The Valley of the Moon Jack London

scattered, and the leasing began. It's a ruin to-day. The trees

  have been cut and sold for firewood. There's only a little bit of

  the vineyard that isn't abandoned--just enough to make wine for

  the present Italian lessees, who are running a poverty-stricken

  milk ranch on the leavings of the soil. I rode over it last year,

  and cried. The beautiful orchard is a horror. The grounds have

  gone back to the wild. Just because they didn't keep the gutters

  cleaned out, the rain trickled down and dry-rotted the timbers,

  and the big stone barn is caved in. The same with part of the

  winery--the other part is used for stabling the cows. And the

  house!--words can't describe!"

  "It's become a profession," Hastings went on. "The 'movers.' They

  lease, clean out and gut a place in several years, and then move

  on. They're not like the foreigners, the Chinese, and Japanese,

  and the rest. In the main they're a lazy, vagabond, poor-white

  sort, who do nothing else but skin the soil and move, skin the

  soil and move. Now take the Portuguese and Italians in our

  country. They are different. They arrive in the country without a

  penny and work for others of their countrymen until they've

  learned the language and their way about. Now they're not movers.

  What they are after is land of their own, which they will love

  and care for and conserve. But, in the meantime, how to get it?

  Saving wages is slow. There is a quicker way. They lease. In

  three years they can gut enough out of somebody else's land to

  set themselves up for life. It is sacrilege, a veritable rape of

  the land; but what of it? It's the way of the United States."

  He turned suddenly on Billy.

  "Look here, Roberts. You and your wife are looking for your bit

  of land. You want it bad. Now take my advice. It's cold, hard

  advice. Become a tenant farmer. Lease some place, where the old

  folks have died and the country isn't good enough for the sons

  and daughters. Then gut it. Wring the last dollar out of the

  soil, repair nothing, and in three years you'll have your own

  place paid for. Then turn over a new leaf, and love your soil.

  Nourish it. Every dollar you feed it will return you two. Lend

  have nothing scrub about the place. If it's a horse, a cow, a

  pig, a chicken, or a blackberry vine, see that it's

  thoroughbred."

  "But it's wicked!" Saxon wrung out. "It's wicked advice."

  "We live in a wicked age," Hastings countered, smiling grimly.

  "This wholesale land-skinning is the national crime of the United

  States to-day. Nor would I give your husband such advice if I

  weren't absolutely certain that the land he skins would be

  skinned by some Portuguese or Italian if he refused. As fast as

  they arrive and settle down, they send for their sisters and

  their cousins and their aunts. If you were thirsty, if a

  warehouse were burning and beautiful Rhine wine were running to

  waste, would you stay your hand from scooping a drink? Well, the

  national warehouse is afire in many places, and no end of the

  good things are running to waste. Help yourself. If you don't,

  the immigrants will."

  "Oh, you don't know him," Mrs. Hastings hurried to explain. "He

  spends all his time on the ranch in conserving the soil. There

  are over a thousand acres of woods alone, and, though he thins

  and forests like a surgeon, he won't let a tree be chopped

  without his permission. He's even planted a hundred thousand

  trees. He's always draining and ditching to stop erosion, and

  experimenting with pasture grasses. And every little while he

  buys some exhausted adjoining ranch and starts building up the

  soil."

  "Wherefore I know what I 'm talking about," Hastings broke in.

  "And my advice holds. I love the soil, yet to-morrow, things being

  as they are and if I were poor, I'd gut five hundred acres in

  order to buy twenty-five for myself. When you get into Sonoma

  Valley, look me up, and I'll put you onto the whole game, and

  both ends of it. I'll show you construction as well as

  destruction. When you find a farm doomed to be gutted anyway, why

  jump in and do it yourself."

  "Yes, and he mortgaged himself to the eyes," laughed Mrs.

  Hastings, "to keep five hundred acres of woods out of the hands

  of the charcoal burners."

