When Forrest went through the
French windows from his sleeping-porch, he crossed, first, a
comfortable dressing room, window-divaned, many- lockered, with a
generous fireplace, out of which opened a bathroom; and, second, a
long office room, wherein was all the paraphernalia of
business--desks, dictaphones, filing cabinets, book cases, magazine
files, and drawer-pigeonholes that tiered to the low, beamed
ceiling.
Midway in the office room, he pressed a button and a series of
book- freightened shelves swung on a pivot, revealing a tiny spiral
stairway of steel, which he descended with care that his spurs
might not catch, the bookshelves swinging into place behind
him.
At the foot of the stairway, a press on another button pivoted
more shelves of books and gave him entrance into a long low room
shelved with books from floor to ceiling. He went directly to a
case, directly to a shelf, and unerringly laid his hand on the book
he sought. A minute he ran the pages, found the passage he was
after, nodded his head to himself in vindication, and replaced the
book.
A door gave way to a pergola of square concrete columns spanned
with redwood logs and interlaced with smaller trunks of redwood,
all rough and crinkled velvet with the ruddy purple of the
bark.
It was evident, since he had to skirt several hundred feet of
concrete walls of wandering house, that he had not taken the short
way out. Under wide-spreading ancient oaks, where the long
hitching-rails, bark-chewed, and the hoof-beaten gravel showed the
stamping place of many horses, he found a pale-golden, almost
tan-golden, sorrel mare. Her well-groomed spring coat was alive and
flaming in the morning sun that slanted straight under the edge of
the roof of trees. She was herself alive and flaming. She was built
like a stallion, and down her backbone ran a narrow dark strip of
hair that advertised an ancestry of many range mustangs.
"How's the Man-Eater this morning?" he queried, as he unsnapped
the tie-rope from her throat.
She laid back the tiniest ears that ever a horse possessed--ears
that told of some thoroughbred's wild loves with wild mares among
the hills--and snapped at Forrest with wicked teeth and
wicked-gleaming eyes.
She sidled and attempted to rear as he swung into the saddle,
and, sidling and attempting to rear, she went off down the graveled
road. And rear she would have, had it not been for the martingale
that held her head down and that, as well, saved the rider's nose
from her angry-tossing head.
So used was he to the mare, that he was scarcely aware of her
antics. Automatically, with slightest touch of rein against arched
neck, or with tickle of spur or press of knee, he kept the mare to
the way he willed. Once, as she whirled and danced, he caught a
glimpse of the Big House. Big it was in all seeming, and yet, such
was the vagrant nature of it, it was not so big as it seemed. Eight
hundred feet across the front face, it stretched. But much of this
eight hundred feet was composed of mere corridors, concrete-walled,
tile-roofed, that connected and assembled the various parts of the
building. There were patios and pergolas in proportion, and all the
walls, with their many right-angled juts and recessions, arose out
of a bed of greenery and bloom.
Spanish in character, the architecture of the Big House was not
of the California-Spanish type which had been introduced by way of
Mexico a hundred years before, and which had been modified by
modern architects to the California-Spanish architecture of the
day. Hispano-Moresque more technically classified the Big House in
all its hybridness, although there were experts who heatedly
quarreled with the term.
Spaciousness without austerity and beauty without ostentation
were the fundamental impressions the Big House gave. Its lines,
long and horizontal, broken only by lines that were vertical and by
the lines of juts and recesses that were always right-angled, were
as chaste as those of a monastery. The irregular roof-line,
however, relieved the hint of monotony.
Low and rambling, without being squat, the square upthrusts of
towers and of towers over-topping towers gave just proportion of
height without being sky-aspiring. The sense of the Big House was
solidarity. It defied earthquakes. It was planted for a thousand
years. The honest concrete was overlaid by a cream-stucco of honest
cement. Again, this very sameness of color might have proved
monotonous to the eye had it not been saved by the many flat roofs
of warm-red Spanish tile.
In that one sweeping glance while the mare whirled unduly, Dick
Forrest's eyes, embracing all of the Big House, centered for a
quick solicitous instant on the great wing across the
two-hundred-foot court, where, under climbing groups of towers,
red-snooded in the morning sun, the drawn shades of the
sleeping-porch tokened that his lady still slept.
About him, for three quadrants of the circle of the world, arose
low- rolling hills, smooth, fenced, cropped, and pastured, that
melted into higher hills and steeper wooded slopes that merged
upward, steeper, into mighty mountains. The fourth quadrant was
unbounded by mountain walls and hills. It faded away, descending
easily to vast far flatlands, which, despite the clear brittle air
of frost, were too vast and far to scan across.
