palm of one great hand. At this point Mrs. Dyke was called in, both
father and daughter, children both, crying out that she was to come in
and look, look. She arrived out of breath from the kitchen, the potato
masher in her hand. "Such children," she murmured, shaking her head at
them, amused for all that, tucking the potato masher under her arm and
clapping her hands. In the end, it was part of the game that Sidney
should tumble down upon Dyke, whereat he invariably vented a great
bellow as if in pain, declaring that his ribs were broken. Gasping, his
eyes shut, he pretended to be in the extreme of dissolution--perhaps
he was dying. Sidney, always a little uncertain, amused but distressed,
shook him nervously, tugging at his beard, pushing open his eyelid with
one finger, imploring him not to frighten her, to wake up and be good.

On this occasion, while yet he was half-dressed, Dyke tiptoed into his
mother's room to look at Sidney fast asleep in her little iron cot, her
arm under her head, her lips parted. With infinite precaution he kissed
her twice, and then finding one little stocking, hung with its mate very
neatly over the back of a chair, dropped into it a dime, rolled up in a
wad of paper. He winked all to himself and went out again, closing the
door with exaggerated carefulness.

He breakfasted alone, Mrs. Dyke pouring his coffee and handing him his
plate of ham and eggs, and half an hour later took himself off in his
springless, skeleton wagon, humming a tune behind his beard and cracking
the whip over the backs of his staid and solid farm horses.

The morning was fine, the sun just coming up. He left Guadalajara,
sleeping and lifeless, on his left, and going across lots, over an
angle of Quien Sabe, came out upon the Upper Road, a mile below the
Long Trestle. He was in great spirits, looking about him over the brown
fields, ruddy with the dawn. Almost directly in front of him, but far
off, the gilded dome of the court-house at Bonneville was glinting
radiant in the first rays of the sun, while a few miles distant,
toward the north, the venerable campanile of the Mission San Juan stood
silhouetted in purplish black against the flaming east. As he proceeded,
the great farm horses jogging forward, placid, deliberate, the country
side waked to another day. Crossing the irrigating ditch further on, he
met a gang of Portuguese, with picks and shovels over their shoulders,
just going to work. Hooven, already abro