by Jack London
scattered, and the leasing began. It's a ruin to-day. The trees
have been cut and sold for firewood. There's only a little bit of
the vineyard that isn't abandoned--just enough to make wine for
the present Italian lessees, who are running a poverty-stricken
milk ranch on the leavings of the soil. I rode over it last year,
and cried. The beautiful orchard is a horror. The grounds have
gone back to the wild. Just because they didn't keep the gutters
cleaned out, the rain trickled down and dry-rotted the timbers,
and the big stone barn is caved in. The same with part of the
winery--the other part is used for stabling the cows. And the
house!--words can't describe!"
"It's become a profession," Hastings went on. "The 'movers.' They
lease, clean out and gut a place in several years, and then move
on. They're not like the foreigners, the Chinese, and Japanese,
and the rest. In the main they're a lazy, vagabond, poor-white
sort, who do nothing else but skin the soil and move, skin the
soil and move. Now take the Portuguese and Italians in our
country. They are different. They arrive in the country without a
penny and work for others of their countrymen until they've
learned the language and their way about. Now they're not movers.
What they are after is land of their own, which they will love
and care for and conserve. But, in the meantime, how to get it?
Saving wages is slow. There is a quicker way. They lease. In
three years they can gut enough out of somebody else's land to
set themselves up for life. It is sacrilege, a veritable rape of
the land; but what of it? It's the way of the United States."
He turned suddenly on Billy.
"Look here, Roberts. You and your wife are looking for your bit
of land. You want it bad. Now take my advice. It's cold, hard
advice. Become a tenant farmer. Lease some place, where the old
folks have died and the country isn't good enough for the sons
and daughters. Then gut it. Wring the last dollar out of the
soil, repair nothing, and in three years you'll have your own
place paid for. Then turn over a new leaf, and love your soil.
Nourish it. Every dollar you feed it will return you two. Lend
have nothing scrub about the place. If it's a horse, a cow, a
pig, a chicken, or a blackberry vine, see that it's
thoroughbred."
"But it's wicked!" Saxon wrung out. "It's wicked advice."
"We live in a wicked age," Hastings countered, smiling grimly.
"This wholesale land-skinning is the national crime of the United
States to-day. Nor would I give your husband such advice if I
weren't absolutely certain that the land he skins would be
skinned by some Portuguese or Italian if he refused. As fast as
they arrive and settle down, they send for their sisters and
their cousins and their aunts. If you were thirsty, if a
warehouse were burning and beautiful Rhine wine were running to
waste, would you stay your hand from scooping a drink? Well, the
national warehouse is afire in many places, and no end of the
good things are running to waste. Help yourself. If you don't,
the immigrants will."
"Oh, you don't know him," Mrs. Hastings hurried to explain. "He
spends all his time on the ranch in conserving the soil. There
are over a thousand acres of woods alone, and, though he thins
and forests like a surgeon, he won't let a tree be chopped
without his permission. He's even planted a hundred thousand
trees. He's always draining and ditching to stop erosion, and
experimenting with pasture grasses. And every little while he
buys some exhausted adjoining ranch and starts building up the
soil."
"Wherefore I know what I 'm talking about," Hastings broke in.
"And my advice holds. I love the soil, yet to-morrow, things being
as they are and if I were poor, I'd gut five hundred acres in
order to buy twenty-five for myself. When you get into Sonoma
Valley, look me up, and I'll put you onto the whole game, and
both ends of it. I'll show you construction as well as
destruction. When you find a farm doomed to be gutted anyway, why
jump in and do it yourself."
"Yes, and he mortgaged himself to the eyes," laughed Mrs.
Hastings, "to keep five hundred acres of woods out of the hands
of the charcoal burners."
Ahead, on the left bank of the Sacramento, just at the fading end
of the Montezuma Hills, Rio Vista appeared. The Roamer slipped
through the smooth water, past steamboat wharves, landing stages,
and warehouses. The two Japanese went for'ard on deck. At command
of Hastings, the jib ran down, and he shot the Roomer into the
wind, losing way, until he called, "Let go the hook!" The anchor
went down, and the yacht swung to it, so close to shore that the
skiff lay under overhanging willows.
