IX

Instead of returning to the city on Monday, Daylight rented the
butcher's horse for another day and crossed the bed of the valley to
its eastern hills to look at the mine. It was dryer and rockier here
than where he had been the day before, and the ascending slopes
supported mainly chaparral, scrubby and dense and impossible to
penetrate on horseback. But in the canyons water was plentiful and
also a luxuriant forest growth. The mine was an abandoned affair, but
he enjoyed the half-hour's scramble around. He had had experience in
quartz-mining before he went to Alaska, and he enjoyed the
recrudescence of his old wisdom in such matters. The story was simple
to him: good prospects that warranted the starting of the tunnel into
the sidehill; the three months' work and the getting short of money;
the lay-off while the men went away and got jobs; then the return and a
new stretch of work, with the "pay" ever luring and ever receding into
the mountain, until, after years of hope, the men had given up and
vanished. Most likely they were dead by now, Daylight thought, as he
turned in the saddle and looked back across the canyon at the ancient
dump and dark mouth of the tunnel.

As on the previous day, just for the joy of it, he followed
cattle-trails at haphazard and worked his way up toward the summits.
Coming out on a wagon road that led upward, he followed it for several
miles, emerging in a small, mountain-encircled valley, where half a
dozen poor ranchers farmed the wine-grapes on the steep slopes.
Beyond, the road pitched upward. Dense chaparral covered the exposed
hillsides but in the creases of the canons huge spruce trees grew, and
wild oats and flowers.

Half an hour later, sheltering under the summits themselves, he came
out on a clearing. Here and there, in irregular patches where the
steep and the soil favored, wine grapes were growing. Daylight could
see that it had been a stiff struggle, and that wild nature showed
fresh signs of winning--chaparral that had invaded the clearings;
patches and parts of patches of vineyard, unpruned, grassgrown, and
abandoned; and everywhere old stake-and-rider fences vainly striving to
remain intact. Here, at a small farm-house surrounded by large
outbuildings, the road ended. Beyond, the chaparral blocked the way.

He came upon an old woman forking manure in the barnyard, and reined in
by the fence.

"Hello, mother," was his greeting; "ain't you got any men-fo