks said that no man 'has come to true greatness
who has not felt in some degree that his life belongs to his race, and
that what God gives him, he gives him for mankind.'"

"So at last you believe in God?" the man, addressed Aaron, genially
sneered back. He was a slender, long-faced olive-brunette, with
brilliant black eyes and the blackest of long black beards.

"I'm hanged if I know," Dick answered. "Anyway, I quoted only
figuratively. Call it morality, call it good, call it evolution."

"A man doesn't have to be intellectually correct in order to be great,"
intruded a quiet, long-faced Irishman, whose sleeves were threadbare
and frayed. "And by the same token many men who are most correct in
sizing up the universe have been least great."

"True for you, Terrence," Dick applauded.

"It's a matter of definition," languidly spoke up an unmistakable
Hindoo, crumbling his bread with exquisitely slender and small-boned
fingers. "What shall we mean as _great?"_

"Shall we say _beauty?"_ softly queried a tragic-faced youth, sensitive
and shrinking, crowned with an abominably trimmed head of long hair.

Ernestine rose suddenly at her place, hands on table, leaning forward
with a fine simulation of intensity.

 "They're off!" she cried. "They're off! Now we'll have the universe
settled all over again for the thousandth time. Theodore"--to the
youthful poet--"it's a poor start. Get into the running. Ride your
father ion and your mother ion, and you'll finish three lengths ahead."

A roar of laughter was her reward, and the poet blushed and receded
into his sensitive shell.

Ernestine turned on the black-bearded one:

"Now, Aaron. He's not in form. You start it. You know how. Begin: 'As
Bergson so well has said, with the utmost refinement of philosophic
speech allied with the most comprehensive intellectual outlook
that....'"

More laughter roared down the table, drowning Ernestine's conclusion as
well as the laughing retort of the black-bearded one.

"Our philosophers won't have a chance to-night," Paula stole in an
aside to Graham.

"Philosophers?" he questioned back. "They didn't come with the
Wickenberg crowd. Who and what are they? I'm all at sea."

"They--" Paula hesitated. "They live here. They call themselves the
jungle-birds. They have a camp in the woods a couple of miles away,
where they never do anything except read and talk. I'll wager, right
now, you'll find fifty of Dick's latest, uncatalogued books in their
cabins. They have the run of the library, as well, and you'll see them
drifting in and out, any time of the day or night, with their arms full
of books--also, the latest magazines. Dick says they are responsible
for his possessing the most exhaustive and up-to-date library on
philosophy on the Pacific Coast. In a way, they sort of digest such
things for him. It's great fun for Dick, and, besides, it saves him
time. He's a dreadfully hard worker, you know."

"I understand that they... that Dick takes care of them?" Graham asked,
the while he pleasured in looking straight into the blue eyes that
looked so straight into his.

As she answered, he was occupied with noting the faintest hint of
bronze--perhaps a trick of the light--in her long, brown lashes.
Perforce, he lifted his gaze to her eyebrows, brown, delicately
stenciled, and made sure that the hint of bronze was there. Still
lifting his gaze to her high-piled hair, he again saw, but more
pronounced, the bronze note glinting from the brown-golden hair. Nor
did he fail to startle and thrill to a dazzlement of smile and teeth
and eye that frequently lived its life in her face. Hers was no thin
smile of restraint, he judged. When she smiled she smiled all of
herself, generously, joyously, throwing the largess of all her being
into the natural expression of what was herself and which domiciled
somewhere within that pretty head of hers.

"Yes," she was saying. "They have never to worry, as long as they live,
over mere bread and butter. Dick is most generous, and, rather immoral,
in his encouragement of idleness on the part of men like them. It's a
funny place, as you'll find out until you come to understand us.
They... they are appurtenances, and--and hereditaments, and such
things. They will be with us always until we bury them or they bury us.
Once in a while one or another of them drifts away--for a time. Like
the cat, you know. Then it costs Dick real money to get them back.
Terrence, there--Terrence McFane--he's an epicurean anarchist, if you
know what that means. He wouldn't kill a flea. He has a pet cat I gave
him, a Persian of the bluest blue, and he carefully picks her fleas,
not injuring them, stores them in a vial, and turns them loose in the
forest on his long walks when he tires of human companionship and
communes with nature.