"Farther up the river we tie to the bank," Mrs. Hastings said,
"so that when you wake in the morning you find the branches of
trees sticking down into the cabin."
"Ooh!" Saxon murmured, pointing to a lump on her wrist. "Look at
that. A mosquito."
"Pretty early for them," Hastings said. "But later on they're
terrible. I've seen them so thick I couldn't back the jib against
them."
Saxon was not nautical enough to appreciate his hyperbole, though
Billy grinned.
"There are no mosquitoes in the valley of the moon," she said.
"No, never," said Mrs. Hastings, whose husband began immediately
to regret the smallness of the cabin which prevented him from
offering sleeping accommodations.
An automobile bumped along on top of the levee, and the young
boys and girls in it cried, "Oh, you kid!" to Saxon and Billy,
and Hastings, who was rowing them ashore in the skiff. Hastings
called, "Oh, you kid!" back to them; and Saxon, pleasuring in the
boyishness of his sunburned face, was reminded of the boyishness
of Mark Hall and his Carmel crowd.
CHAPTER XII
Crossing the Sacramento on an old-fashioned ferry a short
distance above Rio Vista, Saxon and Billy entered the river
country. From the top of the levee she got her revelation.
Beneath, lower than the river, stretched broad, flat land, far as
the eye could see. Roads ran in every direction, and she saw
countless farmhouses of which she had never dreamed when sailing
on the lonely river a few feet the other side of the willowy
fringe.
Three weeks they spent among the rich farm islands, which heaped
up levees and pumped day and night to keep afloat. It was a
monotonous land, with an unvarying richness of soil and with only
one landmark--Mt. Diablo, ever to be seen, sleeping in the midday
azure, limping its crinkled mass against the sunset sky, or
forming like a dream out of the silver dawn. Sometimes on foot,
often by launch, they cries-crossed and threaded the river region
as far as the peat lands of the Middle River, down the San
Joaquin to Antioch, and up Georgiana Slough to Walnut Grove on
the Sacramento. And it proved a foreign land. The workers of
the
soil teemed by thousands, yet Saxon and Billy knew what it was to
go a whole day without finding any one who spoke English. They
encountered--sometimes in whole villages--Chinese, Japanese,
Italians, Portuguese, Swiss, Hindus, Koreans, Norwegians, Danes,
French, Armenians, Slavs, almost every nationality save American.
One American they found on the lower reaches of Georgiana who
eked an illicit existence by fishing with traps. Another
American, who spouted blood and destruction on all political
subjects, was an itinerant bee-farmer. At Walnut Grove, bustling
with life, the few Americans consisted of the storekeeper, the
saloonkeeper, the butcher, the keeper of the drawbridge, and the
ferryman. Yet two thriving towns were in Walnut Grove, one
Chinese, one Japanese. Most of the land was owned by Americans,
who lived away from it and were continually selling it to the
foreigners.
A riot, or a merry-making--they could not tell which--was taking
place in the Japanese town, as Saxon and Billy steamed out on the
Apache, bound for Sacramento.
"We're settin' on the stoop," Billy railed. "Pretty soon they'll
crowd us off of that."
"There won't be any stoop in the valley of the moon," Saxon
cheered him.
But he was inconsolable, remarking bitterly:
"An' they ain't one of them damn foreigners that can handle four
horses like me.
"But they can everlastingly farm," he added.
And Saxon, looking at his moody face, was suddenly reminded of a
lithograph she had seen in her childhood It was of a Plains
Indian, in paint and feathers, astride his horse and gazing with
wondering eye at a railroad train rushing along a fresh-made
track. The Indian had passed, she remembered, before the tide of
new life that brought the railroad. And were Billy and his kind
doomed to pass, she pondered, before this new tide of life,
amazingly industrious, that was flooding in from Asia and Europe?
