“Nice place you have, Mr. Panel,” a stranger might say.

“Yas; we call it Sunny Bushes.  Uster be nothin’ but sun an’ bushes onst.  It’s nice, yas, and it’s paid for.”

“What a good-looking mare!”

“Yas; she’s paid for, too.”

Everything on the ranch, animal, vegetable, and mineral, was “paid for.”  Uncle Jap was the last man to hurt anybody’s feelings, but the “paid for” rankled on occasion, for some of his visitors stood perilously near the edge of bankruptcy, and, as a rule, had not paid for either the land they occupied, or the cattle they branded, or the clothes they wore.  To understand this story you must grasp the fact that Uncle Jap lived with credit and not on it.

His wife, also of New England parentage, had a righteous horror of debt bred in her bone.  Uncle Jap adored her.  If he set an extravagant value upon his other possessions, what price above rubies did he place upon the meek, silent, angular woman, who had been his partner, companion, and friend for more than a quarter of a century.  Sun and wind had burnt her face, also, to the exact tint of her husband’s.  Her name was Lily.

“And, doggone it, she looks like a lily,” Uncle Jap would say, in moments of expansion.  “Tall an’ slim, yas, an’ with a little droop of her head.  I’d ought ter be grateful to God fer givin’ me sech a flower outer heaven—­an’ I am, I am.  Look at her now!  What a mover!”

Uncle Jap’s Lily chasing a hen certainly exhibited an activity surprising in one of her years.  By a hairbreadth she missed perfection.  Uncle Jap had been known to hint, nothing more, that he would have liked a dozen or so of babies.  The hint took concrete form in:  “I think a heap o’ young things, colts, kittens, puppies—­an’ the like.”  Then he would sigh.

We came to California in the eighties, and in ’93, if my memory serves me, Uncle Jap discovered bituminous rock in a corner of his ranch.  He became very excited over this find, and used to carry samples of ore in his pocket which he showed to the neighbours.

“There’s petroleum whar that ore is—­sure.  An’ ef I could strike it, boys, why, why I’d jest hang my Lily with di’monds from her head to her feet, I would.”

This, mind you, was before the discovery of the now famous oil fields.  Even in those early days experts were of opinion that oil might be found below the croppings of bituminous rock by any pioneer enterprising enough to bore for it.

About this time we began to notice that Uncle Jap was losing interest in his ranch.  Cattle strayed through the fence because he neglected to mend it, calves escaping were caught and branded by unscrupulous neighbours, a colt was found dead, cast in a deep gulch.

“What’s the matter with Uncle Jap?” we asked, at the May-Day picnic.

Mrs. Fullalove, a friend of Mrs. Panel, answered the question.

“I’ll tell ye,” she said sharply.  “Jaspar Panel has gotten a disease common enough in Californy.  He’s sufferin’ from a dose o’ swelled head.”