vines, bright with the most vivid of the commoner flowers.  They were crazily picturesque with their rough stone chimneys, their roofs of shakes, their broad low verandahs, and their split-picket fences.  On these verandahs sat patriarchal-looking men with sweeping white beards, who smoked pipes and gazed across with dim eyes toward the distant blue mountains.  When Welton, casually and by the way, mentioned topographical names, Bob realized to what placid and contented retirement these men had turned, and who they were.  Nugget Creek, Flour Gold, Bear Gulch—­these spoke of the strong, red-shirted Argonauts of the El Dorado.  Among these scarred but peaceful foothills had been played and applauded the great, wonderful, sordid, inspired drama of the early days, the traces of which had almost vanished from the land.

Occasionally also the buckboard paused for water at a more pretentious place set in a natural opening.  There a low, rambling, white ranch-house beneath trees was segregated by a picket fence enclosing blossoms like a basket.  At a greater or lesser distance were corrals of all sizes arranged in a complicated pattern.  They resembled a huge puzzle.  The barns were large; a forge stood under an open shed indescribably littered with scrap iron and fragments of all sorts; saddles hung suspended by the horn or one stirrup; bright milk pails sunned bottom-up on fence posts; a dozen horses cropped in a small enclosed pasture or dozed beneath one or another of the magnificent and spreading live-oak trees.  Children of all sizes and states of repair clambered to the fence tops or gazed solemnly between the rails.  Sometimes women stood in the doorways to nod cheerfully at the travellers.  They seemed to Bob a comely, healthy-looking lot, competent and good-natured.  Beyond an occasional small field and an invariable kitchen garden there appeared to be no evidences of cultivation.  Around the edges of the natural opening stretched immediately the open jungle of the chaparral or the park-like forests of oaks.

“These are the typical mountain people of California,” said Welton.  “It’s only taken us a few hours to come up this far, but we’ve struck among a different breed of cats.  They’re born, live and die in the hills, and they might as well be a thousand miles away as forty or fifty.  As soon as the snow is out, they hike for the big mountains.”

“What do they do?” inquired Bob.

“Cattle,” replied Welton.  “Nothing else.”

“I haven’t seen any men.”

“No, and you won’t, except the old ones.  They’ve taken their cattle back to the summer ranges in the high mountains.  By and by the women and kids will go into the summer camps with the horses.”