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He came upon a particularly shady spot and a bench placed invitingly. Andy sat down, eased the new-healed leg out before him and rolled a cigarette. “This is going to be some different from hunting a stray on the range,” he told himself, with an air of deliberate cheerfulness. “If I could get out and scurrup around on a hoss, and round her up that way–but this footing it all over town is what grinds me.” He drew a match along the under side of the bench and held the blaze absently to the cigarette. “There was one thing–she told about an orange tree right beside her mother’s front gate, Maybe–” He looked around him hopefully. Just across the street was a front gate, and beside it an orange tree; he knew because there were ripe oranges hanging upon it. He started to rise, his blood jumping queerly, sat down again and swore. “Every darned gate in town, just about, has got an orange tree stuck somewhere handy by. I remember ’em now, damn ’em!”

Three cigarettes he smoked while he sat there. When he started on again his face was grimly set toward the nearest business street. At the first real-estate sign he stopped, pulled together his courage, and went in. A girl sat in a corner of the room before a typewriter. Andy saw at a glance that her hair was too dark; murmured something and backed out. At the next place, a man was crumpled into a big chair, reading a paper. Behind a high desk a typewriter clicked, but Andy could not see the operator without going behind the railing, and he hesitated.

“Looking for a snap?” asked the man briskly, coming up from his crumpled state like a spring.

“Well, I was looking–“

“Now, here. It may not be what you want, but I’m just going to show you this proposition and see what you think of it. It ain’t going to last–somebody’s goin’ to snap it up before you know it. Now, here–“

It was half an hour before Andy got away from that office, and he had not seen who was running the machine behind the desk, even then. He had, however, spoken rather loudly and had informed the man that he was from Montana, with no effect whatever upon the clicking. He had listened patiently to the glowing description of several “good buys,” and had escaped with difficulty within ten minutes after hearing the unseen typist addressed as “Fern.”

At the third place he merely looked in at the door and retreated hastily when the agent, like a spider on the watch, started forward.

When he limped into the office of his hotel at six o’clock, Andy was ready to swear that every foot of land in California was for sale, and that every man in San Jose was trying his best to sell it and looked upon him, Andy Green, as a weak-minded millionaire who might be induced to purchase. He had not visited all the places where they kept bulletin-boards covered with yellowed placards abounding in large type and many fat exclamation points and the word ONLY with a dollar mark immediately after. All? He had not visited half of them, or a third!

That night he dreamed feverishly of “five-room, modern cottages with bath,” and of “ONLY $500.00 down and balance payable monthly,” and of ten-acre “ranches” and five-acre “ranches”–he who had been used to numbering acres by the thousand and to whom the word “ranch” meant miles of wire fencing and beyond that miles of open!

It took all the longing he felt for Mary Johnson to drive him out the next morning and to turn his face toward those placarded places which infested every street, but he went. He went with eyes that glared hostility at every man who said “buy,” and with chin set to stubborn purpose. He meant to find Mary Edith Johnson, and he meant to find her without all California knowing that he was looking for her. Not once had he mentioned her name, or showed that he cared whether there was a typewriter in the office or whether it was a girl, man or Chinaman who clicked the keys; and yet he knew exactly how every girl typist had her hair dressed, and what was the color of her eyes.