The mare under him snorted. His knees tightened as he
straightened her into the road and forced her to one side. Down
upon him, with a pattering of feet on the gravel, flowed a river of
white shimmering silk. He knew it at sight for his prize herd of
Angora goats, each with a pedigree, each with a history. There had
to be a near two hundred of them, and he knew, according to the
rigorous selection he commanded, not having been clipped in the
fall, that the shining mohair draping the sides of the least of
them, as fine as any human new-born baby's hair and finer, as white
as any human albino's thatch and whiter, was longer than the
twelve-inch staple, and that the mohair of the best of them would
dye any color into twenty-inch switches for women's heads and sell
at prices unreasonable and profound.
The beauty of the sight held him as well. The roadway had become
a flowing ribbon of silk, gemmed with yellow cat-like eyes that
floated past wary and curious in their regard for him and his
nervous horse. Two Basque herders brought up the rear. They were
short, broad, swarthy men, black-eyed, vivid-faced, contemplative
and philosophic of expression. They pulled off their hats and
ducked their heads to him. Forrest lifted his right hand, the quirt
dangling from wrist, the straight forefinger touching the rim of
his Baden Powell in semi- military salute.
The mare, prancing and whirling again, he held her with a touch
of rein and threat of spur, and gazed after the four-footed silk
that filled the road with shimmering white. He knew the
significance of their presence. The time for kidding was
approaching and they were being brought down from their
brush-pastures to the brood-pens and shelters for jealous care and
generous feed through the period of increase. And as he gazed, in
his mind, comparing, was a vision of all the best of Turkish and
South African mohair he had ever seen, and his flock bore the
comparison well. It looked good. It looked very good.
He rode on. From all about arose the clacking whir of manure-
spreaders. In the distance, on the low, easy-sloping hills, he saw
team after team, and many teams, three to a team abreast, what he
knew were his Shire mares, drawing the plows back and forth across,
contour-plowing, turning the green sod of the hillsides to the rich
dark brown of humus-filled earth so organic and friable that it
would almost melt by gravity into fine-particled seed-bed. That was
for the corn--and sorghum-planting for his silos. Other
hill-slopes, in the due course of his rotation, were knee-high in
barley; and still other slopes were showing the good green of burr
clover and Canada pea.
Everywhere about him, large fields and small were arranged in a
system of accessibility and workability that would have warmed the
heart of the most meticulous efficiency-expert. Every fence was
hog-tight and bull-proof, and no weeds grew in the shelters of the
fences. Many of the level fields were in alfalfa. Others, following
the rotations, bore crops planted the previous fall, or were in
preparation for the spring-planting. Still others, close to the
brood barns and pens, were being grazed by rotund Shropshire and
French-Merino ewes, or were being hogged off by white Gargantuan
brood-sows that brought a flash of pleasure in his eyes as he rode
past and gazed.
He rode through what was almost a village, save that there were
neither shops nor hotels. The houses were bungalows, substantial,
pleasing to the eye, each set in the midst of gardens where stouter
blooms, including roses, were out and smiling at the threat of late
frost. Children were already astir, laughing and playing among the
flowers or being called in to breakfast by their mothers.
Beyond, beginning at a half-mile distant to circle the Big
House, he passed a row of shops. He paused at the first and glanced
in. One smith was working at a forge. A second smith, a shoe
fresh-nailed on the fore-foot of an elderly Shire mare that would
disturb the scales at eighteen hundred weight, was rasping down the
outer wall of the hoof to smooth with the toe of the shoe. Forrest
saw, saluted, rode on, and, a hundred feet away, paused and
scribbled a memorandum in the notebook he drew from his
hip-pocket.
He passed other shops--a paint-shop, a wagon-shop, a plumbing
shop, a carpenter-shop. While he glanced at the last, a hybrid
machine, half- auto, half-truck, passed him at speed and took the
main road for the railroad station eight miles away. He knew it for
the morning butter- truck freighting from the separator house the
daily output of the dairy.
The Big House was the hub of the ranch organization. Half a mile
from it, it was encircled by the various ranch centers. Dick
Forrest, saluting continually his people, passed at a gallop the
dairy center, which was almost a sea of buildings with batteries of
silos and with litter carriers emerging on overhead tracks and
automatically dumping into waiting manure-spreaders. Several times,
business-looking men, college-marked, astride horses or driving
carts, stopped him and conferred with him. They were foremen, heads
of departments, and they were as brief and to the point as was he.
