Paul was the first to leave the table that night.  He drank his coffee in three savage gulps, pushed back his crumpled napkin, and rose.  “If you’ll excuse me—­” he began.

“You’re cert’n’y excusable!” said Mrs. Tolley, elegantly—­adding, when the door had closed behind him:  “And leave me tell you right now that somebody was real fond of children to raise you!”

“An’ I’m not planning to spend the heyday of my girlhood ironing napkins for you, Pauly Pet!” said Min, reaching for his discarded napkin and folding it severely into a wooden ring.

Paul did not hear these remarks, but he heard the laughter that greeted them, and he scowled as he selected a rocker on the front porch.  He put his feet up on the rail, felt in one pocket for tobacco, in another for papers, and in a third for his match-case, and set himself to the congenial task of composing a letter in which he should resign from the employ of the Light and Power Company.  It was a question of a broken contract, so it must be diplomatically worded.  Paul had spent the five evenings since his arrival at Kirkwood in puzzling over the phrasing of that letter.

Below the porch, the hillside, covered with scrub-oak and chaparral and madrono trees, and the stumps where redwoods had been, dropped sharply to the little river, which came tumbling down from the wooded mountains to plunge roaring into one end of the big power-house, and which foamed out at the other side to continue its mad rush down the valley.  The power-house, looming up an immense crude outline in the twilight, rested on the banks of the stream and stood in a rough clearing.  A great gash in the woods above it showed whence lumber for buildings and fires came; another ugly gash marked the course of the “pole line” over the mountain.  Near the big building stood lesser ones, two or three rough little unpainted cottages perched on the hill above it.  There was a “cook-house,” and a “bunk-house,” and storage sheds, and Mrs. Tolley’s locked provision shed, and the rough shack the builders lived in while construction was going on, and where the Hopps lived now, rent free.

Nasturtiums languished here and there, where some of the women had made an effort to fight the unresponsive red clay.  Otherwise, even after two years, the power-house and its environs looked unfinished, crude, ugly.  On all sides the mountains rose dark and steep, the pointed tops of the redwoods mounting evenly, tier on tier.  Except for the lumber slide and the pole line, there was no break anywhere, not even a glimpse of the road that wound somehow out of the canyon--up, up, up, twelve long miles, to the top of the ridge.

And even at the top, Paul reflected bitterly, there was only an unpainted farm-house, where the stage stopped three times a week with mail.  From there it was a fifty-mile drive to town—­a California country town, asleep in the curve of two sluggish little rivers.  And from “town” to San Francisco it was almost a day’s trip, and from San Francisco to the Grand Central Station at Forty-second Street it was nearly five days more.