by Jack London
"Nope. The Porchugeeze make it that high, I guess."
"I thought it was pretty good land that fetched a hundred an
acre," Billy said.
"Oh, them times is past. They used to give away land once, an' if
you was good, throw in all the cattle runnin' on it."
"How about government land around here?" was Billy'a next query.
"Ain't none, an' never was. This was old Mexican grants. My
grandfather bought sixteen hundred of the best acres around here
for fifteen hundred dollars--five hundred down an' the balance in
five years without interest. But that was in the early days. He
come West in '48, tryin' to find a country without chills an'
fever."
"He found it all right," said Billy.
"You bet he did. An' if him an' father 'd held onto the land it'd
been better than a gold mine, an' I wouldn't be workin' for a
livin'. What's your business?"
"Teamster."
"Ben in the strike in Oakland?"
"Sure thing. I've teamed there most of my life."
Here the two men wandered off into a discussion of union affairs
and the strike situation; but Saxon refused to be balked, and
brought back the talk to the land.
"How was it the Portuguese ran up the price of lend?" she asked.
The young fellow broke away from union matters with an effort,
and for a moment regarded her with lack luster eyes, until the
question sank into his consciousness.
"Because they worked the land overtime. Because they worked
mornin', noon, an' night, all hands, women an' kids. Because they
could get more out of twenty acres than we could out of a hundred
an' sixty. Look at old Silva--Antonio Silva. I've known him ever
since I was a shaver. He didn't have the price of a square meal
when he hit this section and begun leasin' land from my folks.
Look at him now--worth two hundred an' fifty thousan' cold, an' I
bet he's got credit for a million, an' there's no tellin' what
the rest of his family owns."
"And he made all that out of your folks' land?" Saxon demanded.
The young man nodded his head with evident reluctance.
"Then why didn't your folks do it?" she pursued.
The lineman shrugged his shoulders.
"Search me," he said.
"But the money was in the land," she persisted.
"Blamed if it was," came the retort, tinged slightly with color.
"We never saw it stickin' out so as you could notice it. The
money was in the hands of the Porchugeeze, I guess. They knew a
few more 'n we did, that's all."
Saxon showed such dissatisfaction with his explanation that he
was stung to action. He got up wrathfully. "Come on, an' I'll
show you," he said. "I'll show you why I'm workin' for wages when
I might a-ben a millionaire if my folks hadn't been mutts. That's
what we old Americans are, Mutts, with a capital M."
He led them inside the gate, to the fruit tree that had first
attracted Saxon's attention. From the main crotch diverged the
four main branches of the tree. Two feet above the crotch the
branches were connected, each to the ones on both sides, by
braces of living wood.
"You think it growed that way, eh? Well, it did. But it was old
Silva that made it just the same--caught two sprouts, when the
tree was young, an' twisted 'em together. Pretty slick, eh? You
bet. That tree'll never blow down. It's a natural, springy brace,
an' beats iron braces stiff. Look along all the rows. Every
tree's that way. See? An' that's just one trick of the
Porchugeeze. They got a million like it.
"Figure it out for yourself. They don't need props when the
crop's heavy. Why, when we had a heavy crop, we used to use five
props to a tree. Now take ten acres of trees. That'd be some
several thousan' props. Which cost money, an' labor to put in an'
take out every year. These here natural braces don't have to have
a thing done. They're Johnny-on-the-spot all the time. Why, the
Porchugeeze has got us skinned a mile. Come on, I'll show you."
Billy, with city notions of trespass, betrayed perturbation at
the freedom they were making of the little farm.
"Oh, it's all right, as long as you don't step on nothin'," the
lineman reassured him. "Besides, my grandfather used to own this.
They know me. Forty years ago old Silva come from the Azores.
