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Mrs. Sproul drew a long, excited breath.

“I wish mother’d been along, Sandy; she’d ‘a’ told ‘im a thing or two.”

Lysander was discreetly silent. The sage and greasewood ended abruptly, and a row of leafless walnut-trees stretched their gaunt white branches above the road. Here and there an almond-tree, lured into premature bloom by the seductive California winter, stood like a wraith by the roadside. They could see the cabin now. A square of flaring and fading light marked the open doorway. The mules quickened their pace, and the wagon rattled over the stony road.

“Talk about increasin’ the value o’ this piece o’ property!” the man broke out contemptuously. “I told ‘im it would take a good deal o’ chin to convince the old woman that anything would increase the value o’ this ranch o’ hern, and danged if I didn’t think she was right. I’d pegged away at it two years, an’ I couldn’t.”

“What did he say to that, Sandy?” demanded the woman, with admiring eagerness.

“Say? Oh, he said the soil was good. An’ I ‘lowed it was,–what there was of it; an’ so was the boulders good, for boulders,–the trouble was in the mixin’. ‘Don’t talk to me about your “decomposed granite,”‘ says I: ‘it’s the granite what ain’t decomposed that bothers me.’ But pshaw!”–and Lysander dropped his voice hopelessly,–“he ain’t a-carin’. I’d about as soon work the boulders as try to work him; he’s harder’n any boulder on the ranch.”

The mules turned into a narrow road, and stopped before the stable, a shackly, semi-tropical structure, consisting of four sycamore posts and a brush-covered roof. The lower half of the firelit doorway beyond suddenly darkened, and there was a swift, scurrying sound among the bushes that intervened between the house and the shed. A succession of heads, visible even in the deepening twilight by reason of a uniform glimmering whiteness, appeared in the barnyard.

Mrs. Sproul ran over the number with a rapid maternal calculation.

“Where’s the baby, Sheridan?”

“Grammuzgotim.”

Lysander climbed out of the wagon, and came around to his wife’s side.

“Shan’t I h’ist you down, Minervy?”

She gave him her hand, and stood beside him for an instant, meditatively, after he had lifted her to the ground.

“I guess I won’t say nothin’ to mother till you come in, Sandy. Be as spry as you can with the chores. Mebbe M’lissy’ll milk the cow fer you.”

She turned, and went up the walk toward the house, her mannish attire and the glimmering white heads that encircled her faintly suggestive of Jupiter and his attendant moons.

The sea-breeze had died away, and the wind was blowing in cooler gusts from the mountain; breezes laden with the aromatic sweetness of the bay-tree and the heavy scent of the shade-loving bracken wandered from far up the canon into the cabin and out again, only to find themselves profaned and sordid with the smell of frying bacon.

A high, energetic voice was making itself heard even above the sizzle of the meat and the voice of a crying baby.

“What under the sun makes ye set up that yell every night jest at supper-time? Ye ain’t a-lackin’ anything, as I kin see, exceptin’ a spankin’, and I’m too busy to give ye that. Hark! There comes your mammy, now. Straighten up yer face and show ‘er what a good boy you’ve been.”

Thus adjured, the baby brought his vocalizing to that abrupt termination indicative of feeling not so deep-seated as to be entirely beyond control, and scrambled toward the door on all fours, breaking in upon the approaching planetary system, a somewhat dimmed and bedraggled comet. Mrs. Sproul picked him up, and looked around the room questioningly.

“What’s M’lissy doin’, mother?”

“Dawdlin’,” answered the old woman, with a curtness that was eloquent, lifting the frying-pan from the stove, and shaking it into a more aggravated sputter.

“Is she upstairs?”

“I s’pose so. She gener’ly is, when there’s anything doin’ down.”

Mrs. Sproul put her hand over the baby’s mouth and called upward, “M’lissy!”