The last of them, astride a Palomina three-year-old that was as
graceful and wild as a half-broken Arab, was for riding by with a
bare salute, but was stopped by his employer.
"Good morning, Mr. Hennessy, and how soon will she be ready for
Mrs. Forrest?" Dick Forrest asked.
"I'd like another week," was Hennessy's answer. "She's well
broke now, just the way Mrs. Forrest wanted, but she's over-strung
and sensitive and I'd like the week more to set her in her
ways."
Forrest nodded concurrence, and Hennessy, who was the
veterinary, went on:
"There are two drivers in the alfalfa gang I'd like to send down
the hill."
"What's the matter with them?"
"One, a new man, Hopkins, is an ex-soldier. He may know
government mules, but he doesn't know Shires."
Forrest nodded.
"The other has worked for us two years, but he's drinking now,
and he takes his hang-overs out on his horses--"
"That's Smith, old-type American, smooth-shaven, with a cast in
his left eye?" Forrest interrupted.
The veterinary nodded.
"I've been watching him," Forrest concluded. "He was a good man
at first, but he's slipped a cog recently. Sure, send him down the
hill. And send that other fellow--Hopkins, you said?--along with
him. By the way, Mr. Hennessy." As he spoke, Forrest drew forth his
pad book, tore off the last note scribbled, and crumpled it in his
hand. "You've a new horse-shoer in the shop. How does he strike
you?"
"He's too new to make up my mind yet."
"Well, send him down the hill along with the other two. He can't
take your orders. I observed him just now fitting a shoe to old
Alden Bessie by rasping off half an inch of the toe of her
hoof."
"He knew better."
"Send him down the hill," Forrest repeated, as he tickled his
champing mount with the slightest of spur-tickles and shot her out
along the road, sidling, head-tossing, and attempting to rear.
Much he saw that pleased him. Once, he murmured aloud, "A fat
land, a fat land." Divers things he saw that did not please him and
that won a note in his scribble pad. Completing the circle about
the Big House and riding beyond the circle half a mile to an
isolated group of sheds and corrals, he reached the objective of
the ride: the hospital. Here he found but two young heifers being
tested for tuberculosis, and a magnificent Duroc Jersey boar in
magnificent condition. Weighing fully six hundred pounds, its
bright eyes, brisk movements, and sheen of hair shouted out that
there was nothing the matter with it. Nevertheless, according to
the ranch practice, being a fresh importation from Iowa, it was
undergoing the regular period of quarantine. Burgess Premier was
its name in the herd books of the association, age two years, and
it had cost Forrest five hundred dollars laid down on the
ranch.
Proceeding at a hand gallop along a road that was one of the
spokes radiating from the Big House hub, Forrest overtook Crellin,
his hog manager, and, in a five-minute conference, outlined the
next few months of destiny of Burgess Premier, and learned that the
brood sow, Lady Isleton, the matron of all matrons of the O. I.
C.'s and blue- ribboner in all shows from Seattle to San Diego, was
safely farrowed of eleven. Crellin explained that he had sat up
half the night with her and was then bound home for bath and
breakfast.
"I hear your oldest daughter has finished high school and wants
to enter Stanford," Forrest said, curbing the mare just as he had
half- signaled departure at a gallop.
Crellin, a young man of thirty-five, with the maturity of a
long-time father stamped upon him along with the marks of college
and the youthfulness of a man used to the open air and
straight-living, showed his appreciation of his employer's interest
as he half-flushed under his tan and nodded.
"Think it over," Forrest advised. "Make a statistic of all the
college girls--yes, and State Normal girls--you know. How many of
them follow career, and how many of them marry within two years
after their degrees and take to baby farming."
"Helen is very seriously bent on the matter," Crellin urged.
"Do you remember when I had my appendix out?" Forrest queried.
"Well, I had as fine a nurse as I ever saw and as nice a girl as
ever walked on two nice legs. She was just six months a
full-fledged nurse, then. And four months after that I had to send
her a wedding present. She married an automobile agent. She's lived
in hotels ever since. She's never had a chance to nurse--never a
child of her own to bring through a bout with colic. But... she has
hopes... and, whether or not her hopes materialize, she's
confoundedly happy. But... what good was her nursing
apprenticeship?"
