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“Wake me up,” Tom was saying. “I can’t believe I arrived on a train. And the population? There were only four thousand thirty years ago.”

“Sixty thousand now,” was the other’s answer. “And increasing by leaps and bounds. Want to spin around for a look at the city? There’s plenty of time.”

As they sped along the broad, well-paved streets, Tom persisted in his Rip Van Winkle pose. The waterfront perplexed him. Where he had once anchored his sloop in a dozen feet of water, he found solid land and railroad yards, with wharves and shipping still farther out.

“Hold on! Stop!” he cried, a few blocks on, looking up at a solid business block. “Where is this, Fred?”

“Fourth and Travers–don’t you remember?”

Tom stood up and gazed around, trying to discern the anciently familiar configuration of the land under its clutter of buildings.

“I … I think….” he began hesitantly. “No; by George, I’m sure of it. We used to hunt cottontails over that ground, and shoot blackbirds in the brush. And there, where the bank building is, was a pond.” He turned to Polly. “I built my first raft there, and got my first taste of the sea.”

“Heaven knows how many gallons of it,” Frederick laughed, nodding to the chauffeur. “They rolled you on a barrel, I remember.”

“Oh! More!” Polly cried, clapping her hands.

“There’s the park,” Frederick pointed out a little later, indicating a mass of virgin redwoods on the first dip of the bigger hills.

“Father shot three grizzlies there one afternoon,” was Tom’s remark.

“I presented forty acres of it to the city,” Frederick went on. “Father bought the quarter section for a dollar an acre from Leroy.”

Tom nodded, and the sparkle and flash in his eyes, like that of his daughter, were unlike anything that ever appeared in his brother’s eyes.

“Yes,” he affirmed, “Leroy, the negro squawman. I remember the time he carried you and me on his back to Alliance, the night the Indians burned the ranch. Father stayed behind and fought.”

“But he couldn’t save the grist mill. It was a serious setback to him.”

“Just the same he nailed four Indians.”

In Polly’s eyes now appeared the flash and sparkle.

“An Indian-fighter!” she cried. “Tell me about him.”

“Tell her about Travers Ferry,” Tom said.

“That’s a ferry on the Klamath River on the way to Orleans Bar and Siskiyou. There was great packing into the diggings in those days, and, among other things, father had made a location there. There was rich bench farming land, too. He built a suspension bridge–wove the cables on the spot with sailors and materials freighted in from the coast. It cost him twenty thousand dollars. The first day it was open, eight hundred mules crossed at a dollar a head, to say nothing of the toll for foot and horse. That night the river rose. The bridge was one hundred and forty feet above low water mark. Yet the freshet rose higher than that, and swept the bridge away. He’d have made a fortune there otherwise.”

“That wasn’t it at all,” Tom blurted out impatiently. “It was at Travers Ferry that father and old Jacob Vance were caught by a war party of Mad River Indians. Old Jacob was killed right outside the door of the log cabin. Father dragged the body inside and stood the Indians off for a week. Father was some shot. He buried Jacob under the cabin floor.”

“I still run the ferry,” Frederick went on, “though there isn’t so much travel as in the old days. I freight by wagon-road to the Reservation, and then mule-back on up the Klamath and clear in to the forks of Little Salmon. I have twelve stores on that chain now, a stage-line to the Reservation, and a hotel there. Quite a tourist trade is beginning to pick up.”

And the girl, with curious brooding eyes, looked from brother to brother as they so differently voiced themselves and life.

“Ay, he was some man, father was,” Tom murmured.