And then, in a sudden rush, Saxon placed him. He it was who had stood with Roy Blanchard alongside the automobile on the day she had wandered, sick and unwitting, into strange neighborhoods. Nor had that day been the first time she had seen him.
"Remember the Bricklayers" Picnic at Weasel Park?" Billy was asking.
"An" the foot race? Why, I"d know that nose of yours anywhere among a million. You was the guy that stuck your cane between Timothy McMa.n.u.s"s legs an" started the grandest roughhouse Weasel Park or any other park ever seen."
The visitor now commenced to laugh. He stood on one leg as he laughed harder, then stood on the other leg. Finally he sat down on a log of driftwood.
"And you were there," he managed to gasp to Billy at last. "You saw it.
You saw it." He turned to Saxon. "--And you?"
She nodded.
"Say," Billy began again, as their laughter eased down, "what I wanta know is what"d you wanta do it for. Say, what"d you wanta do it for?
I"ve been askin" that to myself ever since."
"So have I," was the answer.
"You didn"t know Timothy McMa.n.u.s, did you?"
"No; I"d never seen him before, and I"ve never seen him since."
"But what"d you wanta do it for?" Billy persisted.
The young man laughed, then controlled himself.
"To save my life, I don"t know. I have one friend, a most intelligent chap that writes sober, scientific books, and he"s always aching to throw an egg into an electric fan to see what will happen. Perhaps that"s the way it was with me, except that there was no aching. When I saw those legs flying past, I merely stuck my stick in between. I didn"t know I was going to do it. I just did it. Timothy McMa.n.u.s was no more surprised than I was."
"Did they catch you?" Billy asked.
"Do I look as if they did? I was never so scared in my life. Timothy McMa.n.u.s himself couldn"t have caught me that day. But what happened afterward? I heard they had a fearful roughhouse, but I couldn"t stop to see."
It was not until a quarter of an hour had pa.s.sed, during which Billy described the fight, that introductions took place. Mark Hall was their visitor"s name, and he lived in a bungalow among the Carmel pines.
"But how did you ever find your way to Bierce"s Cove?" he was curious to know. "n.o.body ever dreams of it from the road."
"So that"s its name?" Saxon said.
"It"s the name we gave it. One of our crowd camped here one summer, and we named it after him. I"ll take a cup of that coffee, if you don"t mind."--This to Saxon. "And then I"ll show your husband around. We"re pretty proud of this cove. n.o.body ever comes here but ourselves."
"You didn"t get all that muscle from bein" chased by McMa.n.u.s," Billy observed over the coffee.
"Ma.s.sage under tension," was the cryptic reply.
"Yes," Billy said, pondering vacantly. "Do you eat it with a spoon?"
Hall laughed.
"I"ll show you. Take any muscle you want, tense it, then manipulate it with your fingers, so, and so."
"An" that done all that?" Billy asked skeptically.
"All that!" the other scorned proudly. "For one muscle you see, there"s five tucked away but under command. Touch your finger to any part of me and see."
Billy complied, touching the right breast.
"You know something about anatomy, picking a muscleless spot," scolded Hall.
Billy grinned triumphantly, then, to his amazement, saw a muscle grow up under his finger. He prodded it, and found it hard and honest.
"Ma.s.sage under tension!" Hall exulted. "Go on--anywhere you want."
And anywhere and everywhere Billy touched, muscles large and small rose up, quivered, and sank down, till the whole body was a ripple of willed quick.
"Never saw anything like it," Billy marveled at the end; "an" I"ve seen some few good men stripped in my time. Why, you"re all living silk."
"Ma.s.sage under tension did it, my friend. The doctors gave me up. My friends called me the sick rat, and the mangy poet, and all that. Then I quit the city, came down to Carmel, and went in for the open air--and ma.s.sage under tension."
"Jim Hazard didn"t get his muscles that way," Billy challenged.
"Certainly not, the lucky skunk; he was born with them. Mine"s made.
That"s the difference. I"m a work of art. He"s a cave bear. Come along.
I"ll show you around now. You"d better get your clothes off. Keep on only your shoes and pants, unless you"ve got a pair of trunks."