Just then an empty manure-spreader passed, forcing Crellin, on
foot, and Forrest, on his mare, to edge over to the side of the
road. Forrest glanced with kindling eye at the off mare of the
machine, a huge, symmetrical Shire whose own blue ribbons, and the
blue ribbons of her progeny, would have required an expert
accountant to enumerate and classify.
"Look at the Fotherington Princess," Forrest said, nodding at
the mare that warmed his eye. "She is a normal female. Only
incidentally, through thousands of years of domestic selection, has
man evolved her into a draught beast breeding true to kind. But
being a draught-beast is secondary. Primarily she is a female. Take
them by and large, our own human females, above all else, love us
men and are intrinsically maternal. There is no biological sanction
for all the hurly burly of woman to-day for suffrage and
career."
"But there is an economic sanction," Crellin objected.
"True," his employer agreed, then proceeded to discount. "Our
present industrial system prevents marriage and compels woman to
career. But, remember, industrial systems come, and industrial
systems go, while biology runs on forever."
"It's rather hard to satisfy young women with marriage these
days," the hog-manager demurred.
Dick Forrest laughed incredulously.
"I don't know about that," he said. "There's your wife for an
instance. She with her sheepskin--classical scholar at that--well,
what has she done with it?... Two boys and three girls, I believe?
As I remember your telling me, she was engaged to you the whole
last half of her senior year."
"True, but--" Crellin insisted, with an eye-twinkle of
appreciation of the point, "that was fifteen years ago, as well as
a love-match. We just couldn't help it. That far, I agree. She had
planned unheard-of achievements, while I saw nothing else than the
deanship of the College of Agriculture. We just couldn't help it.
But that was fifteen years ago, and fifteen years have made all the
difference in the world in the ambitions and ideals of our young
women."
"Don't you believe it for a moment. I tell you, Mr. Crellin,
it's a statistic. All contrary things are transient. Ever woman
remains Avoman, everlasting, eternal. Not until our girl-children
cease from playing with dolls and from looking at their own
enticingness in mirrors, will woman ever be otherwise than what she
has always been: first, the mother, second, the mate of man. It is
a statistic. I've been looking up the girls who graduate from the
State Normal. You will notice that those who marry by the way
before graduation are excluded. Nevertheless, the average length of
time the graduates actually teach school is little more than two
years. And when you consider that a lot of them, through ill looks
and ill luck, are foredoomed old maids and are foredoomed to teach
all their lives, you can see how they cut down the period of
teaching of the marriageable ones."
"A woman, even a girl-woman, will have her way where mere men
are concerned," Crellin muttered, unable to dispute his employer's
figures but resolved to look them up.
"And your girl-woman will go to Stanford," Forrest laughed, as
he prepared to lift his mare into a gallop, "and you and I and all
men, to the end of time, will see to it that they do have their
way."
Crellin smiled to himself as his employer diminished down the
road; for Crellin knew his Kipling, and the thought that caused the
smile was: "But where's the kid of your own, Mr. Forrest?" He
decided to repeat it to Mrs. Crellin over the breakfast coffee.
Once again Dick Forrest delayed ere he gained the Big House. The
man he stopped he addressed as Mendenhall, who was his
horse-manager as well as pasture expert, and who was reputed to
know, not only every blade of grass on the ranch, but the length of
every blade of grass and its age from seed-germination as well.
At signal from Forrest, Mendenhall drew up the two colts he was
driving in a double breaking-cart. What had caused Forrest to
signal was a glance he had caught, across the northern edge of the
valley, of great, smooth-hill ranges miles beyond, touched by the
sun and deeply green where they projected into the vast flat of the
Sacramento Valley.
The talk that followed was quick and abbreviated to terms of
understanding between two men who knew. Grass was the subject.
Mention was made of the winter rainfall and of the chance for late
spring rains to come. Names occurred, such as the Little Coyote and
Los Cuatos creeks, the Yolo and the Miramar hills, the Big Basin,
Round Valley, and the San Anselmo and Los Banos ranges. Movements
of herds and droves, past, present, and to come, were discussed, as
well as the outlook for cultivated hay in far upland pastures and
the estimates of such hay that still remained over the winter in
remote barns in the sheltered mountain valleys where herds had
wintered and been fed.
Under the oaks, at the stamping posts, Forrest was saved the
trouble of tying the Man-Eater. A stableman came on the run to take
the mare, and Forrest, scarce pausing for a word about a horse by
the name of Duddy, was clanking his spurs into the Big House.
