Daylight's coming to civilization had not improved him. True, he wore
better clothes, had learned slightly better manners, and spoke better
English. As a gambler and a man-trampler he had developed remarkable
efficiency. Also, he had become used to a higher standard of living,
and he had whetted his wits to razor sharpness in the fierce,
complicated struggle of fighting males. But he had hardened, and at the
expense of his old-time, whole-souled geniality. Of the essential
refinements of civilization he knew nothing. He did not know they
existed. He had become cynical, bitter, and brutal. Power had its
effect on him that it had on all men. Suspicious of the big
exploiters, despising the fools of the exploited herd, he had faith
only in himself. This led to an undue and erroneous exaltation of his
ego, while kindly consideration of others--nay, even simple
respect--was destroyed, until naught was left for him but to worship at
the shrine of self. Physically, he was not the man of iron muscles who
had come down out of the Arctic. He did not exercise sufficiently, ate
more than was good for him, and drank altogether too much. His muscles
were getting flabby, and his tailor called attention to his increasing
waistband. In fact, Daylight was developing a definite paunch. This
physical deterioration was manifest likewise in his face. The lean
Indian visage was suffering a city change. The slight hollows in the
cheeks under the high cheek-bones had filled out. The beginning of
puff-sacks under the eyes was faintly visible. The girth of the neck
had increased, and the first crease and fold of a double chin were
becoming plainly discernible. The old effect of asceticism, bred of
terrific hardships and toil, had vanished; the features had become
broader and heavier, betraying all the stigmata of the life he lived,
advertising the man's self-indulgence, harshness, and brutality.
Even his human affiliations were descending. Playing a lone hand,
contemptuous of most of the men with whom he played, lacking in
sympathy or understanding of them, and certainly independent of them,
he found little in common with those to be encountered, say at the
Alta-Pacific. In point of fact, when the battle with the steamship
companies was at its height and his raid was inflicting incalculable
damage on all business interests, he had been asked to resign from the
Alta-Pacific. The idea had been rather to his liking, and he had found
new quarters in clubs like the Riverside, organized and practically
maintained by the city bosses. He found that he really liked such men
better. They were more primitive and simple, and they did not put on
airs. They were honest buccaneers, frankly in the game for what they
could get out of it, on the surface more raw and savage, but at least
not glossed over with oily or graceful hypocrisy. The Alta-Pacific had
suggested that his resignation be kept a private matter, and then had
privily informed the newspapers. The latter had made great capital out
of the forced resignation, but Daylight had grinned and silently gone
his way, though registering a black mark against more than one club
member who was destined to feel, in the days to come, the crushing
weight of the Klondiker's financial paw.
The storm-centre of a combined newspaper attack lasting for months,
Daylight's character had been torn to shreds. There was no fact in his
history that had not been distorted into a criminality or a vice. This
public making of him over into an iniquitous monster had pretty well
crushed any lingering hope he had of getting acquainted with Dede
Mason. He felt that there was no chance for her ever to look kindly on
a man of his caliber, and, beyond increasing her salary to seventy-five
dollars a month, he proceeded gradually to forget about her. The
increase was made known to her through Morrison, and later she thanked
Daylight, and that was the end of it.
One week-end, feeling heavy and depressed and tired of the city and its
ways, he obeyed the impulse of a whim that was later to play an
important part in his life. The desire to get out of the city for a
whiff of country air and for a change of scene was the cause. Yet, to
himself, he made the excuse of going to Glen Ellen for the purpose of
inspecting the brickyard with which Holdsworthy had goldbricked him.
He spent the night in the little country hotel, and on Sunday morning,
astride a saddle-horse rented from the Glen Ellen butcher, rode out of
the village. The brickyard was close at hand on the flat beside the
Sonoma Creek. The kilns were visible among the trees, when he glanced
to the left and caught sight of a cluster of wooded knolls half a mile
away, perched on the rolling slopes of Sonoma Mountain. The mountain,
itself wooded, towered behind. The trees on the knolls seemed to
beckon to him.
The dry, early-summer air, shot through with sunshine, was wine to him.
Unconsciously he drank it in deep breaths. The prospect of the
brickyard was uninviting. He was jaded with all things business, and
the wooded knolls were calling to him. A horse was between his legs--a
good horse, he decided; one that sent him back to the cayuses he had
ridden during his eastern Oregon boyhood. He had been somewhat of a
rider in those early days, and the champ of bit and creak of
saddle-leather sounded good to him now.