"Well, only last year, he got a bee in his bonnet--the alphabet. He
started for Egypt--without a cent, of course--to run the alphabet down
in the home of its origin and thereby to win the formula that would
explain the cosmos. He got as far as Denver, traveling as tramps
travel, when he mixed up in some I. W. W. riot for free speech or
something. Dick had to hire lawyers, pay fines, and do just about
everything to get him safe home again.

"And the one with a beard--Aaron Hancock. Like Terrence, he won't work.
Aaron's a Southerner. Says none of his people ever did work, and that
there have always been peasants and fools who just couldn't be
restrained from working. That's why he wears a beard. To shave, he
holds, is unnecessary work, and, therefore, immoral. I remember, at
Melbourne, when he broke in upon Dick and me, a sunburnt wild man from
out the Australian bush. It seems he'd been making original researches
in anthropology, or folk-lore-ology, or something like that. Dick had
known him years before in Paris, and Dick assured him, if he ever
drifted back to America, of food and shelter. So here he is."

"And the poet?" Graham asked, glad that she must still talk for a
while, enabling him to study the quick dazzlement of smile that played
upon her face.

"Oh, Theo--Theodore Malken, though we call him Leo. He won't work,
either. His people are old Californian stock and dreadfully wealthy;
but they disowned him and he disowned them when he was fifteen. They
say he is lunatic, and he says they are merely maddening. He really
writes some remarkable verse... when he does write; but he prefers to
dream and live in the jungle with Terrence and Aaron. He was tutoring
immigrant Jews in San Francisco, when Terrence and Aaron rescued him,
or captured him, I don't know which. He's been with us two years now,
and he's actually filling out, despite the facts that Dick is absurdly
generous in furnishing supplies and that they'd rather talk and read
and dream than cook. The only good meals they get is when they descend
upon us, like to-night."

"And the Hindoo, there--who's he?"

"That's Dar Hyal. He's their guest. The three of them invited him up,
just as Aaron first invited Terrence, and as Aaron and Terrence invited
Leo. Dick says, in time, three more are bound to appear, and then he'll
have his Seven Sages of the Madroño Grove. Their jungle camp is in a
madroño grove, you know. It's a most beautiful spot, with living
springs, a canyon--but I was telling you about Dar Hyal.

"He's a revolutionist, of sorts. He's dabbled in our universities,
studied in France, Italy, Switzerland, is a political refugee from
India, and he's hitched his wagon to two stars: one, a new synthetic
system of philosophy; the other, rebellion against the tyranny of
British rule in India. He advocates individual terrorism and direct
mass action. That's why his paper, _Kadar,_ or _Badar,_ or something
like that, was suppressed here in California, and why he narrowly
escaped being deported; and that's why he's up here just now, devoting
himself to formulating his philosophy.

"He and Aaron quarrel tremendously--that is, on philosophical matters.
And now--" Paula sighed and erased the sigh with her smile--"and now,
I'm done. Consider yourself acquainted. And, oh, if you encounter our
sages more intimately, a word of warning, especially if the encounter
be in the stag room: Dar Hyal is a total abstainer; Theodore Malken can
get poetically drunk, and usually does, on one cocktail; Aaron Hancock
is an expert wine-bibber; and Terrence McFane, knowing little of one
drink from another, and caring less, can put ninety-nine men out of a
hundred under the table and go right on lucidly expounding epicurean
anarchy."

One thing Graham noted as the dinner proceeded. The sages called Dick
Forrest by his first name; but they always addressed Paula as "Mrs.
Forrest," although she called them by their first names. There was
nothing affected about it. Quite unconsciously did they, who respected
few things under the sun, and among such few things not even
work--quite unconsciously, and invariably, did they recognize the
certain definite aloofness in Dick Forrest's wife so that her given
name was alien to their lips. By such tokens Evan Graham was not slow
in learning that Dick Forrest's wife had a way with her, compounded of
sheerest democracy and equally sheer royalty.

It was the same thing, after dinner, in the big living room. She dared
as she pleased, but nobody assumed. Before the company settled down,
Paula seemed everywhere, bubbling over with more outrageous spirits
than any of them. From this group or that, from one corner or another,
her laugh rang out. And her laugh fascinated Graham. There was a
fibrous thrill in it, most sweet to the ear, that differentiated it
from any laugh he had ever heard. It caused Graham to lose the thread
of young Mr. Wombold's contention that what California needed was not a
Japanese exclusion law but at least two hundred thousand Japanese
coolies to do the farm labor of California and knock in the head the
threatened eight-hour day for agricultural laborers. Young Mr. Wombold,
Graham gleaned, was an hereditary large land-owner in the vicinity of
Wickenberg who prided himself on not yielding to the trend of the times
by becoming an absentee landlord.

