Ever north, through a fat and flourishing rejuvenated land, stopping at
the towns of Willows, Red Bluff and Redding, crossing the counties of
Colusa, Glenn, Tehama, and Shasta, went the spruce wagon drawn by the
dappled chestnuts with cream-colored manes and tails. Billy picked up
only three horses for shipment, although he visited many farms; and
Saxon talked with the women while he looked over the stock with the men.
And Saxon grew the more convinced that the valley she sought lay not
there.
At Redding they crossed the Sacramento on a cable ferry, and made a
day's scorching traverse through rolling foot-hills and flat tablelands.
The heat grew more insupportable, and the trees and shrubs were blasted
and dead. Then they came again to the Sacramento, where the great
smelters of Kennett explained the destruction of the vegetation.
They climbed out of the smelting town, where eyrie houses perched
insecurely on a precipitous landscape. It was a broad, well-engineered
road that took them up a grade miles long and plunged down into the
Canyon of the Sacramento. The road, rock-surfaced and easy-graded, hewn
out of the canyon wall, grew so narrow that Billy worried for fear of
meeting opposite-bound teams. Far below, the river frothed and flowed
over pebbly shallows, or broke tumultuously over boulders and cascades,
in its race for the great valley they had left behind.
Sometimes, on the wider stretches of road, Saxon drove and Billy walked
to lighten the load. She insisted on taking her turns at walking, and
when he breathed the panting mares on the steep, and Saxon stood by
their heads caressing them and cheering them, Billy's joy was too deep
for any turn of speech as he gazed at his beautiful horses and his
glowing girl, trim and colorful in her golden brown corduroy, the brown
corduroy calves swelling sweetly under the abbreviated slim skirt. And
when her answering look of happiness came to him--a sudden dimness in
her straight gray eyes--he was overmastered by the knowledge that he
must say something or burst.
“O, you kid!” he cried.
And with radiant face she answered, “O, you kid!”
They camped one night in a deep dent in the canyon, where was snuggled
a box-factory village, and where a toothless ancient, gazing with faded
eyes at their traveling outfit, asked: “Be you showin'?”
They passed Castle Crags, mighty-bastioned and glowing red against the
palpitating blue sky. They caught their first glimpse of Mt. Shasta, a
rose-tinted snow-peak rising, a sunset dream, between and beyond green
interlacing walls of canyon--a landmark destined to be with them for
many days. At unexpected turns, after mounting some steep grade, Shasta
would appear again, still distant, now showing two peaks and glacial
fields of shimmering white. Miles and miles and days and days they
climbed, with Shasta ever developing new forms and phases in her summer
snows.
“A moving picture in the sky,” said Billy at last.
“Oh,--it is all so beautiful,” sighed Saxon. “But there are no
moon-valleys here.”
They encountered a plague of butterflies, and for days drove through
untold millions of the fluttering beauties that covered the road with
uniform velvet-brown. And ever the road seemed to rise under the noses
of the snorting mares, filling the air with noiseless flight, drifting
down the breeze in clouds of brown and yellow soft-flaked as snow, and
piling in mounds against the fences, ever driven to float helplessly on
the irrigation ditches along the roadside. Hazel and Hattie soon grew
used to them though Possum never ceased being made frantic.
“Huh!--who ever heard of butterfly-broke horses?” Billy chaffed. “That's
worth fifty bucks more on their price.”
“Wait till you get across the Oregon line into the Rogue River
Valley,” they were told. “There's God's Paradise--climate, scenery,
and fruit-farming; fruit ranches that yield two hundred per cent. on a
valuation of five hundred dollars an acre.”
“Gee!” Billy said, when he had driven on out of hearing; “that's too
rich for our digestion.”
And Saxon said, “I don't know about apples in the valley of the moon,
but I do know that the yield is ten thousand per cent. of happiness on a
valuation of one Billy, one Saxon, a Hazel, a Hattie, and a Possum.”
Through Siskiyou County and across high mountains, they came to Ashland
and Medford and camped beside the wild Rogue River.
“This is wonderful and glorious,” pronounced Saxon; “but it is not the
valley of the moon.”
“Nope, it ain't the valley of the moon,” agreed Billy, and he said it
on the evening of the day he hooked a monster steelhead, standing to his
neck in the ice-cold water of the Rogue and fighting for forty minutes,
with screaming reel, ere he drew his finny prize to the bank and with
the scalp-yell of a Comanche jumped and clutched it by the gills.
“'Them that looks finds,'” predicted Saxon, as they drew north out of
Grant's Pass, and held north across the mountains and fruitful Oregon
valleys.