  Ahead, on the left bank of the Sacramento, just at the fading end

  of the Montezuma Hills, Rio Vista appeared. The Roamer slipped

  through the smooth water, past steamboat wharves, landing stages,

  and warehouses. The two Japanese went for'ard on deck. At command

  of Hastings, the jib ran down, and he shot the Roomer into the

  wind, losing way, until he called, "Let go the hook!" The anchor

  went down, and the yacht swung to it, so close to shore that the

  skiff lay under overhanging willows.

  "Farther up the river we tie to the bank," Mrs. Hastings said,

  "so that when you wake in the morning you find the branches of

  trees sticking down into the cabin."

  "Ooh!" Saxon murmured, pointing to a lump on her wrist. "Look at

  that. A mosquito."

  "Pretty early for them," Hastings said. "But later on they're

  terrible. I've seen them so thick I couldn't back the jib against

  them."

  Saxon was not nautical enough to appreciate his hyperbole, though

  Billy grinned.

  "There are no mosquitoes in the valley of the moon," she said.

  "No, never," said Mrs. Hastings, whose husband began immediately

  to regret the smallness of the cabin which prevented him from

  offering sleeping accommodations.

  An automobile bumped along on top of the levee, and the young

  boys and girls in it cried, "Oh, you kid!" to Saxon and Billy,

  and Hastings, who was rowing them ashore in the skiff. Hastings

  called, "Oh, you kid!" back to them; and Saxon, pleasuring in the

  boyishness of his sunburned face, was reminded of the boyishness

  of Mark Hall and his Carmel crowd.

  CHAPTER XII

  Crossing the Sacramento on an old-fashioned ferry a short

  distance above Rio Vista, Saxon and Billy entered the river

  country. From the top of the levee she got her revelation.

  Beneath, lower than the river, stretched broad, flat land, far as

  the eye could see. Roads ran in every direction, and she saw

  countless farmhouses of which she had never dreamed when sailing

  on the lonely river a few feet the other side of the willowy

  fringe.

  Three weeks they spent among the rich farm islands, which heaped

  up levees and pumped day and night to keep afloat. It was a

  monotonous land, with an unvarying richness of soil and with only

  one landmark--Mt. Diablo, ever to be seen, sleeping in the midday

  azure, limping its crinkled mass against the sunset sky, or

  forming like a dream out of the silver dawn. Sometimes on foot,

  often by launch, they cries-crossed and threaded the river region

  as far as the peat lands of the Middle River, down the San

  Joaquin to Antioch, and up Georgiana Slough to Walnut Grove on

  the Sacramento. And it proved a foreign land. The workers of
the

  soil teemed by thousands, yet Saxon and Billy knew what it was to

  go a whole day without finding any one who spoke English. They

  encountered--sometimes in whole villages--Chinese, Japanese,

  Italians, Portuguese, Swiss, Hindus, Koreans, Norwegians, Danes,

  French, Armenians, Slavs, almost every nationality save American.

  One American they found on the lower reaches of Georgiana who

  eked an illicit existence by fishing with traps. Another

  American, who spouted blood and destruction on all political

  subjects, was an itinerant bee-farmer. At Walnut Grove, bustling

  with life, the few Americans consisted of the storekeeper, the

  saloonkeeper, the butcher, the keeper of the drawbridge, and the

  ferryman. Yet two thriving towns were in Walnut Grove, one

  Chinese, one Japanese. Most of the land was owned by Americans,

  who lived away from it and were continually selling it to the

  foreigners.

  A riot, or a merry-making--they could not tell which--was taking

  place in the Japanese town, as Saxon and Billy steamed out on the

  Apache, bound for Sacramento.

  "We're settin' on the stoop," Billy railed. "Pretty soon they'll

  crowd us off of that."

  "There won't be any stoop in the valley of the moon," Saxon

  cheered him.

  But he was inconsolable, remarking bitterly:

  "An' they ain't one of them damn foreigners that can handle four

  horses like me.

  "But they can everlastingly farm," he added.

  And Saxon, looking at his moody face, was suddenly reminded of a

  lithograph she had seen in her childhood It was of a Plains

  Indian, in paint and feathers, astride his horse and gazing with

  wondering eye at a railroad train rushing along a fresh-made

  track. The Indian had passed, she remembered, before the tide of

  new life that brought the railroad. And were Billy and his kind

  doomed to pass, she pondered, before this new tide of life,

  amazingly industrious, that was flooding in from Asia and Europe?

