t on the floor,
his nose pressed close to the crevice under the door of the little
cloakroom, winding his tail slowly back and forth, excited, very eager.
At times he would draw back and make a strange little clacking noise
down in his throat.

"Ain't he funnee?" said the little girl again. The cat slunk swiftly
away as the children came up. Then the tallest of the little girls swung
the door of the little cloakroom wide open and they all ran in.

CHAPTER 20

The day was very hot, and the silence of high noon lay close and thick
between the steep slopes of the canyons like an invisible, muffling
fluid. At intervals the drone of an insect bored the air and trailed
slowly to silence again. Everywhere were pungent, aromatic smells.
The vast, moveless heat seemed to distil countless odors from the
brush--odors of warm sap, of pine needles, and of tar-weed, and above
all the medicinal odor of witch hazel. As far as one could look,
uncounted multitudes of trees and manzanita bushes were quietly and
motionlessly growing, growing, growing. A tremendous, immeasurable Life
pushed steadily heavenward without a sound, without a motion. At turns
of the road, on the higher points, canyons disclosed themselves far
away, gigantic grooves in the landscape, deep blue in the distance,
opening one into another, ocean-deep, silent, huge, and suggestive of
colossal primeval forces held in reserve. At their bottoms they were
solid, massive; on their crests they broke delicately into fine serrated
edges where the pines and redwoods outlined their million of tops
against the high white horizon. Here and there the mountains lifted
themselves out of the narrow river beds in groups like giant lions
rearing their heads after drinking. The entire region was untamed. In
some places east of the Mississippi nature is cosey, intimate,
small, and homelike, like a good-natured housewife. In Placer County,
California, she is a vast, unconquered brute of the Pliocene epoch,
savage, sullen, and magnificently indifferent to man.

But there were men in these mountains, like lice on mammoths' hides,
fighting them stubbornly, now with hydraulic "monitors," now with drill
and dynamite, boring into the vitals of them, or tearing away great
yellow gravelly scars in the flanks of them, sucking their blood,
extracting gold.

Here and there at long distances upon the canyon sides rose the headgear
of a mine, surrounded with its few unpainted houses, and to