he banks of the stream and stood in a rough clearing. A
great gash in the woods above it showed whence lumber for buildings and
fires came; another ugly gash marked the course of the "pole line" over
the mountain. Near the big building stood lesser ones, two or three
rough little unpainted cottages perched on the hill above it. There was
a "cook-house," and a "bunk-house," and storage sheds, and Mrs.
Tolley's locked provision shed, and the rough shack the builders lived
in while construction was going on, and where the Hopps lived now, rent
free.

Nasturtiums languished here and there, where some of the women had made
an effort to fight the unresponsive red clay. Otherwise, even after two
years, the power-house and its environs looked unfinished, crude, ugly.
On all sides the mountains rose dark and steep, the pointed tops of the
redwoods mounting evenly, tier on tier. Except for the lumber slide and
the pole line, there was no break anywhere, not even a glimpse of the
road that wound somehow out of the canyon--up, up, up, twelve long
miles, to the top of the ridge.

And even at the top, Paul reflected bitterly, there was only an
unpainted farm-house, where the stage stopped three times a week with
mail. From there it was a fifty-mile drive to town--a California
country town, asleep in the curve of two sluggish little rivers. And
from "town" to San Francisco it was almost a day's trip, and from San
Francisco to the Grand Central Station at Forty-second Street it was
nearly five days more.

Paul shoved his hands in his pockets and began again: "Light and Power
Co.--GENTLEMEN."

Night came swiftly to Kirkwood. For a few wonderful moments the last of
the sunlight lingered, hot and gold, on the upper branches of the
highest trees along the ridge; then suddenly the valley was plunged in
soft twilight, and violet shadows began to tangle themselves about the
great shafts of the redwoods. The heat of the day dropped from the air
like a falling veil. A fine mist spun itself above the river; bats
began to wheel on the edge of the clearing.

With the coming of darkness every window in the place was suddenly
alight. The Company House blazed with it; the great power-house doorway
sent a broad stream of yellow into the deepening shadows of the night;
the "cook-house," where Willy Chow Tong cooked for a score of "hands"
and oilers, showed a thousand golden cracks in its rough walls. The
little cottages on the hill were hidden by