  At Sacramento they stopped two weeks, where Billy drove team and

  earned the money to put them along on their travels. Also, life

  in Oakland and Carmel, close to the salt edge of the coast, had

  spoiled them for the interior. Too warm, was their verdict of

  Sacramento and they followed the railroad west, through a region

  of swamp-land, to Davisville. Here they were lured aside and to

  the north to pretty Woodland, where Billy drove team for a fruit

  farm, and where Saxon wrung from him a reluctant consent for her

  to work a few days in the fruit harvest. She made an important

  and mystifying secret of what she intended doing with her

  earnings, and Billy teased her about it until the matter passed

  from his mind. Nor did she tell him of a money order inclosed

  with a certain blue slip of paper in a letter to Bud Strothers.

  They began to suffer from the heat. Billy declared they had

  strayed out of the blanket climate.

  "There are no redwoods here," Saxon said. "We must go west toward

  the coast. It is there we'll find the valley of the moon."

  From Woodland they swung west and south along the county roads to

  the fruit paradise of Vacaville. Here Billy picked fruit, then

  drove team; and here Saxon received a letter and a tiny express

  package from Bud Strothers. When Billy came into camp from the

  day's work, she bade him stand still and shut his eyes. For a few

  seconds she fumbled and did something to the breast of his cotton

  work-shirt. Once, he felt a slight prick, as of a pin point, and

  grunted, while she laughed and bullied him to continue keeping

  his eyes shut.

  "Close your eyes and give me a kiss," she sang, "and then I'll

  show you what iss."

  She kissed him and when he looked down he saw, pinned to his

  shirt, the gold medals he had pawned the day they had gone to the

  moving picture show and received their inspiration to return to

  the land.

  "You darned kid!" he exclaimed, as he caught her to him. "So

  that's what you blew your fruit money in on? An' I never

  guessed!--Come here to you."

  And thereupon she suffered the pleasant mastery of his brawn, and

  was hugged and wrestled with until the coffee pot boiled over and

  she darted from him to the rescue.

  "I kinda always been a mite proud of 'em," he confessed, as he

  rolled his after-supper cigarette. "They take me back to my kid

  days when I amateured it to beat the band. I was some kid in them

  days, believe muh.--But say, d'ye know, they'd clean slipped my

  recollection. Oakland's a thousan' years away from you an' me,

  an' ten thousan' miles."

  "Then this will bring you back to it," Saxon said, opening Bud's

  letter and reading it aloud.

  Bud had taken it for granted that Billy knew the wind-up of the

  strike; so he devoted himself to the details as to which men had

  got back their jobs, and which had been blacklisted. To his own

  amazement he had been taken back, and was now driving Billy's

  horses. Still more amazing was the further information he had to

  impart. The old foreman of the West Oakland stables had died, and

  since then two other foremen had done nothing but make messes of

  everything. The point of all which was that the Boss had spoken

  that day to Bud, regretting the disappearance of Billy.

  "Don't make no mistake," Bud wrote. "The Boss is onto all your

  curves. I bet he knows every scab you slugged. Just the same he

  says to me--Strothers, if you ain't at liberty to give me his

  address, just write yourself and tell him for me to come a

  running. I'll give him a hundred and twenty-five a month to take

  hold the stables."

  Saxon waited with well-concealed anxiety when the letter was

  finished. Billy, stretched out, leaning on one elbow, blew a

  meditative ring of smoke. His cheap workshirt, incongruously

  brilliant with the gold of the medals that flashed in the

  firelight, was open in front, showing the smooth skin and

  splendid swell of chest. He glanced around--at the blankets

  bowered in a green screen and waiting, at the campfire and the

  blackened, battered coffee pot, at the well-worn hatchet, half

  buried in a tree trunk, and lastly at Saxon. His eyes embraced

  her; then into them came a slow expression of inquiry. But she

  offered no help.

  "Well," he uttered finally, "all you gotta do is write Bud

  Strothers, an' tell 'm not on the Boss's ugly tintype.--An'

  while you're about it, I'll send 'm the money to get my watch

  out. You work out the interest. The overcoat can stay there an'

  rot."

