e some several thousan'
props. Which cost money, an' labor to put in an' take out every year.
These here natural braces don't have to have a thing done. They're
Johnny-on-the-spot all the time. Why, the Porchugeeze has got us skinned
a mile. Come on, I'll show you."

Billy, with city notions of trespass, betrayed perturbation at the
freedom they were making of the little farm.

"Oh, it's all right, as long as you don't step on nothin'," the lineman
reassured him. "Besides, my grandfather used to own this. They know me.
Forty years ago old Silva come from the Azores. Went sheep-herdin' in
the mountains for a couple of years, then blew in to San Leandro. These
five acres was the first land he leased. That was the beginnin'. Then he
began leasin' by the hundreds of acres, an' by the hundred-an'-sixties.
An' his sisters an' his uncles an' his aunts begun pourin' in from the
Azores--they're all related there, you know; an' pretty soon San Leandro
was a regular Porchugeeze settlement.

"An' old Silva wound up by buyin' these five acres from grandfather.
Pretty soon--an' father by that time was in the hole to the neck--he was
buyin' father's land by the hundred-an'-sixties. An' all the rest of
his relations was coin' the same thing. Father was always gettin' rich
quick, an' he wound up by dyin' in debt. But old Silva never overlooked
a bet, no matter how dinky. An' all the rest are just like him. You
see outside the fence there, clear to the wheel-tracks in the
road--horse-beans. We'd a-scorned to do a picayune thing like that. Not
Silva. Why he's got a town house in San Leandro now. An' he rides around
in a four-thousan'-dollar tourin' car. An' just the same his front door
yard grows onions clear to the sidewalk. He clears three hundred a year
on that patch alone. I know ten acres of land he bought last year,--a
thousan' an acre they asked'm, an' he never batted an eye. He knew it
was worth it, that's all. He knew he could make it pay. Back in the
hills, there, he's got a ranch of five hundred an' eighty acres, bought
it dirt cheap, too; an' I want to tell you I could travel around in a
different tourin' car every day in the week just outa the profits he
makes on that ranch from the horses all the way from heavy draughts to
fancy steppers.

"But how?--how?--how did he get it all?" Saxon clamored.

"By bein' wise to farmin'. Why, the whole blame family works. They
ain't ashamed to roll up their sleeves an' dig--sons an' d