At Sacramento they stopped two weeks, where Billy drove team and
earned the money to put them along on their travels. Also, life
in Oakland and Carmel, close to the salt edge of the coast, had
spoiled them for the interior. Too warm, was their verdict of
Sacramento and they followed the railroad west, through a region
of swamp-land, to Davisville. Here they were lured aside and to
the north to pretty Woodland, where Billy drove team for a fruit
farm, and where Saxon wrung from him a reluctant consent for her
to work a few days in the fruit harvest. She made an important
and mystifying secret of what she intended doing with her
earnings, and Billy teased her about it until the matter passed
from his mind. Nor did she tell him of a money order inclosed
with a certain blue slip of paper in a letter to Bud Strothers.
They began to suffer from the heat. Billy declared they had
strayed out of the blanket climate.
"There are no redwoods here," Saxon said. "We must go west toward
the coast. It is there we'll find the valley of the moon."
From Woodland they swung west and south along the county roads to
the fruit paradise of Vacaville. Here Billy picked fruit, then
drove team; and here Saxon received a letter and a tiny express
package from Bud Strothers. When Billy came into camp from the
day's work, she bade him stand still and shut his eyes. For a few
seconds she fumbled and did something to the breast of his cotton
work-shirt. Once, he felt a slight prick, as of a pin point, and
grunted, while she laughed and bullied him to continue keeping
his eyes shut.
"Close your eyes and give me a kiss," she sang, "and then I'll
show you what iss."
She kissed him and when he looked down he saw, pinned to his
shirt, the gold medals he had pawned the day they had gone to the
moving picture show and received their inspiration to return to
the land.
"You darned kid!" he exclaimed, as he caught her to him. "So
that's what you blew your fruit money in on? An' I never
guessed!--Come here to you."
And thereupon she suffered the pleasant mastery of his brawn, and
was hugged and wrestled with until the coffee pot boiled over and
she darted from him to the rescue.
"I kinda always been a mite proud of 'em," he confessed, as he
rolled his after-supper cigarette. "They take me back to my kid
days when I amateured it to beat the band. I was some kid in them
days, believe muh.--But say, d'ye know, they'd clean slipped my
recollection. Oakland's a thousan' years away from you an' me,
an' ten thousan' miles."
"Then this will bring you back to it," Saxon said, opening Bud's
letter and reading it aloud.
Bud had taken it for granted that Billy knew the wind-up of the
strike; so he devoted himself to the details as to which men had
got back their jobs, and which had been blacklisted. To his own
amazement he had been taken back, and was now driving Billy's
horses. Still more amazing was the further information he had to
impart. The old foreman of the West Oakland stables had died, and
since then two other foremen had done nothing but make messes of
everything. The point of all which was that the Boss had spoken
that day to Bud, regretting the disappearance of Billy.
"Don't make no mistake," Bud wrote. "The Boss is onto all your
curves. I bet he knows every scab you slugged. Just the same he
says to me--Strothers, if you ain't at liberty to give me his
address, just write yourself and tell him for me to come a
running. I'll give him a hundred and twenty-five a month to take
hold the stables."
Saxon waited with well-concealed anxiety when the letter was
finished. Billy, stretched out, leaning on one elbow, blew a
meditative ring of smoke. His cheap workshirt, incongruously
brilliant with the gold of the medals that flashed in the
firelight, was open in front, showing the smooth skin and
splendid swell of chest. He glanced around--at the blankets
bowered in a green screen and waiting, at the campfire and the
blackened, battered coffee pot, at the well-worn hatchet, half
buried in a tree trunk, and lastly at Saxon. His eyes embraced
her; then into them came a slow expression of inquiry. But she
offered no help.
"Well," he uttered finally, "all you gotta do is write Bud
Strothers, an' tell 'm not on the Boss's ugly tintype.--An'
while you're about it, I'll send 'm the money to get my watch
out. You work out the interest. The overcoat can stay there an'
rot."