From the piano, where Eddie Mason was the center of a group of girls,
came much noise of ragtime music and slangtime song. Terrence McFane
and Aaron Hancock fell into a heated argument over the music of
futurism. And Graham was saved from the Japanese situation with Mr.
Wombold by Dar Hyal, who proceeded to proclaim Asia for the Asiatics
and California for the Californians.

Paula, catching up her skirts for speed, fled down the room in some
romp, pursued by Dick, who captured her as she strove to dodge around
the Wombold group.

"Wicked woman," Dick reproved her in mock wrath; and, the next moment,
joined her in persuading Dar Hyal to dance.

And Dar Hyal succumbed, flinging Asia and the Asiatics to the winds,
along with his arms and legs, as he weirdly parodied the tango in what
he declared to be the "blastic" culmination of modern dancing.

"And now, Red Cloud, sing Mr. Graham your Acorn Song," Paula commanded
Dick.

Forrest, his arm still about her, detaining her for the threatened
punishment not yet inflicted, shook his head somberly.

"The Acorn Song!" Ernestine called from the piano; and the cry was
taken up by Eddie Mason and the girls.

"Oh, do, Dick," Paula pleaded. "Mr. Graham is the only one who hasn't
heard it."

Dick shook his head.

"Then sing him your Goldfish Song."

"I'll sing him Mountain Lad's song," Dick bullied, a whimsical sparkle
in his eyes. He stamped his feet, pranced, nickered a not bad imitation
of Mountain Lad, tossed an imaginary mane, and cried:

"Hear me! I am Eros! I stamp upon the hills!"

"The Acorn Song," Paula interrupted quickly and quietly, with just the
hint of steel in her voice.

Dick obediently ceased his chant of Mountain Lad, but shook his head
like a stubborn colt.

"I have a new song," he said solemnly. "It is about you and me, Paula.
I got it from the Nishinam."

"The Nishinam are the extinct aborigines of this part of California,"
Paula shot in a swift aside of explanation to Graham.

Dick danced half a dozen steps, stiff-legged, as Indians dance, slapped
his thighs with his palms, and began a new chant, still retaining his
hold on his wife.

"Me, I am Ai-kut, the first man of the Nishinam. Ai-kut is the short
for Adam, and my father and my mother were the coyote and the moon. And
this is Yo-to-to-wi, my wife. She is the first woman of the Nishinam.
Her father and her mother were the grasshopper and the ring-tailed cat.
They were the best father and mother left after my father and mother.
The coyote is very wise, the moon is very old; but who ever heard much
of anything of credit to the grasshopper and the ring-tailed cat? The
Nishinam are always right. The mother of all women had to be a cat, a
little, wizened, sad-faced, shrewd ring-tailed cat."

Whereupon the song of the first man and woman was interrupted by
protests from the women and acclamations from the men.

"This is Yo-to-to-wi, which is the short for Eve," Dick chanted on,
drawing Paula bruskly closer to his side with a semblance of savage
roughness. "Yo-to-to-wi is not much to look at. But be not hard upon
her. The fault is with the grasshopper and the ring-tailed cat. Me, I
am Ai-kut, the first man; but question not my taste. I was the first
man, and this, I saw, was the first woman. Where there is but one
choice, there is not much to choose. Adam was so circumstanced. He
chose Eve. Yo-to-to-wi was the one woman in all the world for me, so I
chose Yo-to-to-wi."

And Evan Graham, listening, his eyes on that possessive, encircling arm
of all his hostess's fairness, felt an awareness of hurt, and arose
unsummoned the thought, to be dismissed angrily, "Dick Forrest is
lucky--too lucky."

"Me, I am Ai-kut," Dick chanted on. "This is my dew of woman. She is my
honey-dew of woman. I have lied to you. Her father and her mother were
neither hopper nor cat. They were the Sierra dawn and the summer east
wind of the mountains. Together they conspired, and from the air and
earth they sweated all sweetness till in a mist of their own love the
leaves of the chaparral and the manzanita were dewed with the honey-dew.

