It was a typical railroad town of California.  It was flat, dusty, all its buildings of wood.  There were some two thousand souls in Red Creek; two or three stores, a bakery from which the crude odour of baking bread burst every night; saloons, warehouses, a smithy, a butcher shop open only two days a week, a Chinese laundry from which opium-tainted steam issued all day and all night; cattle sheds, pepper trees, wheat barns, and a hotel of raw pine, with a narrow bedroom represented by every one of the forty narrow windows in its upper stories, and a lower floor decorated with spittoons.  Back of the crowded main street was another street, beside which Main Street’s muddy ugliness was beautiful.  Here was another saloon, and rooms above it, and several disreputable cottages about which Cherry sometimes saw odd-looking women.

Not everyone in Red Creek was poor, by any means.  It was a district bursting with prosperity; all summer long wheat and fruit and butter and beef poured through it out into the world.  Down the road a mile or two, and back toward the far hills, were comfortable ranches where trees planted fifty years before had grown to mammoth proportions, and where the women of the family cultivated gardens.  Every family had pigs and cattle and fine horses, and mud-spattered motor cars were familiar sights in Red Creek’s streets.

Cherry used to wonder why anybody who could live elsewhere lived here.  When some of the ranch girls told her that they always did their shopping in San Francisco, she marvelled that they could reconcile themselves to come home.

The days went on and on, each bringing its round of dishes, beds, sweeping, marketing, folding and unfolding tablecloths, going back and forth between kitchen and dining room.  Martin’s breakfast was either promptly served and well cooked, in which case Martin was silently satisfied, or it was late and a failure, when he was very articulately disgusted; in either case Cherry was left to clear and wash and plan for another meal in four hours more.  She soaked fruit, beat up cake, chopped boxes into kindlings, heated a kettle of water and another kettle of water, dragged sheets from the bed only to replace them, filled dishes with food only to find them empty and ready to wash again.

“I get sick of it!” she told Martin.

“Well, Lord!” he exclaimed.  “Don’t you think everybody does?  Don’t I get sick of my work?  You ought to have the responsibility of it all for a while!”

His tone was humorously reproving rather than unkind.  But such a speech would fill Cherry’s eyes with tears, and cause her to go about the house all morning with a heavy heart.

She would find herself looking thoughtfully at Martin in these days, studying him as if he were an utter stranger.  It bewildered her to feel that he actually was no more than that, after two years of marriage.  She not only did not know him, but she had a baffled sense that the very nearness of their union prevented her from seeing him fairly.  She knew that she did him injustice in her thoughts.