"My mother was a poet," Saxon said, while Billy was getting himself ready in the thicket. She had noted Hall"s reference to himself.
He seemed incurious, and she ventured further.
"Some of it was printed."
"What was her name?" he asked idly.
"Dayelle Wiley Brown. She wrote: "The Viking"s Quest"; "Days of Gold"; "Constancy"; "The Caballero"; "Graves at Little Meadow"; and a lot more.
Ten of them are in "The Story of the Files.""
"I"ve the book at home," he remarked, for the first time showing real interest. "She was a pioneer, of course--before my time. I"ll look her up when I get back to the house. My people were pioneers. They came by Panama, in the Fifties, from Long Island. My father was a doctor, but he went into business in San Francisco and robbed his fellow men out of enough to keep me and the rest of a large family going ever since.--Say, where are you and your husband bound?"
When Saxon had told him of their attempt to get away from Oakland and of their quest for land, he sympathized with the first and shook his head over the second.
"It"s beautiful down beyond the Sur," he told her. "I"ve been all over those redwood canyons, and the place is alive with game. The government land is there, too. But you"d be foolish to settle. It"s too remote. And it isn"t good farming land, except in patches in the canyons. I know a Mexican there who is wild to sell his five hundred acres for fifteen hundred dollars. Three dollars an acre! And what does that mean? That it isn"t worth more. That it isn"t worth so much; because he can find no takers. Land, you know, is worth what they buy and sell it for."
Billy, emerging from the thicket, only in shoes and in pants rolled to the knees, put an end to the conversation; and Saxon watched the two men, physically so dissimilar, climb the rocks and start out the south side of the cove. At first her eyes followed them lazily, but soon she grew interested and worried. Hall was leading Billy up what seemed a perpendicular wall in order to gain the backbone of the rock. Billy went slowly, displaying extreme caution; but twice she saw him slip, the weather-eaten stone crumbling away in his hand and rattling beneath him into the cove. When Hall reached the top, a hundred feet above the sea, she saw him stand upright and sway easily on the knife-edge which she knew fell away as abruptly on the other side. Billy, once on top, contented himself with crouching on hands and knees. The leader went on, upright, walking as easily as on a level floor. Billy abandoned the hands and knees position, but crouched closely and often helped himself with his hands.
The knife-edge backbone was deeply serrated, and into one of the notches both men disappeared. Saxon could not keep down her anxiety, and climbed out on the north side of the cove, which was less rugged and far less difficult to travel. Even so, the unaccustomed height, the crumbling surface, and the fierce buffets of the wind tried her nerve. Soon she was opposite the men. They had leaped a narrow chasm and were scaling another tooth. Already Billy was going more nimbly, but his leader often paused and waited for him. The way grew severer, and several times the clefts they essayed extended down to the ocean level and spouted spray from the growling breakers that burst through. At other times, standing erect, they would fall forward across deep and narrow clefts until their palms met the opposing side; then, clinging with their fingers, their bodies would be drawn across and up.
Near the end, Hall and Billy went out of sight over the south side of the backbone, and when Saxon saw them again they were rounding the extreme point of rock and coming back on the cove side. Here the way seemed barred. A wide fissure, with hopelessly vertical sides, yawned skywards from a foam-white vortex where the mad waters shot their level a dozen feet upward and dropped it as abruptly to the black depths of battered rock and writhing weed.
Clinging precariously, the men descended their side till the spray was flying about them. Here they paused. Saxon could see Hall pointing down across the fissure and imagined he was showing some curious thing to Billy. She was not prepared for what followed. The surf-level sucked and sank away, and across and down Hall jumped to a narrow foothold where the wash had roared yards deep the moment before. Without pause, as the returning sea rushed up, he was around the sharp corner and clawing upward hand and foot to escape being caught. Billy was now left alone.
He could not even see Hall, much less be further advised by him, and so tensely did Saxon watch, that the pain in her finger-tips, crushed to the rock by which she held, warned her to relax. Billy waited his chance, twice made tentative preparations to leap and sank back, then leaped across and down to the momentarily exposed foothold, doubled the corner, and as he clawed up to join Hall was washed to the waist but not torn away.