Resolving to have his fun first, and to look over the brickyard
afterward, he rode on up the hill, prospecting for a way across country
to get to the knolls. He left the country road at the first gate he
came to and cantered through a hayfield. The grain was waist-high on
either side the wagon road, and he sniffed the warm aroma of it with
delighted nostrils. Larks flew up before him, and from everywhere came
mellow notes. From the appearance of the road it was patent that it
had been used for hauling clay to the now idle brickyard. Salving his
conscience with the idea that this was part of the inspection, he rode
on to the clay-pit--a huge scar in a hillside. But he did not linger
long, swinging off again to the left and leaving the road. Not a
farm-house was in sight, and the change from the city crowding was
essentially satisfying. He rode now through open woods, across little
flower-scattered glades, till he came upon a spring. Flat on the
ground, he drank deeply of the clear water, and, looking about him,
felt with a shock the beauty of the world. It came to him like a
discovery; he had never realized it before, he concluded, and also, he
had forgotten much. One could not sit in at high finance and keep
track of such things. As he drank in the air, the scene, and the
distant song of larks, he felt like a poker-player rising from a
night-long table and coming forth from the pent atmosphere to taste the
freshness of the morn.
At the base of the knolls he encountered a tumble-down stake-and-rider
fence. From the look of it he judged it must be forty years old at
least--the work of some first pioneer who had taken up the land when
the days of gold had ended. The woods were very thick here, yet fairly
clear of underbrush, so that, while the blue sky was screened by the
arched branches, he was able to ride beneath. He now found himself in
a nook of several acres, where the oak and manzanita and madrono gave
way to clusters of stately redwoods. Against the foot of a
steep-sloped knoll he came upon a magnificent group of redwoods that
seemed to have gathered about a tiny gurgling spring.
He halted his horse, for beside the spring uprose a wild California
lily. It was a wonderful flower, growing there in the cathedral nave
of lofty trees. At least eight feet in height, its stem rose straight
and slender, green and bare for two-thirds its length, and then burst
into a shower of snow-white waxen bells. There were hundreds of these
blossoms, all from the one stem, delicately poised and ethereally
frail. Daylight had never seen anything like it. Slowly his gaze
wandered from it to all that was about him. He took off his hat, with
almost a vague religious feeling. This was different. No room for
contempt and evil here. This was clean and fresh and
beautiful-something he could respect. It was like a church. The
atmosphere was one of holy calm. Here man felt the prompting of nobler
things. Much of this and more was in Daylight's heart as he looked
about him. But it was not a concept of his mind. He merely felt it
without thinking about it at all.
On the steep incline above the spring grew tiny maidenhair ferns, while
higher up were larger ferns and brakes. Great, moss-covered trunks of
fallen trees lay here and there, slowly sinking back and merging into
the level of the forest mould. Beyond, in a slightly clearer space,
wild grape and honeysuckle swung in green riot from gnarled old oak
trees. A gray Douglas squirrel crept out on a branch and watched him.
From somewhere came the distant knocking of a woodpecker. This sound
did not disturb the hush and awe of the place. Quiet woods, noises
belonged there and made the solitude complete. The tiny bubbling
ripple of the spring and the gray flash of tree-squirrel were as
yardsticks with which to measure the silence and motionless repose.
"Might be a million miles from anywhere," Daylight whispered to himself.
But ever his gaze returned to the wonderful lily beside the bubbling
spring.
He tethered the horse and wandered on foot among the knolls. Their tops
were crowned with century-old spruce trees, and their sides clothed
with oaks and madronos and native holly. But to the perfect redwoods
belonged the small but deep canon that threaded its way among the
knolls. Here he found no passage out for his horse, and he returned to
the lily beside the spring. On foot, tripping, stumbling, leading the
animal, he forced his way up the hillside. And ever the ferns carpeted
the way of his feet, ever the forest climbed with him and arched
overhead, and ever the clean joy and sweetness stole in upon his senses.
On the crest he came through an amazing thicket of velvet-trunked young
madronos, and emerged on an open hillside that led down into a tiny
valley. The sunshine was at first dazzling in its brightness, and he
paused and rested, for he was panting from the exertion. Not of old
had he known shortness of breath such as this, and muscles that so
easily tired at a stiff climb. A tiny stream ran down the tiny valley
through a tiny meadow that was carpeted knee-high with grass and blue
and white nemophila. The hillside was covered with Mariposa lilies and
wild hyacinth, down through which his horse dropped slowly, with
circumspect feet and reluctant gait.