Went sheep-herdin' in the mountains for a couple of years, then
blew in to San Leandro. These five acres was the first land he
leased. That was the beginnin'. Then he began leasin' by the
hundreds of acres, an' by the hundred-an'-sixties. An' his
sisters an' his uncles an' his aunts begun pourin' in from the
Azores--they're all related there, you know; an' pretty soon San
Leandro was a regular Porchugeeze settlement.
"An' old Silva wound up by buyin' these five acres from
grandfather. Pretty soon--an' father by that time was in the hole
to the neck--he was buyin' father's land by the
hundred-an'-sixties. An' all the rest of his relations was coin'
the same thing. Father was always gettin' rich quick, an' he
wound up by dyin' in debt. But old Silva never overlooked a bet,
no matter how dinky. An' all the rest are just like him. You see
outside the fence there, clear to the wheel-tracks in the
road--horse-beans. We'd a-scorned to do a picayune thing like
that. Not Silva. Why he's got a town house in San Leandro now.
An' he rides around in a four-thousan'-dollar tourin' car. An'
just the same his front door yard grows onions clear to the
sidewalk. He clears three hundred a year on that patch alone. I
know ten acres of land he bought last year,--a thousan' an acre
they asked'm, an' he never batted an eye. He knew it was worth
it, that's all. He knew he could make it pay. Back in the hills,
there, he's got a ranch of five hundred an' eighty acres, bought
it dirt cheap, too; an' I want to tell you I could travel around
in a different tourin' car every day in the week just outa the
profits he makes on that ranch from the horses all the way from
heavy draughts to fancy steppers.
"But how?--how?--how did he get it all?" Saxon clamored.
"By bein' wise to farmin'. Why, the whole blame family works.
They ain't ashamed to roll up their sleeves an' dig--sons an'
daughters an' daughter-in-laws, old man, old woman, an' the
babies. They have a sayin' that a kid four years old that can't
pasture one cow on the county road an' keep it fat ain't worth
his salt. Why, the Silvas, the whole tribe of 'em, works a
hundred acres in peas, eighty in tomatoes, thirty in asparagus,
ten in pie-plant, forty in cucumbers, an'--oh, stacks of other
things."
"But how do they do it?" Saxon continued to demand. "We've never
been ashamed to work. We've worked hard all our lives. I can
out-work any Portuguese woman ever born. And I've done it, too,
in the jute mills. There were lots of Portuguese girls working at
the looms all around me, and I could out-weave them, every day,
and I did, too. It isn't a case of work. What is it?"
The lineman look
ed at her in a troubled way.
"Many's the time I've asked myself that same question. 'We're
better'n these cheap emigrants,' I'd say to myself. 'We was here
first, an' owned the land. I can lick any Dago that ever hatched
in the Azores. I got a better education. Then how in thunder do
they put it all over us, get our land, an' start accounts in the
banks?' An' the only answer I know is that we ain't got the sabe.
We don't use our head-pieces right. Something's wrong with us.
Anyway, we wasn't wised up to farming. We played at it. Show you?
That's what I brung you in for--the way old Silva an' all his
tribe farms. Book at this place. Some cousin of his, just out
from the Azores, is makin' a start on it, an' payin' good rent to
Silva. Pretty soon he'll be up to snuff an' buyin' land for
himself from some perishin' American farmer.
"Look at that--though you ought to see it in summer. Not an inch
wasted. Where we got one thin crop, they get four fat crops. An'
look at the way they crowd it--currants between the tree rows,
beans between the currant rows, a row of beans close on each side
of the trees, an' rows of beans along the ends of the tree rows.
