han Bella
does. But for my child--my son--I want everything. Want him a
gentleman like his ancestors, French and American"--she gave his arm a
propitiating squeeze for she knew he disliked this kind of talk--"want
him to be educated like my father, and know everything, and have a
profession."

"You're looking far ahead."

"Years and years ahead," and then with deprecating eyes and
irrepressible laughter, "Now don't say I'm foolish, but sometimes I
think of him getting married and the kind of girl I'll choose for
him--not stupid like me, but one who's good and beautiful and knows all
about literature and geography and science. The finest girl in the
world, and I'll find her for him."

He didn't laugh, instead he looked sulkily thoughtful:

"And where will we get the money to do all this?"

"We'll make it. We have a good deal now. Daddy John told me the other
day he thought we had nearly ten thousand dollars in dust beside what
my father left. That will be plenty to begin on, and you can go into
business down on the coast. They told Daddy John at the Fort there
would be hundreds and thousands of people coming in next spring.
They'll build towns, make Sacramento and San Francisco big places with
lots going on. We can settle in whichever seems the most thriving and
get back into the kind of life where we belong."

It was her old song, the swan song of his hopes. He felt a loneliness
more bitter than he had ever before conceived of. In the jarring
tumult of a growing city he saw himself marked in his own eyes, aloof
in the street and the market place, a stranger by his own fireside. In
his fear he swore that he would thwart her, keep her in the wild
places, crush her maternal ambitions and force her to share his chosen
life, the life of the outcast. He knew that it would mean conflict,
the subduing of a woman nerved by a mother's passion. And as he worked
in the ditches he thought about it, arranging the process by which he
would gradually break her to his will, beat down her aspirations till
she was reduced to the abject docility of a squaw. Then he would hold
her forever under his hand and eye, broken as a dog to his word,
content to wander with him on those lonely paths where he would tread
out the measure of his days.

Toward the end of November the rains came. First in hesitant showers,
then in steadier downpourings, finally, as December advanced, in
torrential fury. Veils of water descended upo