h he passed, a twister that
was at least ten or eleven feet through. The trail led straight to a
small dam where was the intake for the pipe that watered the vegetable
garden. Here, beside the stream, were alders and laurel trees, and he
walked through fern-brakes higher than his head. Velvety moss was
everywhere, out of which grew maiden-hair and gold-back ferns.

Save for the dam, it was a virgin wild. No ax had invaded, and the
trees died only of old age and stress of winter storm. The huge trunks
of those that had fallen lay moss-covered, slowly resolving back into
the soil from which they sprang. Some had lain so long that they were
quite gone, though their faint outlines, level with the mould, could
still be seen. Others bridged the stream, and from beneath the bulk of
one monster half a dozen younger trees, overthrown and crushed by the
fall, growing out along the ground, still lived and prospered, their
roots bathed by the stream, their upshooting branches catching the
sunlight through the gap that had been made in the forest roof.

Back at the farm-house, Daylight mounted and rode on away from the
ranch and into the wilder canons and steeper steeps beyond. Nothing
could satisfy his holiday spirit now but the ascent of Sonoma Mountain.
And here on the crest, three hours afterward, he emerged, tired and
sweaty, garments torn and face and hands scratched, but with sparkling
eyes and an unwonted zestfulness of expression. He felt the illicit
pleasure of a schoolboy playing truant. The big gambling table of San
Francisco seemed very far away. But there was more than illicit
pleasure in his mood. It was as though he were going through a sort of
cleansing bath. No room here for all the sordidness, meanness, and
viciousness that filled the dirty pool of city existence. Without
pondering in detail upon the matter at all, his sensations were of
purification and uplift. Had he been asked to state how he felt, he
would merely have said that he was having a good time; for he was
unaware in his self-consciousness of the potent charm of nature that
was percolating through his city-rotted body and brain--potent, in that
he came of an abysmal past of wilderness dwellers, while he was himself
coated with but the thinnest rind of crowded civilization.

There were no houses in the summit of Sonoma Mountain, and, all alone
under the azure California sky, he reined in on the southern edge of
the peak. He saw open pas