Why, Silva wouldn't sell these five acres for five hundred an
acre cash down. He gave grandfather fifty an acre for it on long
time, an' here am I, workin' for the telephone company an'
putting' in a telephone for old Silva's cousin from the Azores
that can't speak American yet. Horse-beans along the road--say,
when Silva swung that trick he made more outa fattenin' hogs with
'em than grandfather made with all his farmin'. Grandfather stuck
up his nose at horse-beans. He died with it stuck up, an' with
more mortgages on the land he had left than you could shake a
stick at. Plantin' tomatoes wrapped up in wrappin' paper--ever
heard of that? Father snorted when he first seen the Porchugeeze
doin' it. An' he went on snortin'. Just the same they got bumper
crops, an' father's house-patch of tomatoes was eaten by the
black beetles. We ain't got the sabe, or the knack, or something
or other. Just look at this piece of ground--four crops a year,
an' every inch of soil workin' over time. Why, back in town
there, there's single acres that earns more than fifty of ours in
the old days. The Porchugeeze is natural-born farmers, that's
all, an' we don't know nothin' about farmin' an' never did."
Saxon talked with the lineman, following him about, till one
o'clock, when he looked at his watch, said good bye, and returned
to his task of putting in a telephone for the latest immigrant
from the Azores.
When in town, Saxon carried her oilcloth-wrapped telescope in her
hand; but it was so arranged with loops, that, once on the road,
she could thrust her arms through the loops and carry it on her
back. When she did this, the tiny ukulele case was shifted so
that it hung under her left arm.
A mile on from the lineman, they stopped where a small creek,
fringed with brush, crossed the county road. Billy was for the
cold lunch, which was the last meal Saxon had prepared in the
Pine street cottage; but she was determined upon building a fire
and boiling coffee. Not that she desired it for herself, but that
she was impressed with the idea that everything at the starting
of their strange wandering must be as comfortable as possible for
Billy's sake. Bent on inspiring him with enthusiasm equal to her
own, she declined to dampen what sparks he had caught by anything
so uncheerful as a cold meal.
"Now one thing we want to get out of our heads right at the
start, Billy, is that we're in a hurry. We're not in a hurry, and
we don't care whether school keeps or not. We're out to have a
good time, a regular adventure like you read about in books.--My!
I wish that boy that took me fishing to Goat Island could see me
now. Oakland was just a place to start from, he said. And, well,
we've started, haven't we? And right here's where we stop and
boil coffee. You get the fire going, Billy, and I'll get the
water and the things ready to spread out."
"Say," Billy remarked, while they waited for the water to boil,
"d'ye know what this reminds me of?"
Saxon was certain she did know, but she shook her head. She
wanted to hear him say it.
"Why, the second Sunday I knew you, when we drove out to Moraga
Valley behind Prince and King. You spread the lunch that day."
"Only it was a more scrumptious lunch," she added, with a happy
smile.
"But I wonder why we didn't have coffee that day," he went on.
"Perhaps it would have been too much like housekeeping," she
laughed; "kind of what Mary would call indelicate--"
"Or raw," Billy interpolated. "She was always springin' that
word."
"And yet look what became of her."
"That's the way with all of them," Billy growled somberly. "I've
always noticed it's the fastidious, la-de-da ones that turn out
the rottenest. They're like some horses I know, a-shyin' at the
things they're the least afraid of."
Saxon was silent, oppressed by a sadness, vague and remote, which
the mention of Bert's widow had served to bring on.
"I know something else that happened that day which you'd never
guess," Billy reminisced. "I bet you couldn't.
"I wonder," Saxon murmured, and guessed it with her eyes.
Billy's eyes answered, and quite spontaneously he reached over,
caught her hand, and pressed it caressingly to his cheek.
"It's little, but oh my," he said, addressing the imprisoned
hand. Then he gazed at Saxon, and she warmed with his words.
"We're beginnin' courtin' all over again, ain't we?"
Both ate heartily, and Billy was guilty of three cups of coffee.
"Say, this country air gives some appetite," he mumbled, as he
sank his teeth into his fifth bread-and-meat sandwich. "I could
eat a horse, an' drown his head off in coffee afterward."
Saxon's mind had reverted to all the young lineman had told her,
and she completed a sort of general resume of the information.
"My!" she exclaimed, "but we've learned a lot!"
"An' we've sure learned one thing," Billy said. "An' that is that
this is no place for us, with land a thousan' an acre an' only
twenty dollars in our pockets."
