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“And we turned off at Fort Hall, where the Oregon emigration went north’ard, and swung south for Californy,” was his way of concluding the narrative of that arduous journey. “And Bill Ping and me used to rope grizzlies out of the underbrush of Cache Slough in the Sacramento Valley.”

Years of freighting and mining had followed, and, with a stake gleaned from the Merced placers, he satisfied the land-hunger of his race and time by settling in Sonoma County.

During the ten years of carrying the mail across Tarwater Township, up Tarwater Valley, and over Tarwater Mountain, most all of which land had once been his, he had spent his time dreaming of winning back that land before he died. And now, his huge gaunt form more erect than it had been for years, with a glinting of blue fires in his small and close-set eyes, he was lifting his ancient chant again.

“There he goes now–listen to him,” said William Tarwater.

“Nobody at home,” laughed Harris Topping, day labourer, husband of Annie Tarwater, and father of her nine children.

The kitchen door opened to admit the old man, returning from feeding his horses. The song had ceased from his lips; but Mary was irritable from a burnt hand and a grandchild whose stomach refused to digest properly diluted cows’ milk.

“Now there ain’t no use you carryin’ on that way, father,” she tackled him. “The time’s past for you to cut and run for a place like the Klondike, and singing won’t buy you nothing.”

“Just the same,” he answered quietly. “I bet I could go to that Klondike place and pick up enough gold to buy back the Tarwater lands.”

“Old fool!” Annie contributed.

“You couldn’t buy them back for less’n three hundred thousand and then some,” was William’s effort at squelching him.

“Then I could pick up three hundred thousand, and then some, if I was only there,” the old man retorted placidly.

“Thank God you can’t walk there, or you’d be startin’, I know,” Mary cried. “Ocean travel costs money.”

“I used to have money,” her father said humbly.

“Well, you ain’t got any now–so forget it,” William advised. “Them times is past, like roping bear with Bill Ping. There ain’t no more bear.”

“Just the same–“

But Mary cut him off. Seizing the day’s paper from the kitchen table, she flourished it savagely under her aged progenitor’s nose.

“What do those Klondikers say? There it is in cold print. Only the young and robust can stand the Klondike. It’s worse than the north pole. And they’ve left their dead a-plenty there themselves. Look at their pictures. You’re forty years older ‘n the oldest of them.”

John Tarwater did look, but his eyes strayed to other photographs on the highly sensational front page.

“And look at the photys of them nuggets they brought down,” he said. “I know gold. Didn’t I gopher twenty thousand outa the Merced? And wouldn’t it a-ben a hundred thousand if that cloudburst hadn’t busted my wing-dam? Now if I was only in the Klondike–“

“Crazy as a loon,” William sneered in open aside to the rest.

“A nice way to talk to your father,” Old Man Tarwater censured mildly. “My father’d have walloped the tar out of me with a single-tree if I’d spoke to him that way.”

“But you ARE crazy, father–” William began.

“Reckon you’re right, son. And that’s where my father wasn’t crazy. He’d a-done it.”

“The old man’s been reading some of them magazine articles about men who succeeded after forty,” Annie jibed.

“And why not, daughter?” he asked. “And why can’t a man succeed after he’s seventy? I was only seventy this year. And mebbe I could succeed if only I could get to the Klondike–“

“Which you ain’t going to get to,” Mary shut him off.

“Oh, well, then,” he sighed, “seein’s I ain’t, I might just as well go to bed.”