Crossing the stream, Daylight followed a faint cattle trail over a low,
rocky hill and through a wine-wooded forest of manzanita, and emerged
upon another tiny valley, down which filtered another spring-fed,
meadow-bordered streamlet. A jack-rabbit bounded from a bush under his
horse's nose, leaped the stream, and vanished up the opposite hillside
of scrub-oak. Daylight watched it admiringly as he rode on to the head
of the meadow. Here he startled up a many-pronged buck, that seemed to
soar across the meadow, and to soar over the stake-and-rider fence,
and, still soaring, disappeared in a friendly copse beyond.
Daylight's delight was unbounded. It seemed to him that he had never
been so happy. His old woods' training was aroused, and he was keenly
interested in everything in the moss on the trees and branches; in the
bunches of mistletoe hanging in the oaks; in the nest of a wood-rat; in
the water-cress growing in the sheltered eddies of the little stream;
in the butterflies drifting through the rifted sunshine and shadow; in
the blue jays that flashed in splashes of gorgeous color across the
forest aisles; in the tiny birds, like wrens, that hopped among the
bushes and imitated certain minor quail-calls; and in the
crimson-crested woodpecker that ceased its knocking and cocked its head
on one side to survey him. Crossing the stream, he struck faint
vestiges of a wood-road, used, evidently, a generation back, when the
meadow had been cleared of its oaks. He found a hawk's nest on the
lightning-shattered tipmost top of a six-foot redwood. And to complete
it all his horse stumbled upon several large broods of half-grown
quail, and the air was filled with the thrum of their flight. He
halted and watched the young ones "petrifying" and disappearing on the
ground before his eyes, and listening to the anxious calls of the old
ones hidden in the thickets.
"It sure beats country places and bungalows at Menlo Park," he communed
aloud; "and if ever I get the hankering for country life, it's me for
this every time."
The old wood-road led him to a clearing, where a dozen acres of grapes
grew on wine-red soil. A cow-path, more trees and thickets, and he
dropped down a hillside to the southeast exposure. Here, poised above
a big forested canon, and looking out upon Sonoma Valley, was a small
farm-house. With its barn and outhouses it snuggled into a nook in the
hillside, which protected it from west and north. It was the erosion
from this hillside, he judged, that had formed the little level stretch
of vegetable garden. The soil was fat and black, and there was water
in plenty, for he saw several faucets running wide open.
Forgotten was the brickyard. Nobody was at home, but Daylight
dismounted and ranged the vegetable garden, eating strawberries and
green peas, inspecting the old adobe barn and the rusty plough and
harrow, and rolling and smoking cigarettes while he watched the antics
of several broods of young chickens and the mother hens. A foottrail
that led down the wall of the big canyon invited him, and he proceeded
to follow it. A water-pipe, usually above ground, paralleled the
trail, which he concluded led upstream to the bed of the creek. The
wall of the canon was several hundred feet from top to bottom, and
magnificent were the untouched trees that the place was plunged in
perpetual shade. He measured with his eye spruces five and six feet in
diameter and redwoods even larger. One such he passed, a twister that
was at least ten or eleven feet through. The trail led straight to a
small dam where was the intake for the pipe that watered the vegetable
garden. Here, beside the stream, were alders and laurel trees, and he
walked through fern-brakes higher than his head. Velvety moss was
everywhere, out of which grew maiden-hair and gold-back ferns.
Save for the dam, it was a virgin wild. No ax had invaded, and the
trees died only of old age and stress of winter storm. The huge trunks
of those that had fallen lay moss-covered, slowly resolving back into
the soil from which they sprang. Some had lain so long that they were
quite gone, though their faint outlines, level with the mould, could
still be seen. Others bridged the stream, and from beneath the bulk of
one monster half a dozen younger trees, overthrown and crushed by the
fall, growing out along the ground, still lived and prospered, their
roots bathed by the stream, their upshooting branches catching the
sunlight through the gap that had been made in the forest roof.
Back at the farm-house, Daylight mounted and rode on away from the
ranch and into the wilder canons and steeper steeps beyond. Nothing
could satisfy his holiday spirit now but the ascent of Sonoma Mountain.
