t in the Basin, sitting beside Marie
in the huge campfire circle, made wonderful by the shadowy giants,
the redwoods; talking foolishness in undertones while the crowd sang
snatches of songs which no one knew from beginning to end, and that went
very lumpy in the verses and very much out of harmony in the choruses.
Sometimes they would stroll down toward that sweeter music the creek
made, and stand beside one of the enormous trees and watch the glow of
the fire, and the silhouettes of the people gathered around it.

In a week they were surreptitiously holding hands. In two weeks they
could scarcely endure the partings when Bud must start back to San Jose,
and were taxing their ingenuity to invent new reasons why Marie must go
along. In three weeks they were married, and Marie's mother--a shrewd,
shrewish widow--was trying to decide whether she should wash her hands
of Marie, or whether it might be well to accept the situation and hope
that Bud would prove himself a rising young man.

But that was a year in the past. Bud had cabin fever now and did not
know what ailed him, though cause might have been summed up in two meaty
phrases: too much idleness, and too much mother-in-law. Also, not enough
comfort and not enough love.

In the kitchen of the little green cottage on North Sixth Street where
Bud had built the home nest with much nearly-Mission furniture and a
piano, Bud was frying his own hotcakes for his ten o'clock breakfast,
and was scowling over the task. He did not mind the hour so much, but he
did mortally hate to cook his own breakfast--or any other meal, for that
matter. In the next room a rocking chair was rocking with a rhythmic
squeak, and a baby was squalling with that sustained volume of sound
which never fails to fill the adult listener with amazement. It affected
Bud unpleasantly, just as the incessant bawling of a band of weaning
calves used to do. He could not bear the thought of young things going
hungry.

"For the love of Mike, Marie! Why don't you feed that kid, or do
something to shut him up?" he exploded suddenly, dribbling pancake
batter over the untidy range.

The squeak, squawk of the rocker ceased abruptly. "'Cause it isn't time
yet to feed him--that's why. What's burning out there? I'll bet you've
got the stove all over dough again--" The chair resumed its squeaking,
the baby continued uninterrupted its wah-h-hah! wah-h-hah, as though it
was a phonograph that had been wound up with that