make a bonanza farm. It wasn't long before it was 'most all bonanza farms.'
'They were the successful gamblers,' Saxon put in, remembering Mark Hall's words.
The man nodded appreciatively and continued.
'The old folks schemed and gathered and added the land into the big holdings, and built the great barns and mansions, and planted the house orchards and flower gardens. The young folks were spoiled by so much wealth and went away to the cities to spend it. And old folks and young united in one thing: in impoverishing the soil. Year after year they scratched it and took out bonanza crops. They put nothing back. All they left was plow-sole and exhausted land. Why, there's big sections they exhausted and left almost desert.
'The bonanza farmers are all gone now, thank the Lord, and here's where we small farmers come into our own. It won't be many years before the whole valley will be farmed in patches like mine. Look at what we're doing! Worked-out land that had ceased to grow wheat, and we turn the water on, treat the soil decently, and see our orchards!
'We've got the water-from the mountains, and from under the ground. I was reading an account the other day. All life depends on food. All food depends on water. It takes a thousand pounds of water to produce one pound of food; ten thousand pounds to produce one pound of meat. How much water do you drink in a year? About a ton. But you eat about two hundred pounds of vegetables and two hundred pounds of meat a year-which means you consume one hundred tons of water in the vegetables and one thousand tons in the meat-which means that it takes eleven hundred and one tons of water each year to keep a small woman like you going.'
'Gee!' was all Billy could say.
'You see how population depends upon water,' the ax-barkeeper went on. 'Well, we've got the water, immense subterranean supplies, and in not many years this valley will be populated as thick as Belgium.'
Fascinated by the five-inch stream, sluiced out of the earth and back to the earth by the droning motor, he forgot his discourse and stood and gazed, rapt and unheeding, while his visitors drove on.
'An' him a drink-slinger!' Billy marveled. 'He can sure sling the temperance dope if anybody should ask you.'
'It's lovely to think about-all that water, and all the happy people that will come here to live-'
'But it ain't the valley of the moon!' Billy laughed.
'No,' she responded. 'They don't have to irrigate in the valley of the moon, unless for alfalfa and such crops. What we want is the water bubbling naturally from the ground, and crossing the farm in little brooks, and on the boundary a fine big creek-'
'With trout in it!' Billy took her up. 'An' willows and trees of all kinds growing along the edges, and here a riffle where you can flip out trout, and there a deep pool where you can swim and high-dive. An' kingfishers, an' rabbits comin' down to drink, an', maybe, a deer.'
'And meadowlarks in the pasture,' Saxon added. 'And mourning doves in the trees. We must have mourning doves-and the big, gray tree-squirrels.'
'Gee!-that valley of the moon's goin' to be some valley,' Billy meditated, flicking a fly away with his whip from Hattie's side. 'Think we'll ever find it?'
Saxon nodded her head with great certitude.
'Just as the Jews found the promised land, and the Mormons Utah, and the Pioneers California. You remember the last advice we got when we left Oakland' ''Tis them that looks that finds.''
CHAPTER XV
Ever north, through a fat and flourishing rejuvenated land, stopping at the towns of Willows, Red Bluff and Redding, crossing the counties of Colusa, Glenn, Tehama, and Shasta, went the spruce wagon drawn by the dappled chestnuts with cream-colored manes and tails. Billy picked up only three horses for shipment, although he visited many farms; and Saxon talked with the women while he looked over the stock with the men. And Saxon grew the more convinced that the valley she sought lay not there.
At Redding they crossed the Sacramento on a cable ferry, and made a day's scorching traverse through rolling foot-hills and flat tablelands. The heat grew more insupportable, and the trees and shrubs were blasted and dead. Then they came again to the Sacramento, where the great smelters of Kennett explained the destruction of the vegetation.
They climbed out of the smelting town, where eyrie houses perched insecurely on a precipitous landscape. It was a broad, well-engineered road that took them up a grade miles long and plunged down into the Canyon of the Sacramento. The road, rock-surfaced and easy-graded, hewn out of the canyon wall, grew so narrow that Billy worried for fear of meeting opposite-bound teams. Far below, the river frothed and flowed over pebbly shallows, or broke tumultuously over boulders and cascades, in its race for the great valley they had left behind.
Sometimes, on the wider stretches of road, Saxon drove and Billy walked to lighten the load. She insisted on taking her turns at walking, and when he breathed the panting mares on the steep, and Saxon stood by their heads caressing them and cheering them, Billy's joy was too deep for any turn of speech as he gazed at his beautiful horses and his glowing girl, trim and colorful in her golden brown corduroy, the brown corduroy calves swelling sweetly under the abbreviated slim skirt. And when her answering look of happiness came to him-a sudden dimness in her straight gray eyes-he was overmastered by the knowledge that he must say something or burst.
'O, you kid!' he cried.
And with radiant face she answered, 'O, you kid!'
They camped one night in a deep dent in the canyon, where was snuggled a box-factory village, and where a toothless ancient, gazing with faded eyes at their traveling outfit, asked: 'Be you showin'?'
They passed Castle Crags, mighty-bastioned and glowing red against the palpitating blue sky. They caught their first glimpse of Mt. Shasta, a rose-tinted snow-peak rising, a sunset dream, between and beyond green interlacing walls of canyon-a landmark destined to be with them for many days. At unexpected turns, after mounting some steep grade, Shasta would appear again, still distant, now showing two peaks and glacial fields of shimmering white. Miles and miles and days and days they climbed, with Shasta ever developing new forms and phases in her summer snows.
'A moving picture in the sky,' said Billy at last.
'Oh,-it is all so beautiful,' sighed Saxon. 'But there are no moon-valleys here.'
They encountered a plague of butterflies, and for days drove through untold millions of the fluttering beauties that covered the road with uniform velvet-brown. And ever the road seemed to rise under the noses of the snorting mares, filling the air with noiseless flight, drifting down the breeze in clouds of brown and yellow soft-flaked as snow, and piling in mounds against the fences, ever driven to float helplessly on the irrigation ditches along the roadside. Hazel and Hattie soon grew used to them though Possum never ceased being made frantic.
'Huh!-who ever heard of butterfly-broke horses?' Billy chaffed. 'That's worth fifty bucks more on their price.'
'Wait till you get across the Oregon line into the Rogue River Valley,' they were told. 'There's God's Paradise-climate, scenery, and fruit-farming; fruit ranches that yield two hundred per cent. on a valuation of five hundred dollars an acre.'
'Gee!' Billy said, when he had driven on out of hearing; 'that's too rich for our digestion.'
And Saxon said, 'I don't know about apples in the valley of the moon, but I do know that the yield is ten thousand per cent. of happiness on a valuation of one Billy, one Saxon, a Hazel, a Hattie, and a Possum.'
Through Siskiyou County and across high mountains, they came to Ashland and Medford and camped beside the wild Rogue River.
'This is wonderful and glorious,' pronounced Saxon; 'but it is not the valley of the moon.'
'Nope, it ain't the valley of the moon,' agreed Billy, and he said it on the evening of the day he hooked a monster steelhead, standing to his neck in the ice-cold water of the Rogue and fighting for forty minutes, with screaming reel, ere he drew his finny prize to the bank and with the scalp-yell of a Comanche jumped and clutched it by the gills.
''Them that looks finds,'' predicted Saxon, as they drew north out of Grant's Pass, and held north across the