And here on the crest, three hours afterward, he emerged, tired and
sweaty, garments torn and face and hands scratched, but with sparkling
eyes and an unwonted zestfulness of expression. He felt the illicit
pleasure of a schoolboy playing truant. The big gambling table of San
Francisco seemed very far away. But there was more than illicit
pleasure in his mood. It was as though he were going through a sort of
cleansing bath. No room here for all the sordidness, meanness, and
viciousness that filled the dirty pool of city existence. Without
pondering in detail upon the matter at all, his sensations were of
purification and uplift. Had he been asked to state how he felt, he
would merely have said that he was having a good time; for he was
unaware in his self-consciousness of the potent charm of nature that
was percolating through his city-rotted body and brain--potent, in that
he came of an abysmal past of wilderness dwellers, while he was himself
coated with but the thinnest rind of crowded civilization.
There were no houses in the summit of Sonoma Mountain, and, all alone
under the azure California sky, he reined in on the southern edge of
the peak. He saw open pasture country, intersected with wooded canons,
descending to the south and west from his feet, crease on crease and
roll on roll, from lower level to lower level, to the floor of Petaluma
Valley, flat as a billiard-table, a cardboard affair, all patches and
squares of geometrical regularity where the fat freeholds were farmed.
Beyond, to the west, rose range on range of mountains cuddling purple
mists of atmosphere in their valleys; and still beyond, over the last
range of all, he saw the silver sheen of the Pacific. Swinging his
horse, he surveyed the west and north, from Santa Rosa to St. Helena,
and on to the east, across Sonoma to the chaparral-covered range that
shut off the view of Napa Valley. Here, part way up the eastern wall
of Sonoma Valley, in range of a line intersecting the little village of
Glen Ellen, he made out a scar upon a hillside. His first thought was
that it was the dump of a mine tunnel, but remembering that he was not
in gold-bearing country, he dismissed the scar from his mind and
continued the circle of his survey to the southeast, where, across the
waters of San Pablo Bay, he could see, sharp and distant, the twin
peaks of Mount Diablo. To the south was Mount Tamalpais, and, yes, he
was right, fifty miles away, where the draughty winds of the Pacific
blew in the Golden Gate, the smoke of San Francisco made a low-lying
haze against the sky.
"I ain't seen so much country all at once in many a day," he thought
aloud.
He was loath to depart, and it was not for an hour that he was able to
tear himself away and take the descent of the mountain. Working out a
new route just for the fun of it, late afternoon was upon him when he
arrived back at the wooded knolls. Here, on the top of one of them,
his keen eyes caught a glimpse of a shade of green sharply
differentiated from any he had seen all day. Studying it for a minute,
he concluded that it was composed of three cypress trees, and he knew
that nothing else than the hand of man could have planted them there.
Impelled by curiosity purely boyish, he made up his mind to
investigate. So densely wooded was the knoll, and so steep, that he
had to dismount and go up on foot, at times even on hands and knees
struggling hard to force a way through the thicker underbrush. He came
out abruptly upon the cypresses. They were enclosed in a small square
of ancient fence; the pickets he could plainly see had been hewn and
sharpened by hand. Inside were the mounds of two children's graves.
Two wooden headboards, likewise hand-hewn, told the state Little David,
born 1855, died 1859; and Little Roy, born 1853, died 1860.
"The poor little kids," Daylight muttered. The graves showed signs of
recent care. Withered bouquets of wild flowers were on the mounds, and
the lettering on the headboards was freshly painted. Guided by these
clews, Daylight cast about for a trail, and found one leading down the
side opposite to his ascent. Circling the base of the knoll, he picked
up with his horse and rode on to the farm-house. Smoke was rising from
the chimney and he was quickly in conversation with a nervous, slender
young man, who, he learned, was only a tenant on the ranch. How large
was it? A matter of one hundred and eighty acres, though it seemed
much larger. This was because it was so irregularly shaped. Yes, it
included the clay-pit and all the knolls, and its boundary that ran
along the big canon was over a mile long.
"You see," the young man said, "it was so rough and broken that when
they began to farm this country the farmers bought in the good land to
the edge of it. That's why its boundaries are all gouged and jagged.
"Oh, yes, he and his wife managed to scratch a living without working
too hard. They didn't have to pay much rent. Hillard, the owner,
depended on the income from the clay-pit. Hillard was well off, and
had big ranches and vineyards down on the flat of the valley. The
brickyard paid ten cents a cubic yard for the clay. As for the rest of
the ranch, the land was good in patches, where it was cleared, like the
vegetable garden and the vineyard, but the rest of it was too much
up-and-down."
"You're not a farmer," Daylight said. The young man laughed and shook
his head. "No; I'm a telegraph operator. But the wife and I decided
to take a two years' vacation, and ... here we are. But the time's
about up. I'm going back into the office this fall after I get the
grapes off."
