Burning Daylight

. It was dryer and rockier here than where he had been the day before, and the ascending slopes supported mainly chaparral, scrubby and dense and impossible to penetrate

he sidehill; the three months' work and the getting short of money; the lay-off while the men went away and got jobs; then the return and a new stretch of work, with the "pay" ever luring and ever receding into the mountain,

upward, he followed it for several miles, emerging in a small, mountain-encircled valley, where half a dozen poor ranchers farmed the wine-grapes on the steep slop

d see that it had been a stiff struggle, and that wild nature showed fresh signs of winning-chaparral that had invaded the clearings; patches and parts of patches of vineyard, unpruned, grassgrown, and

rking manure in the barnyard

ing; "ain't you got any men-fo

ly. He saw that her toil-worn, weather-exposed hands were like a man's, callused, large-k

you from, and all the way up here? Won't y

g of wine. It was too far and too bad a road to haul the grapes to the valley wineries, she explained, and so they were compelled to do it themselves. "They," he learned, were she and

land in '57 and cleared it and farmed it ever since, until he died, when she had carried it on. It actually didn't pay for the toil, but what were they to do? There was the wine trust, and wine was

and her people before her-the ones that did the work, drove their oxen across the Plains, cleared and broke the virgin land, toiled all days and all hours, paid their taxes, and sent their sons and grandsons out to fight and die

about that amount. And, besides them, there was a horde of others that took their whack. They called it railroading, high finance, banking, wholesaling, real estate, and such things, but the point was that they got it,

you, mother

ne come nex

etty hard,

n state until I was woman-grown. Then I marrie

u going to t

he chose to think his question

believe

dded h

g about God, that allowed so many suckers to be born and that did not break

that Riesli

sks and calculated. "Just sh

th all of it, and speculated as

you got a dollar a gal

ead, I

aking se

the house, and buy a new wagon.

after

e a co

yours, mother,

d her inc

that need watching, their memories being so infernal short, you know. Here's my address. You've go

y upward till he came out on the divide and gazed down into Napa Valley and back

ck. But there was no irritation about it. He enjoyed it all, for he was back at his old game of bucking nature. Late in the afternoon he broke through, and followed a well-defined trail down a dry canon. Here he got a fresh thrill. He had heard the baying of the hound some minutes before, and suddenly, across the bare face of the hill above him, h

ad. There were no farms in this immediate section, and no houses. The soil was meagre, the bed-rock either close to the surface or constituting the surface itself. Manzanita and scrub-o

t. The sun was ruddy-brown in his face, and by it his sandy hair was bleached on the ends to peroxide blond. H

ylight put it int

e hereabout

r. He was gazing at Daylight in

d. "You're Elam Harnish-Burning Dayli

ght n

sun are you doing he

red, "Drumming up trade for

else I'd have missed seeing you. I've seen your photo in the papers many a time

bouts?" Daylight r

pretty spring, and a few fruit trees and berry bushes. Come in and take a look.

of a canon mouth. Here were several large oaks, evidencing a richer soil. The erosion of ages from the hillside had slowly formed this deposit of fat earth. Under the oaks, almost buried in them, stood a rough, unpainted cabin, the wide verandah of which, with chairs and hammocks, advertised an out-of doors bedcham

into his visitor's face

ou think o

Daylight laughed, but the joy and satisfaction

ey were sons of mine. I planted them, nursed them, fed th

erdict, after due inspection and sampl

middle was comfortably littered with books and magazines. All the available wall space, from floor to ceiling, was occupied by filled bookshelves. I

tanned them, too," Fe

room was a huge fireplace

she drew! Never a wisp of smoke anywhere save in the p

enture, and Daylight accepted an invitation to supper, half prepared to find his host a raw-fruit-and-nut-eater or some similar sort of health faddest. At table, while eating rice and jack-rabbit curry (the latter shot by

the most divergent topics, he could find no hint of queerness or unusualness. So it was, when between them they had was

to locate a screw loose somewhere, but I'll be danged if I've succeeded. What are you doing here, anyway? Wha

howed his pleasure

i. They tried electricity, and forced feeding, and fasting. I was a graduate of about everything in the curriculum. They kept me poor with their bills while I went from bad to worse. The

une was the biggest and most influential pap

t matter. It had to be bolstered up with whiskey, which wasn't good for it any more than was the living i

shoulders and

wn and out it seemed a yearning came to me to go back to the country. So I quit, quit everything, absolutely, and came to live in the Valley of the Moon-that's the Indian name, you know, for Sonoma Val

day over forty,"

looked nearer sixty, and

who laughed at the city-dwellers and called them lunatics; a man who did not care for money, and in whom the lust

d when I slipped out there was not one of them to drop me a line and say, 'How are you, old man? Anything I can do for you?' For several weeks it was: 'What's become o

ylight's query. "You must need c

. Just look at me and you can see why. I'm hard as rocks. And I like the work. But I tell you a chap's got to break in to it. It's a great thing when he's learned to pick grapes a whole long day and come home at the end of it with that tired happy feeling, instead of being in a state of physical collapse. That fireplace-those big stones-I was soft, then, a little, anemi

imagination, though my cooler reason tells me that you are a lunatic like the rest. The lust for power! It's a dreadful affliction. Why didn't you stay in your Klo

alley. There was no thought in his mind of ever intending to live on it. His game was in San Francisco. But he liked the ranch, and as soon as he got back to the office he