"Yo-to-to-wi is my honey-dew woman. Hear me! I am Ai-kut. Yo-to-to-wi
is my quail woman, my deer-woman, my lush-woman of all soft rain and
fat soil. She was born of the thin starlight and the brittle dawn-light
before the sun . . .

"And," Forrest concluded, relapsing into his natural voice and
enunciation, having reached the limit of extemporization,--"and if you
think old, sweet, blue-eyed Solomon has anything on me in singing the
Song of Songs, just put your names down for the subscription edition of
_my_ Song of Songs."




CHAPTER XI



It was Mrs. Mason who first asked that Paula play; but it was Terrence
McFane and Aaron Hancock who evicted the rag-time group from the piano
and sent Theodore Malken, a blushing ambassador, to escort Paula.

"'Tis for the confounding of this pagan that I'm askin' you to play
'Reflections on the Water,'" Graham heard Terrence say to her.

"And 'The Girl with Flaxen Hair,' after, please," begged Hancock, the
indicted pagan. "It will aptly prove my disputation. This wild Celt has
a bog-theory of music that predates the cave-man--and he has the
unadulterated stupidity to call himself ultra-modern."

"Oh, Debussy!" Paula laughed. "Still wrangling over him, eh? I'll try
and get around to him. But I don't know with what I'll begin."

Dar Hyal joined the three sages in seating Paula at the concert grand
which, Graham decided, was none too great for the great room. But no
sooner was she seated than the three sages slipped away to what were
evidently their chosen listening places. The young poet stretched
himself prone on a deep bearskin forty feet from the piano, his hands
buried in his hair. Terrence and Aaron lolled into a cushioned
embrasure of a window seat, sufficiently near to each other to nudge
the points of their respective contentions as Paula might expound them.
The girls were huddled in colored groups on wide couches or garlanded
in twos and threes on and in the big koa-wood chairs.

Evan Graham half-started forward to take the honor of turning Paula's
music, but saw in time that Dar Hyal had already elected to himself
that office. Graham glimpsed the scene with quiet curious glances. The
grand piano, under a low arch at the far-end of the room, was cunningly
raised and placed as on and in a sounding board. All jollity and banter
had ceased. Evidently, he thought, the Little Lady had a way with her
and was accepted as a player of parts. And from this he was perversely
prepared for disappointment.

Ernestine leaned across from a chair to whisper to him:

"She can do anything she wants to do. And she doesn't work . . . much.
She studied under Leschetizky and Madame Carreno, you know, and she
abides by their methods. She doesn't play like a woman, either. Listen
to that!"

Graham knew that he expected disappointment from her confident hands,
even as she rippled them over the keys in little chords and runs with
which he could not quarrel but which he had heard too often before from
technically brilliant but musically mediocre performers. But whatever
he might have fancied she would play, he was all unprepared for
Rachmaninoff's sheerly masculine Prelude, which he had heard only men
play when decently played.

She took hold of the piano, with the first two ringing bars,
masterfully, like a man; she seemed to lift it, and its sounding wires,
with her two hands, with the strength and certitude of maleness. And
then, as only he had heard men do it, she sank, or leaped--he could
scarcely say which--to the sureness and pureness and ineffable softness
of the _Andante_ following.

She played on, with the calm and power of anything but the little,
almost girlish woman he glimpsed through half-closed lids across the
ebony board of the enormous piano, which she commanded, as she
commanded herself, as she commanded the composer. Her touch was
definite, authoritative, was his judgment, as the Prelude faded away in
dying chords hauntingly reminiscent of its full vigor that seemed still
to linger in the air.

While Aaron and Terrence debated in excited whispers in the window
seat, and while Dar Hyal sought other music at Paula's direction, she
glanced at Dick, who turned off bowl after bowl of mellow light till
Paula sat in an oasis of soft glow that brought out the dull gold
lights in her dress and hair.

Graham watched the lofty room grow loftier in the increasing shadows.
Eighty feet in length, rising two stories and a half from masonry walls
to tree-trunked roof, flung across with a flying gallery from the rail
of which hung skins of wild animals, hand-woven blankets of Oaxaca and
Ecuador, and tapas, woman-pounded and vegetable-dyed, from the islands
of the South Pacific, Graham knew it for what it was--a feast-hall of
some medieval castle; and almost he felt a poignant sense of lack of
the long spread table, with pewter below the salt and silver above the
salt, and with huge hound-dogs scuffling beneath for bones.

