Ahead and toward the right, across sheer ridges of the mountains, separated by deep green canyons and broadening lower down into rolling orchards and vineyards, they caught their first sight of Sonoma Valley and the wild mountains that rimmed its eastern side. To the left they gazed across a golden land of small hills and valleys. Beyond, to the north, they glimpsed another portion of the valley, and, still beyond, the opposing wall of the valley-a range of mountains, the highest of which reared its red and battered ancient crater against a rosy and mellowing sky. From north to southeast, the mountain rim curved in the brightness of the sun, while Saxon and Billy were already in the shadow of evening. He looked at Saxon, noted the ravished ecstasy of her face, and stopped the horses. All the eastern sky was blushing to rose, which descended upon the mountains, touching them with wine and ruby. Sonoma Valley began to fill with a purple flood, laying the mountain bases, rising, inundating, drowning them in its purple. Saxon pointed in silence, indicating that the purple flood was the sunset shadow of Sonoma Mountain. Billy nodded, then chirruped to the mares, and the descent began through a warm and colorful twilight.
On the elevated sections of the road they felt the cool, delicious breeze from the Pacific forty miles away; while from each little dip and hollow came warm breaths of autumn earth, spicy with sunburnt grass and fallen leaves and passing flowers.
They came to the rim of a deep canyon that seemed to penetrate to the heart of Sonoma Mountain. Again, with no word spoken, merely from watching Saxon, Billy stopped the wagon. The canyon was wildly beautiful. Tall redwoods lined its entire length. On its farther rim stood three rugged knolls covered with dense woods of spruce and oak. From between the knolls, a feeder to the main canyon and likewise fringed with redwoods, emerged a smaller canyon. Billy pointed to a stubble field that lay at the feet of the knolls.
'It's in fields like that I've seen my mares a-pasturing,' he said.
They dropped down into the canyon, the road following a stream that sang under maples and alders. The sunset fires, refracted from the cloud-driftage of the autumn sky, bathed the canyon with crimson, in which ruddy- limbed madronos and wine-wooded manzanitas burned and smoldered. The air was aromatic with laurel. Wild grape vines bridged the stream from tree to tree. Oaks of many sorts were veiled in lacy Spanish moss. Ferns and brakes grew lush beside the stream. From somewhere came the plaint of a mourning dove. Fifty feet above the ground, almost over their heads, a Douglas squirrel crossed the road-a flash of gray between two trees; and they marked the continuance of its aerial passage by the bending of the boughs.
'I've got a hunch,' said Billy.
'Let me say it first,' Saxon begged.
He waited, his eyes on her face as she gazed about her in rapture.
'We've found our valley,' she whispered. 'Was that it?'
He nodded, but checked speech at sight of a small boy driving a cow up the road, a preposterously big shotgun in one hand, in the other as preposterously big a jackrabbit. 'How far to Glen Ellen?' Billy asked.
'Mile an' a half,' was the answer.
'What creek is this?' inquired Saxon.
'Wild Water. It empties into Sonoma Creek half a mile down.'
'Trout?'-this from Billy.
'If you know how to catch 'em,' grinned the boy.
'Deer up the mountain?'
'It ain't open season,' the boy evaded.
'I guess you never shot a deer,' Billy slyly baited, and was rewarded with:
'I got the horns to show.'
'Deer shed their horns,' Billy teased on. 'Anybody can find 'em.'
'I got the meat on mine. It ain't dry yet-'
The boy broke off, gazing with shocked eyes into the pit Billy had dug for him.
'It's all right, sonny,' Billy laughed, as he drove on. 'I ain't the game warden. I 'm buyin' horses.'
More leaping tree squirrels, more ruddy madronos and majestic oaks, more fairy circles of redwoods, and, still beside the singing stream, they passed a gate by the roadside. Before it stood a rural mail box, on which was lettered 'Edmund Hale.' Standing under the rustic arch, leaning upon the gate, a man and woman composed a pieture so arresting and beautiful that Saxon caught her breath. They were side by side, the delicate hand of the woman curled in the hand of the man, which looked as if made to confer benedictions. His face bore out this impression-a beautiful-browed countenance, with large, benevolent gray eyes under a wealth of white hair that shone like spun glass. He was fair and large; the little woman beside him was daintily wrought. She was saffron- brown, as a woman of the white race can well be, with smiling eyes of bluest blue. In quaint sage-green draperies, she seemed a flower, with her small vivid face irresistibly reminding Saxon of a springtime wake-robin.
Perhaps the picture made by Saxon and Billy was equally arresting and beautiful, as they drove down through the golden end of day. The two couples had eyes only for each other. The little woman beamed joyously. The man's face glowed into the benediction that had trembled there. To Saxon, like the field up the mountain, like the mountain itself, it seemed that she had always known this adorable pair. She knew that she loved them.
'How d'ye do,' said Billy.
'You blessed children,' said the man. 'I wonder if you know how dear you look sitting there.'
That was all. The wagon had passed by, rustling down the road, which was carpeted with fallen leaves of maple, oak, and alder. Then they came to the meeting of the two creeks.
'Oh, what a place for a home,' Saxon cried, pointing across Wild Water. 'See, Billy, on that bench there above the meadow.'
'It's a rich bottom, Saxon; and so is the bench rich. Look at the big trees on it. An' they's sure to be springs.'
'Drive over,' she said.
Forsaking the main road, they crossed Wild Water on a narrow bridge and continued along an ancient, rutted road that ran beside an equally ancient worm-fence of split redwood rails. They came to a gate, open and off its hinges, through which the road led out on the bench.
'This is it-I know it,' Saxon said with conviction. 'Drive in, Billy.'
A small, whitewashed farmhouse with broken windows showed through the trees.
'Talk about your madronos-'
Billy pointed to the father of all madronos, six feet in diameter at its base, sturdy and sound, which stood before the house.
They spoke in low tones as they passed around the house under great oak trees and came to a stop before a small barn. They did not wait to unharness. Tying the horses, they started to explore. The pitch from the bench to the meadow was steep yet thickly wooded with oaks and manzanita. As they crashed through the underbrush they startled a score of quail into flight.
'How about game?' Saxon queried.
Billy grinned, and fell to examining a spring which bubbled a clear stream into the meadow. Here the ground was sunbaked and wide open in a multitude of cracks.
Disappointment leaped into Saxon's face, but Billy, crumbling a clod between his fingers, had not made up his mind.
'It's rich,' he pronounced; '-the cream of the soil that's been washin' down from the hills for ten thousan' years. But-'
He broke off, stared all about, studying the configuration of the meadow, crossed it to the redwood trees beyond, then came back.
'It's no good as it is,' he said. 'But it's the best ever if it's handled right. All it needs is a little common sense an' a lot of drainage. This meadow's a natural basin not yet filled level. They's a sharp slope through the redwoods to the creek. Come on, I'll show you.'
They went through the redwoods and came out on Sonoma Creek. At this spot was no singing. The stream poured into a quiet pool. The willows on their side brushed the water. The opposite side was a steep bank. Billy measured the height of the bank with his eye, the depth of the water with a driftwood pole.
'Fifteen feet,' he announced. 'That allows all kinds of high-divin' from the bank. An' it's a hundred yards of a swim up an' down.'
They followed down the pool. It emptied in a riffle, across exposed bedrock, into another pool. As they
