sack. Gates placed his hand over it.

"Sign the receipt," he commanded. "Now," he went on after the ink had
been sanded, "there's your $30. It's yours legally; and you can take it
if you want to. But I want to warn you that a thousand-dollar licking
goes with it!"

The money--from Gates's own pocket--eventually found its way to the poor
family!

They had three children, two boys and a girl of which one boy died.

In five years the placers began to play out. One by one the more
energetic of the miners dropped away. The nature of the community
changed. Small hill ranches or fruit farms took the place of the mines.
The camp became a country village. Old time excitement calmed, the pace
of life slowed, the horizon narrowed.

John Gates, clear-eyed, energetic, keen brained, saw this tendency
before it became a fact.

"This camp is busted," he told himself.

It was the hour to fulfill the purpose of the long, terrible journey
across the plains, to carry out the original intention to descend from
the Sierras to the golden valleys, to follow the struggle.

"Reckon it's time to be moving," he told his wife.

But now his own great labours asserted their claim. He had put four
years of his life into making this farm out of nothing, four years of
incredible toil, energy, and young enthusiasm. He had a good dwelling
and spacious corrals, an orchard started, a truck garden, a barley
field, a pasture, cattle, sheep, chickens, his horses--all his creation
from nothing. One evening at sundown he found his wife in the garden
weeping softly.

"What is it, honey?" he asked.

"I was just thinking how we'd miss the garden," she replied.

He looked about at the bright, cheerful flowers, the vine-hung picket
fence, the cool verandah, the shady fig tree already of some size.
Everything was neat and trim, just as he liked it. And the tinkle of
pleasant waters, the song of a meadow lark, the distant mellow lowing of
cows came to his ears; the smell of tarweed and of pines mingled in his
nostrils.

"It's a good place for children," he said, vaguely.

Neither knew it, but that little speech marked the ebb of the wave that
had lifted him from his eastern home, had urged him across the plains,
had flung him in the almost insolent triumph of his youth high toward
the sun. Now the wash receded.

CHAPTER II

It was indeed a good place for children. Charley and Alice Gates grew
tall and strong, big boned, magnificent, typical