r can tell. He's our kind. Go ahead, Billy. You just speak to
him. He isn't working now anyway, and he'll be more likely to talk. See
that tree in there, just inside the gate, and the way the branches are
grown together. It's a curiosity. Ask him about it. That's a good way to
get started."

Billy stopped, when they were alongside.

"How do you do," he said gruffly.

The lineman, a young fellow, paused in the cracking of a hard-boiled egg
to stare up at the couple.

"How do you do," he said.

Billy swung his pack from his shoulders to the ground, and Saxon rested
her telescope basket.

"Peddlin'?" the young man asked, too discreet to put his question
directly to Saxon, yet dividing it between her and Billy, and cocking
his eye at the covered basket.

"No," she spoke up quickly. "We're looking for land. Do you know of any
around here?"

Again he desisted from the egg, studying them with sharp eyes as if to
fathom their financial status.

"Do you know what land sells for around here?" he asked.

"No," Saxon answered. "Do you?"

"I guess I ought to. I was born here. And land like this all around you
runs at from two to three hundred to four an' five hundred dollars an
acre."

"Whew!" Billy whistled. "I guess we don't want none of it."

"But what makes it that high? Town lots?" Saxon wanted to know.

"Nope. The Porchugeeze make it that high, I guess."

"I thought it was pretty good land that fetched a hundred an acre,"
Billy said.

"Oh, them times is past. They used to give away land once, an' if you
was good, throw in all the cattle runnin' on it."

"How about government land around here?" was Billy'a next query.

"Ain't none, an' never was. This was old Mexican grants. My grandfather
bought sixteen hundred of the best acres around here for fifteen
hundred dollars--five hundred down an' the balance in five years without
interest. But that was in the early days. He come West in '48, tryin' to
find a country without chills an' fever."

"He found it all right," said Billy.

"You bet he did. An' if him an' father 'd held onto the land it'd been
better than a gold mine, an' I wouldn't be workin' for a livin'. What's
your business?"

"Teamster."

"Ben in the strike in Oakland?"

"Sure thing. I've teamed there most of my life."

Here the two men wandered off into a discussion of union affairs and the
strike situation; but Saxon refused to be balked, and brought back the
talk to the land.

"How w