But they did not prosper in the interior heat. They lost weight.
The resilience went out of their minds and bodies. As Billy
expressed it, their silk was frazzled. So they shouldered their
packs and headed west across the wild mountains. In the Berryessa
Valley, the shimmering heat waves made their eyes ache, and their
heads; so that they traveled on in the early morning and late
afternoon. Still west they headed, over more mountains, to
beauti
ful Napa Valley. The next valley beyond was Sonoma, where
Hastings had invited them to his ranch. And here they would have
gone, had not Billy chanced upon a newspaper item which told of
the writer's departure to cover some revolution that was breaking
out somewhere in Mexico.
"We'll see 'm later on," Billy said, as they turned northwest,
through the vineyards and orchards of Napa Valley. "We're like
that millionaire Bert used to sing about, except it's time that
we've got to burn. Any direction is as good as any other, only
west is best."
Three times in the Napa Valley Billy refused work. Past St.
Helena, Saxon hailed with joy the unmistakable redwoods they
could see growing up the small canyons that penetrated the
western wall of the valley. At Calistoga, at the end of the
railroad, they saw the six-horse stages leaving for Middletown
and Lower Lake. They debated their route. That way led to Lake
County and not toward the coast, so Saxon and Billy swung west
through the mountains to the valley of the Russian River, coming
out at Healdsburg. They lingered in the hop-fields on the rich
bottoms, where Billy scorned to pick hops alongside of Indians,
Japanese, and Chinese.
"I couldn't work alongside of 'em an hour before I'd be knockin'
their blocks off," he explained. "Besides, this Russian River's
some nifty. Let's pitch camp and go swimmin'."
So they idled their way north up the broad, fertile valley, so
happy that they forgot that work was ever necessary, while the
valley of the moon was a golden dream, remote, but sure, some day
of realization. At Cloverdale, Billy fell into luck. A
combination of sickness and mischance found the stage stables
short a driver. Each day the train disgorged passengers for the
Geysers, and Billy, as if accustomed to it all his life, took the
reins of six horses and drove a full load over the mountains in
stage time. The second trip he had Saxon beside him on the high
boxseat. By the end of two weeks the regular driver was back.
Billy declined a stable-job, took his wages, and continued north.
Saxon had adopted a fox terrier puppy and named him Possum, after
the dog Mrs. Hastings had told them about. So young was he that
he quickly became footsore, and she carried him until Billy
perched him on top of his pack and grumbled that Possum was
chewing his back hair to a frazzle.
They passed through the painted vineyards of Asti at the end of
the grape-picking, and entered Ukiah drenched to the skin by the
first winter rain.
"Say," Billy said, "you remember the way the Roamer just skated
along. Well, this summer's done the same thing--gone by on
wheels. An' now it's up to us to find some place to winter. This
Ukiah looks like a pretty good burg. We'll get a room to-night
an' dry out. An' to-morrow I'll hustle around to the stables, an'
if I locate anything we can rent a shack an' have all winter to
think about where we'll go next year."
CHAPTER XIII
The winter proved much less exciting than the one spent in
Carmel, and keenly as Saxon had appreciated the Carmel folk, she
now appreciated them more keenly than ever. In Ukiah she formed
nothing more than superficial acquaintances. Here people were
more like those of the working class she had known in Oakland, or
else they were merely wealthy and herded together in automobiles.
There was no democratic artist-colony that pursued fellowship
disregardful of the caste of wealth.
Yet it was a more enjoyable winter than any she had spent in
Oakland. Billy had failed to get regular employment; so she saw
much of him, and they lived a prosperous and happy hand-to-mouth
existence in the tiny cottage they rented. As extra man at the
biggest livery stable, Billy's spare time was so great that he
drifted into horse-trading. It was hazardous, and more than once
he was broke, but the table never wanted for the best of steak
and coffee, nor did they stint themselves for clothes.