One day, in camp by the Umpqua River, Billy bent over to begin skinning
the first deer he had ever shot. He raised his eyes to Saxon and
remarked:
“If I didn't know California, I guess Oregon'd suit me from the ground
up.”
In the evening, replete with deer meat, resting on his elbow and smoking
his after-supper cigarette, he said:
“Maybe they ain't no valley of the moon. An' if they ain't, what of it?
We could keep on this way forever. I don't ask nothing better.”
“There is a valley of the moon,” Saxon answered soberly. “And we are
going to find it. We've got to. Why Billy, it would never do, never to
settle down. There would be no little Hazels and little Hatties, nor
little... Billies--”
“Nor little Saxons,” Billy interjected.
“Nor little Possums,” she hurried on, nodding her head and reaching out
a caressing hand to where the fox terrier was ecstatically gnawing
a deer-rib. A vicious snarl and a wicked snap that barely missed her
fingers were her reward.
“Possum!” she cried in sharp reproof, again extending her hand.
“Don't,” Billy warned. “He can't help it, and he's likely to get you
next time.”
Even more compelling was the menacing threat that Possum growled, his
jaws close-guarding the bone, eyes blazing insanely, the hair rising
stiffly on his neck.
“It's a good dog that sticks up for its bone,” Billy championed. “I
wouldn't care to own one that didn't.”
“But it's my Possum,” Saxon protested. “And he loves me. Besides, he
must love me more than an old bone. And he must mind me.--Here, you,
Possum, give me that bone! Give me that bone, sir!”
Her hand went out gingerly, and the growl rose in volume and key till it
culminated in a snap.
“I tell you it's instinct,” Billy repeated. “He does love you, but he
just can't help doin' it.”
“He's got a right to defend his bones from strangers but not from his
mother,” Saxon argued. “I shall make him give up that bone to me.”
“Fox terriers is awful highstrung, Saxon. You'll likely get him
hysterical.”
But she was obstinately set in her purpose. She picked up a short stick
of firewood.
“Now, sir, give me that bone.”
She threatened with the stick, and the dog's growling became ferocious.
Again he snapped, then crouched back over his bone. Saxon raised the
stick as if to strike him, and he suddenly abandoned the bone, rolled
over on his back at her feet, four legs in the air, his ears lying
meekly back, his eyes swimming and eloquent with submission and appeal.
“My God!” Billy breathed in solemn awe. “Look at it!--presenting his
solar plexus to you, his vitals an' his life, all defense down, as much
as sayin': 'Here I am. Stamp on me. Kick the life outa me.' I love you,
I am your slave, but I just can't help defendin' my bone. My instinct's
stronger'n me. Kill me, but I can't help it.”
Saxon was melted. Tears were in her eyes as she stooped and gathered
the mite of an animal in her arms. Possum was in a frenzy of agitation,
whining, trembling, writhing, twisting, licking her face, all for
forgiveness.
“Heart of gold with a rose in his mouth,” Saxon crooned, burying her
face in the soft and quivering bundle of sensibilities. “Mother is
sorry. She'll never bother you again that way. There, there, little
love. See? There's your bone. Take it.”
She put him down, but he hesitated between her and the bone, patently
looking to her for surety of permission, yet continuing to tremble in
the terrible struggle between duty and desire that seemed tearing him
asunder. Not until she repeated that it was all right and nodded her
head consentingly did he go to the bone. And once, a minute later, he
raised his head with a sudden startle and gazed inquiringly at her.
She nodded and smiled, and Possum, with a happy sigh of satisfaction,
dropped his head down to the precious deer-rib.
“That Mercedes was right when she said men fought over jobs like dogs
over bones,” Billy enunciated slowly. “It's instinct. Why, I couldn't
no more help reaching my fist to the point of a scab's jaw than could
Possum from snappin' at you. They's no explainin' it. What a man has to
he has to. The fact that he does a thing shows he had to do it whether
he can explain it or not. You remember Hall couldn't explain why he
stuck that stick between Timothy McManus's legs in the foot race. What
a man has to, he has to. That's all I know about it. I never had no
earthly reason to beat up that lodger we had, Jimmy Harmon. He was a
good guy, square an' all right. But I just had to, with the strike goin'
to smash, an' everything so bitter inside me that I could taste it.
I never told you, but I saw 'm once after I got out--when my arms was
mendin'. I went down to the roundhouse an' waited for 'm to come in
off a run, an' apologized to 'm. Now why did I apologize? I don't know,
except for the same reason I punched 'm--I just had to.”
And so Billy expounded the why of like in terms of realism, in the camp
by the Umpqua River, while Possum expounded it, in similar terms of fang
and appetite, on the rib of deer.