"Land-hogs," he snapped. "That"s our record in this country. As one old Reuben told a professor of an agricultural experiment station: "They ain"t no sense in tryin" to teach me farmin". I know all about it. Ain"t I worked out three farms?" It was his kind that destroyed New England.
Back there great sections are relapsing to wilderness. In one state, at least, the deer have increased until they are a nuisance. There are abandoned farms by the tens of thousands. I"ve gone over the lists of them--farms in New York, New Jersey, Ma.s.sachusetts, Connecticut.
Offered for sale on easy payment. The prices asked wouldn"t pay for the improvements, while the land, of course, is thrown in for nothing.
"And the same thing is going on, in one way or another, the same land-robbing and hogging, over the rest of the country--down in Texas, in Missouri, and Kansas, out here in California. Take tenant farming.
I know a ranch in my county where the land was worth a hundred and twenty-five an acre. And it gave its return at that valuation. When the old man died, the son leased it to a Portuguese and went to live in the city. In five years the Portuguese skimmed the cream and dried up the udder. The second lease, with another Portuguese for three years, gave one-quarter the former return. No third Portuguese appeared to offer to lease it. There wasn"t anything left. That ranch was worth fifty thousand when the old man died. In the end the son got eleven thousand for it. Why, I"ve seen land that paid twelve per cent., that, after the skimming of a five-years" lease, paid only one and a quarter per cent."
"It"s the same in our valley," Mrs. Hastings supplemented. "All the old farms are dropping into ruin. Take the Ebell Place, Mate." Her husband nodded emphatic indors.e.m.e.nt. "When we used to know it, it was a perfect paradise of a farm. There were dams and lakes, beautiful meadows, lush hayfields, red hills of grape-lands, hundreds of acres of good pasture, heavenly groves of pines and oaks, a stone winery, stone barns, grounds--oh, I couldn"t describe it in hours. When Mrs. Bell died, the family 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 j.a.panese, 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.
And 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 gra.s.ses. 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 j.a.panese 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 sh.o.r.e 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 b.u.mped 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 ash.o.r.e 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 ma.s.s against the sunset sky, or forming like a dream out of the silver dawn. Sometimes on foot, often by launch, they criss-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, j.a.panese, 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 j.a.panese. 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 j.a.panese 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 d.a.m.n 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 pa.s.sed, she remembered, before the tide of new life that brought the railroad.
And were Billy and his kind doomed to pa.s.s, 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 pa.s.sed 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 p.r.i.c.k, 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 p.a.w.ned 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."