out of her soul as she had looked.

They cleared the crest of the hill, and he watched the joy mount in her
face as she gazed on the sweet, fresh land. He pointed out the group
of heavily wooded knolls across the rolling stretches of ripe grain.

"They're ours," he said. "And they're only a sample of the ranch.
Wait till you see the big canon. There are 'coons down there, and back
here on the Sonoma there are mink. And deer!--why, that mountain's
sure thick with them, and I reckon we can scare up a mountain-lion if
we want to real hard. And, say, there's a little meadow--well, I ain't
going to tell you another word. You wait and see for yourself."

They turned in at the gate, where the road to the clay-pit crossed the
fields, and both sniffed with delight as the warm aroma of the ripe hay
rose in their nostrils. As on his first visit, the larks were uttering
their rich notes and fluttering up before the horses until the woods
and the flower-scattered glades were reached, when the larks gave way
to blue jays and woodpeckers.

"We're on our land now," he said, as they left the hayfield behind.
"It runs right across country over the roughest parts. Just you wait
and see."

As on the first day, he turned aside from the clay-pit and worked
through the woods to the left, passing the first spring and jumping the
horses over the ruined remnants of the stake-and-rider fence. From
here on, Dede was in an unending ecstasy. By the spring that gurgled
among the redwoods grew another great wild lily, bearing on its slender
stalk the prodigious outburst of white waxen bells. This time he did
not dismount, but led the way to the deep canon where the stream had
cut a passage among the knolls. He had been at work here, and a steep
and slippery horse trail now crossed the creek, so they rode up beyond,
through the somber redwood twilight, and, farther on, through a tangled
wood of oak and madrono. They came to a small clearing of several
acres, where the grain stood waist high.

"Ours," Daylight said.

She bent in her saddle, plucked a stalk of the ripe grain, and nibbled
it between her teeth.

"Sweet mountain hay," she cried. "The kind Mab likes."

And throughout the ride she continued to utter cries and ejaculations
of surprise and delight.

"And you never told me all this!" she reproached him, as they looked
across the little clearing and over the descending slopes of woods to
the great curving sweep of Sonoma