oul straightened her manly back and raised her shrill, womanish
voice nervously. "Oh, I hope you told him you'd stood at the cannon's
mouth before, an' wasn't afraid to face him or any other red-handed
destroyer of his country's flag. I hope you told him that, Sandy."

"Well, I wasn't to say brash," returned her husband slowly and
soothingly. "It wouldn't do, Minervy; it wouldn't do." Lysander uncoiled
his long braided lash and whipped off two or three spikes of the
withering, perfumed sage. "I talked up to 'im, though, middlin'
impident; but law! it didn't hurt 'im; he's got a hide like a
hypothenuse."

Mrs. Sproul drew a long, excited breath.

"I wish mother'd been along, Sandy; she'd 'a' told 'im a thing or two."

Lysander was discreetly silent. The sage and greasewood ended abruptly,
and a row of leafless walnut-trees stretched their gaunt white branches
above the road. Here and there an almond-tree, lured into premature
bloom by the seductive California winter, stood like a wraith by the
roadside. They could see the cabin now. A square of flaring and fading
light marked the open doorway. The mules quickened their pace, and the
wagon rattled over the stony road.

"Talk about increasin' the value o' this piece o' property!" the man
broke out contemptuously. "I told 'im it would take a good deal o' chin
to convince the old woman that anything would increase the value o' this
ranch o' hern, and danged if I didn't think she was right. I'd pegged
away at it two years, an' I couldn't."

"What did he say to that, Sandy?" demanded the woman, with admiring
eagerness.

"Say? Oh, he said the soil was good. An' I 'lowed it was,--what there
was of it; an' so was the boulders good, for boulders,--the trouble was
in the mixin'. 'Don't talk to me about your "decomposed granite,"' says
I: 'it's the granite what ain't decomposed that bothers me.' But
pshaw!"--and Lysander dropped his voice hopelessly,--"he ain't a-carin'.
I'd about as soon work the boulders as try to work him; he's harder'n
any boulder on the ranch."

The mules turned into a narrow road, and stopped before the stable, a
shackly, semi-tropical structure, consisting of four sycamore posts and
a brush-covered roof. The lower half of the firelit doorway beyond
suddenly darkened, and there was a swift, scurrying sound among the
bushes that intervened between the house and the shed. A succession of
heads, visible even in the deepening twilight by reason of a unifo