  But they did not prosper in the interior heat. They lost weight.

  The resilience went out of their minds and bodies. As Billy

  expressed it, their silk was frazzled. So they shouldered their

  packs and headed west across the wild mountains. In the Berryessa

  Valley, the shimmering heat waves made their eyes ache, and their

  heads; so that they traveled on in the early morning and late

  afternoon. Still west they headed, over more mountains, to

  beauti
ful Napa Valley. The next valley beyond was Sonoma, where

  Hastings had invited them to his ranch. And here they would have

  gone, had not Billy chanced upon a newspaper item which told of

  the writer's departure to cover some revolution that was breaking

  out somewhere in Mexico.

  "We'll see 'm later on," Billy said, as they turned northwest,

  through the vineyards and orchards of Napa Valley. "We're like

  that millionaire Bert used to sing about, except it's time that

  we've got to burn. Any direction is as good as any other, only

  west is best."

  Three times in the Napa Valley Billy refused work. Past St.

  Helena, Saxon hailed with joy the unmistakable redwoods they

  could see growing up the small canyons that penetrated the

  western wall of the valley. At Calistoga, at the end of the

  railroad, they saw the six-horse stages leaving for Middletown

  and Lower Lake. They debated their route. That way led to Lake

  County and not toward the coast, so Saxon and Billy swung west

  through the mountains to the valley of the Russian River, coming

  out at Healdsburg. They lingered in the hop-fields on the rich

  bottoms, where Billy scorned to pick hops alongside of Indians,

  Japanese, and Chinese.

  "I couldn't work alongside of 'em an hour before I'd be knockin'

  their blocks off," he explained. "Besides, this Russian River's

  some nifty. Let's pitch camp and go swimmin'."

  So they idled their way north up the broad, fertile valley, so

  happy that they forgot that work was ever necessary, while the

  valley of the moon was a golden dream, remote, but sure, some day

  of realization. At Cloverdale, Billy fell into luck. A

  combination of sickness and mischance found the stage stables

  short a driver. Each day the train disgorged passengers for the

  Geysers, and Billy, as if accustomed to it all his life, took the

  reins of six horses and drove a full load over the mountains in

  stage time. The second trip he had Saxon beside him on the high

  boxseat. By the end of two weeks the regular driver was back.

  Billy declined a stable-job, took his wages, and continued north.

  Saxon had adopted a fox terrier puppy and named him Possum, after

  the dog Mrs. Hastings had told them about. So young was he that

  he quickly became footsore, and she carried him until Billy

  perched him on top of his pack and grumbled that Possum was

  chewing his back hair to a frazzle.

  They passed through the painted vineyards of Asti at the end of

  the grape-picking, and entered Ukiah drenched to the skin by the

  first winter rain.

  "Say," Billy said, "you remember the way the Roamer just skated

  along. Well, this summer's done the same thing--gone by on

  wheels. An' now it's up to us to find some place to winter. This

  Ukiah looks like a pretty good burg. We'll get a room to-night

  an' dry out. An' to-morrow I'll hustle around to the stables, an'

  if I locate anything we can rent a shack an' have all winter to

  think about where we'll go next year."

  CHAPTER XIII

  The winter proved much less exciting than the one spent in

  Carmel, and keenly as Saxon had appreciated the Carmel folk, she

  now appreciated them more keenly than ever. In Ukiah she formed

  nothing more than superficial acquaintances. Here people were

  more like those of the working class she had known in Oakland, or

  else they were merely wealthy and herded together in automobiles.

  There was no democratic artist-colony that pursued fellowship

  disregardful of the caste of wealth.

  Yet it was a more enjoyable winter than any she had spent in

  Oakland. Billy had failed to get regular employment; so she saw

  much of him, and they lived a prosperous and happy hand-to-mouth

  existence in the tiny cottage they rented. As extra man at the

  biggest livery stable, Billy's spare time was so great that he

  drifted into horse-trading. It was hazardous, and more than once

  he was broke, but the table never wanted for the best of steak

  and coffee, nor did they stint themselves for clothes.