e bolstered
up with whiskey, which wasn't good for it any more than was the living
in clubs and hotels good for my stomach and the rest of me. That was
what ailed me; I was living all wrong."

He shrugged his shoulders and drew at his pipe.

"When the doctors gave me up, I wound up my affairs and gave the
doctors up. That was fifteen years ago. I'd been hunting through here
when I was a boy, on vacations from college, and when I was all down
and out it seemed a yearning came to me to go back to the country. So
I quit, quit everything, absolutely, and came to live in the Valley of
the Moon--that's the Indian name, you know, for Sonoma Valley. I lived
in the lean-to the first year; then I built the cabin and sent for my
books. I never knew what happiness was before, nor health. Look at me
now and dare to tell me that I look forty-seven."

"I wouldn't give a day over forty," Daylight confessed.

"Yet the day I came here I looked nearer sixty, and that was fifteen
years ago."

They talked along, and Daylight looked at the world from new angles.
Here was a man, neither bitter nor cynical, who laughed at the
city-dwellers and called them lunatics; a man who did not care for
money, and in whom the lust for power had long since died. As for the
friendship of the city-dwellers, his host spoke in no uncertain terms.

"What did they do, all the chaps I knew, the chaps in the clubs with
whom I'd been cheek by jowl for heaven knows how long? I was not
beholden to them for anything, and when I slipped out there was not one
of them to drop me a line and say, 'How are you, old man? Anything I
can do for you?' For several weeks it was: 'What's become of Ferguson?'
After that I became a reminiscence and a memory. Yet every last one of
them knew I had nothing but my salary and that I'd always lived a lap
ahead of it."

"But what do you do now?" was Daylight's query. "You must need cash to
buy clothes and magazines?"

"A week's work or a month's work, now and again, ploughing in the
winter, or picking grapes in the fall, and there's always odd jobs with
the farmers through the summer. I don't need much, so I don't have to
work much. Most of my time I spend fooling around the place. I could
do hack work for the magazines and newspapers; but I prefer the
ploughing and the grape picking. Just look at me and you can see why.
I'm hard as rocks. And I like the work. But I tell you a chap's got
to break in to it. It's a