lts grazin'
with 'em or kickin' up their heels. You know, there's money in raisin'
horses--especially the big workhorses that run to eighteen hundred an'
two thousand pounds. They're payin' for 'em, in the cities, every day in
the year, seven an' eight hundred a pair, matched geldings, four years
old. Good pasture an' plenty of it, in this kind of a climate, is all
they need, along with some sort of shelter an' a little hay in long
spells of bad weather. I never thought of it before, but let me tell you
that this ranch proposition is beginnin' to look good to ME."

Saxon was all excitement. Here was new information on the cherished
subject, and, best of all, Billy was the authority. Still better, he was
taking an interest himself.

"There'll be room for that and for everything on a quarter section," she
encouraged.

"Sure thing. Around the house we'll have vegetables an' fruit and
chickens an' everything, just like the Porchugeeze, an' plenty of room
beside to walk around an' range the horses."

"But won't the colts cost money, Billy?"

"Not much. The cobblestones eat horses up fast. That's where I'll get my
brood mares, from the ones knocked out by the city. I know THAT end of
it. They sell 'em at auction, an' they're good for years an' years, only
no good on the cobbles any more."

There ensued a long pause. In the dying fire both were busy visioning
the farm to be.

"It's pretty still, ain't it?" Billy said, rousing himself at last.
He gazed about him. "An' black as a stack of black cats." He shivered,
buttoned his coat, and tossed several sticks on the fire. "Just the
same, it's the best kind of a climate in the world. Many's the time,
when I was a little kid, I've heard my father brag about California's
bein' a blanket climate. He went East, once, an' staid a summer an' a
winter, an' got all he wanted. Never again for him."

"My mother said there never was such a land for climate. How wonderful
it must have seemed to them after crossing the deserts and mountains.
They called it the land of milk and honey. The ground was so rich that
all they needed to do was scratch it, Cady used to say."

"And wild game everywhere," Billy contributed. "Mr. Roberts, the one
that adopted my father, he drove cattle from the San Josquin to the
Columbia river. He had forty men helpin' him, an' all they took along
was powder an' salt. They lived off the game they shot."

"The hills were full of deer, and my mother saw whole