Yes, there were about eleven acres in the vineyard--wine grapes. The
price was usually good. He grew most of what they ate. If he owned
the place, he'd clear a patch of land on the side-hill above the
vineyard and plant a small home orchard. The soil was good. There was
plenty of pasturage all over the ranch, and there were several cleared
patches, amounting to about fifteen acres in all, where he grew as much
mountain hay as could be found. It sold for three to five dollars more
a ton than the rank-stalked valley hay.
Daylight listened, there came to him a sudden envy of this young fellow
living right in the midst of all this which Daylight had travelled
through the last few hours.
"What in thunder are you going back to the telegraph office for?" he
demanded.
The young man smiled with a certain wistfulness. "Because we can't get
ahead here..." (he hesitated an instant), "and because there are added
expenses coming. The rent, small as it is, counts; and besides, I'm
not strong enough to effectually farm the place. If I owned it, or if
I were a real husky like you, I'd ask nothing better. Nor would the
wife." Again the wistful smile hovered on his face. "You see, we're
country born, and after bucking with cities for a few years, we kind of
feel we like the country best. We've planned to get ahead, though, and
then some day we'll buy a patch of land and stay with it."
The graves of the children? Yes, he had relettered them and hoed the
weeds out. It had become the custom. Whoever lived on the ranch did
that. For years, the story ran, the father and mother had returned
each summer to the graves. But there had come a time when they came no
more, and then old Hillard started the custom. The scar across the
valley? An old mine. It had never paid. The men had worked on it,
off and on, for years, for the indications had been good. But that was
years and years ago. No paying mine had ever been struck in the
valley, though there had been no end of prospect-holes put down and
there had been a sort of rush there thirty years back.
A frail-looking young woman came to the door to call the young man to
supper. Daylight's first thought was that city living had not agreed
with her. And then he noted the slight tan and healthy glow that
seemed added to her face, and he decided that the country was the place
for her. Declining an invitation to supper, he rode on for Glen Ellen
sitting slack-kneed in the saddle and softly humming forgotten songs.
He dropped down the rough, winding road through covered pasture, with
here and there thickets of manzanita and vistas of open glades. He
listened greedily to the quail calling, and laughed outright, once, in
sheer joy, at a tiny chipmunk that fled scolding up a bank, slipping on
the crumbly surface and falling down, then dashing across the road
under his horse's nose and, still scolding, scrabbling up a protecting
oak.
Daylight could not persuade himself to keep to the travelled roads that
day, and another cut across country to Glen Ellen brought him upon a
canon that so blocked his way that he was glad to follow a friendly
cow-path. This led him to a small frame cabin. The doors and windows
were open, and a cat was nursing a litter of kittens in the doorway,
but no one seemed at home. He descended the trail that evidently
crossed the canon. Part way down, he met an old man coming up through
the sunset. In his hand he carried a pail of foamy milk. He wore no
hat, and in his face, framed with snow-white hair and beard, was the
ruddy glow and content of the passing summer day. Daylight thought
that he had never seen so contented-looking a being.
"How old are you, daddy?" he queried.
"Eighty-four," was the reply. "Yes, sirree, eighty-four, and spryer
than most."
"You must a' taken good care of yourself," Daylight suggested.
"I don't know about that. I ain't loafed none. I walked across the
Plains with an ox-team and fit Injuns in '51, and I was a family man
then with seven youngsters. I reckon I was as old then as you are now,
or pretty nigh on to it."
"Don't you find it lonely here?"
The old man shifted the pail of milk and reflected. "That all
depends," he said oracularly. "I ain't never been lonely except when
the old wife died. Some fellers are lonely in a crowd, and I'm one of
them. That's the only time I'm lonely, is when I go to 'Frisco. But I
don't go no more, thank you 'most to death. This is good enough for me.
I've ben right here in this valley since '54--one of the first settlers
after the Spaniards."
Daylight started his horse, saying:--
"Well, good night, daddy. Stick with it. You got all the young bloods
skinned, and I guess you've sure buried a mighty sight of them."
The old man chuckled, and Daylight rode on, singularly at peace with
himself and all the world. It seemed that the old contentment of trail
and camp he had known on the Yukon had come back to him. He could not
shake from his eyes the picture of the old pioneer coming up the trail
through the sunset light. He was certainly going some for eighty-four.
The thought of following his example entered Daylight's mind, but the
big game of San Francisco vetoed the idea.
"Well, anyway," he decided, "when I get old and quit the game, I'll
settle down in a place something like this, and the city can go to
hell."