Later, when Paula had played sufficient Debussy to equip Terrence and
Aaron for fresh war, Graham talked with her about music for a few vivid
moments. So well did she prove herself aware of the philosophy of
music, that, ere he knew it, he was seduced into voicing his own pet
theory.

"And so," he concluded, "the true psychic factor of music took nearly
three thousand years to impress itself on the Western mind. Debussy
more nearly attains the idea-engendering and suggestive serenity--say
of the time of Pythagoras--than any of his fore-runners--"

Here, Paula put a pause in his summary by beckoning over Terrence and
Aaron from their battlefield in the windowseat.

"Yes, and what of it?" Terrence was demanding, as they came up side by
side. "I defy you, Aaron, I defy you, to get one thought out of Bergson
on music that is more lucid than any thought he ever uttered in his
'Philosophy of Laughter,' which is not lucid at all."

"Oh!--listen!" Paula cried, with sparkling eyes. "We have a new
prophet. Hear Mr. Graham. He's worthy of your steel, of both your
steel. He agrees with you that music is the refuge from blood and iron
and the pounding of the table. That weak souls, and sensitive souls,
and high-pitched souls flee from the crassness and the rawness of the
world to the drug-dreams of the over-world of rhythm and vibration--"

"Atavistic!" Aaron Hancock snorted. "The cave-men, the monkey-folk, and
the ancestral bog-men of Terrence did that sort of thing--"

"But wait," Paula urged. "It's his conclusions and methods and
processes. Also, there he disagrees with you, Aaron, fundamentally. He
quoted Pater's 'that all art aspires toward music'--"

"Pure prehuman and micro-organic chemistry," Aaron broke in. "The
reactions of cell-elements to the doggerel punch of the wave-lengths of
sunlight, the foundation of all folk-songs and rag-times. Terrence
completes his circle right there and stultifies all his windiness. Now
listen to me, and I will present--"

"But wait," Paula pleaded. "Mr. Graham argues that English puritanism
barred music, real music, for centuries...."

"True," said Terrence.

"And that England had to win to its sensuous delight in rhythm through
Milton and Shelley--"

"Who was a metaphysician." Aaron broke in.

"A lyrical metaphysician," Terrence defined instantly. "_That_ you must
acknowledge, Aaron."

"And Swinburne?" Aaron demanded, with a significance that tokened
former arguments.

"He says Offenbach was the fore-runner of Arthur Sullivan," Paula cried
challengingly. "And that Auber was before Offenbach. And as for Wagner,
ask him, just ask him--"

And she slipped away, leaving Graham to his fate. He watched her,
watched the perfect knee-lift of her draperies as she crossed to Mrs.
Mason and set about arranging bridge quartets, while dimly he could
hear Terrence beginning:

"It is agreed that music was the basis of inspiration of all the arts
of the Greeks...."

Later, when the two sages were obliviously engrossed in a heated battle
as to whether Berlioz or Beethoven had exposited in their compositions
the deeper intellect, Graham managed his escape. Clearly, his goal was
to find his hostess again. But she had joined two of the girls in the
whispering, giggling seclusiveness of one of the big chairs, and, most
of the company being deep in bridge, Graham found himself drifted into
a group composed of Dick Forrest, Mr. Wombold, Dar Hyal, and the
correspondent of the _Breeders' Gazette_.

"I'm sorry you won't be able to run over with me," Dick was saying to
the correspondent. "It would mean only one more day. I'll take you
tomorrow."

"Sorry," was the reply. "But I must make Santa Rosa. Burbank has
promised me practically a whole morning, and you know what that means.
Yet I know the _Gazette_ would be glad for an account of the
experiment. Can't you outline it?--briefly, just briefly? Here's Mr.
Graham. It will interest him, I am sure."

"More water-works?" Graham queried.

"No; an asinine attempt to make good farmers out of hopelessly poor
ones," Mr. Wombold answered. "I contend that any farmer to-day who has
no land of his own, proves by his lack of it that he is an inefficient
farmer."

