Part 77 (2/2)
”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 cert.i.tude.
”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 flouris.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+pment, 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 pa.s.sed 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 s.h.i.+mmering 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 b.u.t.terflies, 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 b.u.t.terfly-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 G.o.d's Paradise--climate, scenery, and fruit-farming; fruit ranches that yield two hundred per cent. on a valuation of five hundred dollars an acre.”
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