About half-past eight, two or three five-year-olds, one a little colored girl, came into the schoolroom of the kindergarten with a great chatter of voices, going across to the cloakroom to hang up their hats and coats as they had been taught.

Half way across the room one of them stopped and put her small nose in the air, crying, “Um-o-o, what a funnee smell!” The others began to sniff the air as well, and one, the daughter of a butcher, exclaimed, “’Tsmells like my pa’s shop,” adding in the next breath, “Look, what’s the matter with the kittee?”

In fact, the cat was acting strangely.  He lay quite flat on the floor, his nose pressed close to the crevice under the door of the little cloakroom, winding his tail slowly back and forth, excited, very eager.  At times he would draw back and make a strange little clacking noise down in his throat.

“Ain’t he funnee?” said the little girl again.  The cat slunk swiftly away as the children came up.  Then the tallest of the little girls swung the door of the little cloakroom wide open and they all ran in.

CHAPTER 20

The day was very hot, and the silence of high noon lay close and thick between the steep slopes of the canyons like an invisible, muffling fluid.  At intervals the drone of an insect bored the air and trailed slowly to silence again.  Everywhere were pungent, aromatic smells.  The vast, moveless heat seemed to distil countless odors from the brush—­odors of warm sap, of pine needles, and of tar-weed, and above all the medicinal odor of witch hazel.  As far as one could look, uncounted multitudes of trees and manzanita bushes were quietly and motionlessly growing, growing, growing.  A tremendous, immeasurable Life pushed steadily heavenward without a sound, without a motion.  At turns of the road, on the higher points, canyons disclosed themselves far away, gigantic grooves in the landscape, deep blue in the distance, opening one into another, ocean-deep, silent, huge, and suggestive of colossal primeval forces held in reserve.  At their bottoms they were solid, massive; on their crests they broke delicately into fine serrated edges where the pines and redwoods outlined their million of tops against the high white horizon.  Here and there the mountains lifted themselves out of the narrow river beds in groups like giant lions rearing their heads after drinking.  The entire region was untamed.  In some places east of the Mississippi nature is cosey, intimate, small, and homelike, like a good-natured housewife.  In Placer County, California, she is a vast, unconquered brute of the Pliocene epoch, savage, sullen, and magnificently indifferent to man.

But there were men in these mountains, like lice on mammoths’ hides, fighting them stubbornly, now with hydraulic “monitors,” now with drill and dynamite, boring into the vitals of them, or tearing away great yellow gravelly scars in the flanks of them, sucking their blood, extracting gold.