"On the contrary," spoke up Dar Hyal, weaving his slender Asiatic
fingers in the air to emphasize his remarks. "Quite on the contrary.
Times have changed. Efficiency no longer implies the possession of
capital. It is a splendid experiment, an heroic experiment. And it will
succeed."

"What is it, Dick?" Graham urged. "Tell us."

"Oh, nothing, just a white chip on the table," Forrest answered
lightly. "Most likely it will never come to anything, although just the
same I have my hopes--"

"A white chip!" Wombold broke in. "Five thousand acres of prime valley
land, all for a lot of failures to batten on, to farm, if you please,
on salary, with food thrown in!"

"The food that is grown on the land only," Dick corrected. "Now I will
have to put it straight. I've set aside five thousand acres midway
between here and the Sacramento River."

"Think of the alfalfa it grew, and that you need," Wombold again
interrupted.

"My dredgers redeemed twice that acreage from the marshes in the past
year," Dick replied. "The thing is, I believe the West and the world
must come to intensive farming. I want to do my share toward blazing
the way. I've divided the five thousand acres into twenty-acre
holdings. I believe each twenty acres should support, comfortably, not
only a family, but pay at least six per cent."

"When it is all allotted it will mean two hundred and fifty families,"
the _Gazette_ man calculated; "and, say five to the family, it will
mean twelve hundred and fifty souls."

"Not quite," Dick corrected. "The last holding is occupied, and we have
only a little over eleven hundred on the land." He smiled whimsically.
"But they promise, they promise. Several fat years and they'll average
six to the family."

"Who is _we_?" Graham inquired.

"Oh, I have a committee of farm experts on it--my own men, with the
exception of Professor Lieb, whom the Federal Government has loaned me.
The thing is: they _must_ farm, with individual responsibility,
according to the scientific methods embodied in our instructions. The
land is uniform. Every holding is like a pea in the pod to every other
holding. The results of each holding will speak in no uncertain terms.
The failure of any farmer, through laziness or stupidity, measured by
the average result of the entire two hundred and fifty farmers, will
not be tolerated. Out the failures must go, convicted by the average of
their fellows.

"It's a fair deal. No farmer risks anything. With the food he may grow
and he and his family may consume, plus a cash salary of a thousand a
year, he is certain, good seasons and bad, stupid or intelligent, of at
least a hundred dollars a month. The stupid and the inefficient will be
bound to be eliminated by the intelligent and the efficient. That's
all. It will demonstrate intensive farming with a vengeance. And there
is more than the certain salary guaranty. After the salary is paid, the
adventure must yield six per cent, to me. If more than this is
achieved, then the entire hundred per cent, of the additional
achievement goes to the farmer."

"Which means that each farmer with go in him will work nights to make
good--I see," said the _Gazette_ man. "And why not? Hundred-dollar jobs
aren't picked up for the asking. The average farmer in the United
States doesn't net fifty a month on his own land, especially when his
wages of superintendence and of direct personal labor are subtracted.
Of course able men will work their heads off to hold to such a
proposition, and they'll see to it that every member of the family does
the same."

"'Tis the one objection I have to this place," Terrence McFane, who had
just joined the group, announced. "Ever one hears but the one
thing--work. 'Tis repulsive, the thought of the work, each on his
twenty acres, toilin' and moilin', daylight till dark, and after
dark--an' for what? A bit of meat, a bit of bread, and, maybe, a bit of
jam on the bread. An' to what end? Is meat an' bread an' jam the end of
it all, the meaning of life, the goal of existence? Surely the man will
die, like a work horse dies, after a life of toil. And what end has
been accomplished? Bread an' meat an' jam? Is that it? A full belly and
shelter from the cold till one's body drops apart in the dark moldiness
of the grave?"

"But, Terrence, you, too, will die," Dick Forrest retorted.

"But, oh, my glorious life of loafing," came the instant answer. "The
hours with the stars and the flowers, under the green trees with the
whisperings of breezes in the grass. My books, my thinkers and their
thoughts. Beauty, music, all the solaces of all the arts. What? When I
fade into the dark I shall have well lived and received my wage for
living. But these twenty-acre work-animals of two-legged men of yours!
Daylight till dark, toil and moil, sweat on the shirts on the backs of
them that dries only to crust, meat and bread in their bellies, roofs
that don't leak, a brood of youngsters to live after them, to live the
same beast-lives of toil, to fill their bellies with the same meat and
bread, to scratch their backs with the same sweaty shirts, and to go
into the dark knowing only meat and bread, and, mayhap, a bit of jam."

