Below them the cliff dropped away so steeply that they looked out above the treetops as from the summit of a true precipice.  Almost directly below them lay the wooded valley of Sycamore Flats, maplike, tiny.  It was just possible to make out the roofs of houses, like gray dots.  Roads showed as white filaments threading the irregular patches of green and brown.  From beneath flowed the wide oak and brush-clad foothills, rising always with the apparent cup of the earth until almost at the height of the eye the shimmering, dim plains substituted their brown for the dark green of the hills.  The country that yesterday had seemed mountainous, full of canons, ridges and ranges, now showed gently undulating, flattened, like a carpet spread before the feet of the Sierras.  To the north were tumbled, blue, pine-clad mountains as far as the eye could see, receding into the dimness of great distance.  At one point, but so far away as to be distinguishable only by a slight effort of the imagination, hovered like soap-bubbles against an ethereal sky the forms of snow mountains.  Welton pointed out the approximate position of Yosemite.

They returned to camp where Welton showed the clean and painted little house built for Bob and himself.  It was quite simply a row of rooms with a verandah in front of them all.  But the interiors were furnished with matting for the floors, curtains to the windows, white iron bedsteads, running water and open fireplaces.

“I’m sick of camping,” said Welton.  “This is our summer quarters for some time.  I’m going to be comfortable.”

Bob sighed.

“This is the bulliest place I ever saw!” he cried boyishly.

“Well, you’re going to have time enough to get used to it,” said Welton drily.

IV

The Stone Creek fire indeed proved not to amount to much, whereby sheer chance upheld Henry Plant.  The following morning the fire fighters returned; leaving, however, two of their number to “guard the line” until the danger should be over.  Welton explained to Bob that only the fact that Stone Creek bottom was at a low elevation, filled with brush and tarweed, and grown thick with young trees rendered the forest even inflammable at this time of year.

“Anywhere else in this country at this time of year it wouldn’t do any harm,” he told Bob, “and Plant knew it couldn’t get out of the basin.  He didn’t give a cuss how much it did there.  But we’ve got some young stuff that would easy carry a top fire.  Later in the season you may see some tall rustling on the fire lines.”

But before noon of that day a new complication arose.  Up the road came a short, hairy man on a mule.  His beard grew to his high cheek bones, his eyebrows bristled and jutted out over his black eyes, and a thick shock of hair pushed beneath the rim of his hat to meet the eyebrows.  The hat was an old black slouch, misshapen, stained and dusty.  His faded shirt opened to display a hairy throat and chest.  As for the rest he was short-limbed, thick and powerful.