much appreciates a lift in your rig; and sometimes proves worth the trouble.  His labour raises him above the level degradation of the ordinary tramp; the independence of his spirit gives his point of view an originality; the nomadic stirring of his blood keeps him going.  In the course of years he has crossed the length and breadth of the state a half dozen times.  He has harvested apples in Siskiyou and oranges in Riverside; he has chopped sugar pine in the snows of the Sierras and manzanita on the blazing hillsides of San Bernardino; he has garnered the wheat of the great Santa Clara Valley and the alfalfa of San Fernando.  And whenever the need for change or the desire for a drink has struck him, he has drawn his pay, strapped his bed roll, and cheerfully hiked away down the long and dusty trail.

That is his chief defect as a field hand—­his unreliability.  He seems to have no great pride in finishing out a job, although he is a good worker while he is at it.  The Captain used to send in the wagon to bring men out, but refused absolutely to let any man ride in anything going the other way.  Nevertheless the hand, when the wanderlust hit him, trudged cheerfully the long distance to town.  I am not sure that a new type is not thus developing, a type as distinct in its way as the riverman or the cowboy.  It is not as high a type, of course, for it has not the strength either of sustained and earnest purpose nor of class loyalty; but still it makes for new species.  The California field hand has mother-wit, independence, a certain reckless, you-be-damned courage, a wandering instinct.  He quits work not because he wants to loaf, but because he wants to go somewhere else.  He is always on the road travelling, travelling, travelling.  It is not hope of gain that takes him, for in the scarcity of labour wages are as high here as there.  It is not desire for dissipation that lures him from labour; he drinks hard enough, but the liquor is as potent here as two hundred miles away.  He looks you steadily enough in the eye; and he begs his bread and commits his depredations half humorously, as though all this were fooling that both you and he understood.  What his impelling motive is, I cannot say; nor whether he himself understands it, this restlessness that turns his feet ever to the pleasant California highways, an Ishmael of the road.

But this very unreliability forces the ranchman to the next element in our consideration of the ranch’s people—­the Orientals.  They are good workers, these little brown and yellow men, and unobtrusive and skilled.  They do not quit until the job is done; they live frugally; they are efficient.  The only thing we have against them is that we are afraid of them.  They crowd our people out.  Into a community they edge themselves little by little.  At the end of two years they have saved enough capital to begin to buy land.  At the end of ten years they have taken up all the small farms from the whites