across his back. He much appreciates a lift in your rig; and sometimes
proves worth the trouble. His labour raises him above the level
degradation of the ordinary tramp; the independence of his spirit gives
his point of view an originality; the nomadic stirring of his blood
keeps him going. In the course of years he has crossed the length and
breadth of the state a half dozen times. He has harvested apples in
Siskiyou and oranges in Riverside; he has chopped sugar pine in the
snows of the Sierras and manzanita on the blazing hillsides of San
Bernardino; he has garnered the wheat of the great Santa Clara Valley
and the alfalfa of San Fernando. And whenever the need for change or the
desire for a drink has struck him, he has drawn his pay, strapped his
bed roll, and cheerfully hiked away down the long and dusty trail.

That is his chief defect as a field hand--his unreliability. He seems
to have no great pride in finishing out a job, although he is a good
worker while he is at it. The Captain used to send in the wagon to bring
men out, but refused absolutely to let any man ride in anything going
the other way. Nevertheless the hand, when the wanderlust hit him,
trudged cheerfully the long distance to town. I am not sure that a new
type is not thus developing, a type as distinct in its way as the
riverman or the cowboy. It is not as high a type, of course, for it has
not the strength either of sustained and earnest purpose nor of class
loyalty; but still it makes for new species. The California field hand
has mother-wit, independence, a certain reckless, you-be-damned courage,
a wandering instinct. He quits work not because he wants to loaf, but
because he wants to go somewhere else. He is always on the road
travelling, travelling, travelling. It is not hope of gain that takes
him, for in the scarcity of labour wages are as high here as there. It
is not desire for dissipation that lures him from labour; he drinks hard
enough, but the liquor is as potent here as two hundred miles away. He
looks you steadily enough in the eye; and he begs his bread and commits
his depredations half humorously, as though all this were fooling that
both you and he understood. What his impelling motive is, I cannot say;
nor whether he himself understands it, this restlessness that turns his
feet ever to the pleasant California highways, an Ishmael of the road.

But this very unreliability forces the ranchman to the next element in
our consider