alone, in the days he had lived, knew the secret of the hiding-place for which I was bound.  He had bought the ranch for beauty, and paid a round price for it, much to the disgust of the local farmers.  He used to tell with great glee how they were wont to shake their heads mournfully at the price, to accomplish ponderously a bit of mental arithmetic, and then to say, “But you can’t make six per cent on it.”

But he was dead now, nor did the ranch descend to his children.  Of all men, it was now the property of Mr. Wickson, who owned the whole eastern and northern slopes of Sonoma Mountain, running from the Spreckels estate to the divide of Bennett Valley.  Out of it he had made a magnificent deer-park, where, over thousands of acres of sweet slopes and glades and canyons, the deer ran almost in primitive wildness.  The people who had owned the soil had been driven away.  A state home for the feeble-minded had also been demolished to make room for the deer.

To cap it all, Wickson’s hunting lodge was a quarter of a mile from my hiding-place.  This, instead of being a danger, was an added security.  We were sheltered under the very aegis of one of the minor oligarchs.  Suspicion, by the nature of the situation, was turned aside.  The last place in the world the spies of the Iron Heel would dream of looking for me, and for Ernest when he joined me, was Wickson’s deer-park.

We tied our horses among the redwoods at the pool.  From a cache behind a hollow rotting log my companion brought out a variety of things,—­a fifty-pound sack of flour, tinned foods of all sorts, cooking utensils, blankets, a canvas tarpaulin, books and writing material, a great bundle of letters, a five-gallon can of kerosene, an oil stove, and, last and most important, a large coil of stout rope.  So large was the supply of things that a number of trips would be necessary to carry them to the refuge.

But the refuge was very near.  Taking the rope and leading the way, I passed through a glade of tangled vines and bushes that ran between two wooded knolls.  The glade ended abruptly at the steep bank of a stream.  It was a little stream, rising from springs, and the hottest summer never dried it up.  On every hand were tall wooded knolls, a group of them, with all the seeming of having been flung there from some careless Titan’s hand.  There was no bed-rock in them.  They rose from their bases hundreds of feet, and they were composed of red volcanic earth, the famous wine-soil of Sonoma.  Through these the tiny stream had cut its deep and precipitous channel.

It was quite a scramble down to the stream bed, and, once on the bed, we went down stream perhaps for a hundred feet.  And then we came to the great hole.  There was no warning of the existence of the hole, nor was it a hole in the common sense of the word.  One crawled through tight-locked briers and branches, and found oneself on the very edge, peering out and down through a green screen.  A couple of hundred