"But somebody must do the work that enables you to loaf," Mr. Wombold
spoke up indignantly.

"'Tis true, 'tis sad 'tis true," Terrence replied lugubriously. Then
his face beamed. "And I thank the good Lord for it, for the
work-beasties that drag and drive the plows up and down the fields, for
the bat-eyed miner-beasties that dig the coal and gold, for all the
stupid peasant-beasties that keep my hands soft, and give power to fine
fellows like Dick there, who smiles on me and shares the loot with me,
and buys the latest books for me, and gives me a place at his board
that is plenished by the two-legged work-beasties, and a place at his
fire that is builded by the same beasties, and a shack and a bed in the
jungle under the madroño trees where never work intrudes its monstrous
head."

Evan Graham was slow in getting ready for bed that night. He was
unwontedly stirred both by the Big House and by the Little Lady who was
its mistress. As he sat on the edge of the bed, half-undressed, and
smoked out a pipe, he kept seeing her in memory, as he had seen her in
the flesh the past twelve hours, in her varied moods and guises--the
woman who had talked music with him, and who had expounded music to him
to his delight; who had enticed the sages into the discussion and
abandoned him to arrange the bridge tables for her guests; who had
nestled in the big chair as girlish as the two girls with her; who had,
with a hint of steel, quelled her husband's obstreperousness when he
had threatened to sing Mountain Lad's song; who, unafraid, had
bestridden the half-drowning stallion in the swimming tank; and who, a
few hours later, had dreamed into the dining room, distinctive in dress
and person, to meet her many guests.

The Big House, with all its worthy marvels and bizarre novelties,
competed with the figure of Paula Forrest in filling the content of his
imagination. Once again, and yet again, many times, he saw the slender
fingers of Dar Hyal weaving argument in the air, the black whiskers of
Aaron Hancock enunciating Bergsonian dogmas, the frayed coat-cuffs of
Terrence McFane articulating thanks to God for the two-legged
work-beasties that enabled him to loaf at Dick Forrest's board and
under Dick Forrest's madroño trees.

Graham knocked out his pipe, took a final sweeping survey of the
strange room which was the last word in comfort, pressed off the
lights, and found himself between cool sheets in the wakeful dark.
Again he heard Paula Forrest laugh; again he sensed her in terms of
silver and steel and strength; again, against the dark, he saw that
inimitable knee-lift of her gown. The bright vision of it was almost an
irk to him, so impossible was it for him to shake it from his eyes.
Ever it returned and burned before him, a moving image of light and
color that he knew to be subjective but that continually asserted the
illusion of reality.

He saw stallion and rider sink beneath the water, and rise again, a
flurry of foam and floundering of hoofs, and a woman's face that
laughed while she drowned her hair in the drowning mane of the beast.
And the first ringing bars of the Prelude sounded in his ears as again
he saw the same hands that had guided the stallion lift the piano to
all Rachmaninoff's pure splendor of sound.

And when Graham finally fell asleep, it was in the thick of marveling
over the processes of evolution that could produce from primeval mire
and dust the glowing, glorious flesh and spirit of woman.




CHAPTER XII



The next morning Graham learned further the ways of the Big House. Oh
My had partly initiated him in particular things the preceding day and
had learned that, after the waking cup of coffee, he preferred to
breakfast at table, rather than in bed. Also, Oh My had warned him that
breakfast at table was an irregular affair, anywhere between seven and
nine, and that the breakfasters merely drifted in at their convenience.
If he wanted a horse, or if he wanted a swim or a motor car, or any
ranch medium or utility he desired, Oh My informed him, all he had to
do was to call for it.

Arriving in the breakfast room at half past seven, Graham found himself
just in time to say good-by to the _Gazette_ man and the Idaho buyer,
who, finishing, were just ready to catch the ranch machine that
connected at Eldorado with the morning train for San Francisco. He sat
alone, being perfectly invited by a perfect Chinese servant to order as
he pleased, and found himself served with his first desire--an
ice-cold, sherried grapefruit, which, the table-boy proudly informed
him, was "grown on the ranch." Declining variously suggested breakfast
foods, mushes, and porridges, Graham had just ordered his soft-boiled
eggs and bacon, when Bert Wainwright drifted in with a casualness that
Graham recognized as histrionic, when, five minutes later, in boudoir
cap and delectable negligee, Ernestine Desten drifted in and expressed
surprise at finding such a multitude of early risers.