"Oh, we're not going to stop here," she hastened to say.
"But just the same it's the Portuguese that gave it its price,
and they make things go on it--send their children to school . . .
and have them; and, as you said yourself, they're as fat as
butterballs."
"An' I take my hat off to them," Billy responded.
"But all the same, I'd sooner have forty acres at a hundred an
acre than four at a thousan' an acre. Somehow, you know, I'd be
scared stiff on four acres--scared of fallin' off, you know."
She was in full sympathy with him. In her heart of hearts the
forty acres tugged much the harder. In her way, allowing for the
difference of a generation, her desire for spaciousness was as
strong as her Un
cle Will's.
"Well, we're not going to stop here," she assured Billy. "We're
going in, not for forty acres, but for a hundred and sixty acres
free from the government."
"An' I guess the government owes it to us for what our fathers
an' mothers done. I tell you, Saxon, when a woman walks across
the plains like your mother done, an' a man an' wife gets
massacred by the Indians like my grandfather an' mother done, the
government does owe them something."
"Well, it's up to us to collect."
"An' we'll collect all right, all right, somewhere down in them
redwood mountains south of Monterey."
CHAPTER II
It was a good afternoon's tramp to Niles, passing through the
town of Haywards; yet Saxon and Billy found time to diverge from
the main county road and take the parallel roads through acres of
intense cultivation where the land was farmed to the
wheel-tracks. Saxon looked with amazement at these small,
brown-skinned immigrants who came to the soil with nothing and
yet made the soil pay for itself to the tune of two hundred, of
five hundred, and of a thousand dollars an acre.
On every hand was activity. Women and children were in the fields
as well as men. The land was turned endlessly over and over. They
seemed never to let it rest. And it rewarded them. It must reward
them, or their children would not be able to go to school, nor
would so many of them be able to drive by in rattletrap,
second-hand buggies or in stout light wagons.
"Look at their faces," Saxon said. "They are happy and contented.
They haven't faces like the people in our neighborhood after the
strikes began."
"Oh, sure, they got a good thing," Billy agreed. "You can see it
stickin' out all over them. But they needn't get chesty with ME,
I can tell you that much--just because they've jiggerooed us out
of our land an' everything."
"But they're not showing any signs of chestiness," Saxon
demurred.
"No, they're not, come to think of it. All the same, they ain't
so wise. I bet I could tell 'em a few about horses."
It was sunset when they entered the little town of Niles. Billy,
who had been silent for the last half mile, hesitantly ventured a
suggestion.
"Say. .. I could put up for a room in the hotel just as well as
not. What d 'ye think?"
But Saxon shook her head emphatically.
"How long do you think our twenty dollars will last at that rate?
Besides, the only way to begin is to begin at the beginning. We
didn't plan sleeping in hotels."
"All right," he gave in. "I'm game. I was just thinkin' about
you."
"Then you'd better think I'm game, too," she flashed forgivingly.
"And now we'll have to see about getting things for supper."
They bought a round steak, potatoes, onions, and a dozen eating
apples, then went out from the town to the fringe of trees and
brush that advertised a creek. Beside the trees, on a sand bank,
they pitched camp. Plenty of dry wood lay about, and Billy
whistled genially while he gathered and chopped. Saxon, keen to
follow his every mood, was cheered by the atrocious discord on
his lips. She smiled to herself as she spread the blankets, with
the tarpaulin underneath, for a table, having first removed all
twigs from the sand. She had much to learn in the matter of
cooking over a camp-fire, and made fair progress, discovering,
first of all, that control of the fire meant far more than the
size of it. When the coffee was boiled, she settled the grounds
with a part-cup of cold water and placed the pot on the edge of
the coals where it would keep hot and yet not boil. She fried
potato dollars and onions in the same pan, but separately, and
set them on top of the coffee pot in the tin plate she was to eat
from, covering it with Billy's inverted plate. On the dry hot