“Thank the good Lord he don’t cut all his trees after the same pattern,” finished Bill fervently, “and that live oaks ain’t built like redwoods.  If they was, you’d be wiping off my coat-buttons right now, trying to identify my remains!”

Being polite young men, and having a sincere liking for Bill, they hid certain exchanges of grins and glances under their hat-brims (Bill being above them and the brims being wide) and did not by a single word belittle the escape he had had from man-eating cows.  Instead, Dade coaxed him down from the tree and onto Surry, swearing solemnly that the horse was quite as safe as the limb to which Bill showed a disposition to cling.  Bill was hard to persuade, but since Dade was a man who inspired faith instinctively, the exchange was finally accomplished, Bill still showing that strange, clinging disposition that made him grip the saddle-horn as a drowning man is said to grasp at a straw.

So they got him to the house, the two riding Jack’s peppery palimeno with some difficulty; while Surry stepped softly that he might not dislodge that burden in the saddle, whose body lurched insecurely and made the horse feel at every step the ignorance of the man.  They got him and themselves to the house; and his presence there did its part towards strengthening Don Andres’ liking for gringos, while Bill himself gained a broader outlook, a keener perception of the rights of the native-born Californians.

Up in San Francisco there was a tendency to make light of those rights.  It was commonly accepted that the old land grants were outrageous, and that the dons who prated of their rights were but land pirates who would be justly compelled by the government to disgorge their holdings.  Bill had been in the habit of calling all Spaniards “greasers,” just as the average Spaniard spoke of all Americans as “gringos,” or heathenish foreigners.

But on the porch of Don Andres, his saddle-galled person reclining at ease in a great armchair behind the passion vines, with the fragile stem of a wine-glass twirling between his white, sensitive, gambler-fingers while he listened to the don’s courtly utterances as translated faithfully by Dade (Jack being absent on some philandering mission of his own), big Bill Wilson opened his eyes to the other side of the question and frankly owned himself puzzled to choose.

“Seems like the men that came here when there wasn’t anything but Injuns and animals, and built up the country outa raw material, ought to have some say now about who’s going to reap the harvest,” he admitted to Dade.  “Don’t look so much like gobbling, when you get right down to cases, does it?  But at the same time, all these men that leave the east and come out here to make homes—­seems like they’ve got a right to settle down and plow up a garden patch if they want to.  They’re going to do it, anyway.  Looks like these grandees’ll have to cash in their chips and quit, but it’s a darned shame.”