Later, as the three of them were rising from table, they greeted Lute
Desten and Rita Wainwright arriving. Over the billiard table with Bert,
Graham learned that Dick Forrest never appeared for breakfast, that he
worked in bed from terribly wee small hours, had coffee at six, and
only on unusual occasions appeared to his guests before the
twelve-thirty lunch. As for Paula Forrest, Bert explained, she was a
poor sleeper, a late riser, lived behind a door without a knob in a
spacious wing with a rare and secret patio that even he had seen but
once, and only on infrequent occasion was she known to appear before
twelve-thirty, and often not then.

"You see, she's healthy and strong and all that," he explained, "but
she was born with insomnia. She never could sleep. She couldn't sleep
as a little baby even. But it's never hurt her any, because she's got a
will, and won't let it get on her nerves. She's just about as tense as
they make them, yet, instead of going wild when she can't sleep, she
just wills to relax, and she does relax. She calls them her `white
nights,' when she gets them. Maybe she'll fall asleep at daybreak, or
at nine or ten in the morning; and then she'll sleep the rest of the
clock around and get down to dinner as chipper as you please."

"It's constitutional, I fancy," Graham suggested.

Bert nodded.

"It would be a handicap to nine hundred and ninety-nine women out of a
thousand. But not to her. She puts up with it, and if she can't sleep
one time--she should worry--she just sleeps some other time and makes
it up."

More and other things Bert Wainwright told of his hostess, and Graham
was not slow in gathering that the young man, despite the privileges of
long acquaintance, stood a good deal in awe of her.

"I never saw anybody whose goat she couldn't get if she went after it,"
he confided. "Man or woman or servant, age, sex, and previous condition
of servitude--it's all one when she gets on the high and mighty. And I
don't see how she does it. Maybe it's just a kind of light that comes
into her eyes, or some kind of an expression on her lips, or, I don't
know what--anyway, she puts it across and nobody makes any mistake
about it."

"She has a ... a way with her," Graham volunteered.

 "That's it!" Bert's face beamed. "It's a way she has. She just puts
it over. Kind of gives you a chilly feeling, you don't know why. Maybe
she's learned to be so quiet about it because of the control she's
learned by passing sleepless nights without squealing out or getting
sour. The chances are she didn't bat an eye all last night--excitement,
you know, the crowd, swimming Mountain Lad and such things. Now
ordinary things that'd keep most women awake, like danger, or storm at
sea, and such things, Dick says don't faze her. She can sleep like a
baby, he says, when the town she's in is being bombarded or when the
ship she's in is trying to claw off a lee shore. She's a wonder, and no
mistake. You ought to play billiards with her--the English game. She'll
go some."

A little later, Graham, along with Bert, encountered the girls in the
morning room, where, despite an hour of rag-time song and dancing and
chatter, he was scarcely for a moment unaware of a loneliness, a lack,
and a desire to see his hostess, in some fresh and unguessed mood and
way, come in upon them through the open door.

Still later, mounted on Altadena and accompanied by Bert on a
thoroughbred mare called Mollie, Graham made a two hours' exploration
of the dairy center of the ranch, and arrived back barely in time to
keep an engagement with Ernestine in the tennis court.

He came to lunch with an eagerness for which his keen appetite could
not entirely account; and he knew definite disappointment when his
hostess did not appear.

"A white night," Dick Forrest surmised for his guest's benefit, and
went into details additional to Bert's of her constitutional inaptitude
for normal sleep. "Do you know, we were married years before I ever saw
her sleep. I knew she did sleep, but I never saw her. I've seen her go
three days and nights without closing an eye and keep sweet and
cheerful all the time, and when she did sleep, it was out of
exhaustion. That was when the _All Away_ went ashore in the Carolines
and the whole population worked to get us off. It wasn't the danger,
for there wasn't any. It was the noise. Also, it was the excitement.
She was too busy living. And when it was almost all over, I actually
saw her asleep for the first time in my life."

A new guest had arrived that morning, a Donald Ware, whom Graham met at
lunch. He seemed well acquainted with all, as if he had visited much in
the Big House; and Graham gathered that, despite hi

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/6455