all that. Then
I quit the city, came down to Carmel, and went in for the open air--and
massage under tension."

"Jim Hazard didn't get his muscles that way," Billy challenged.

"Certainly not, the lucky skunk; he was born with them. Mine's made.
That's the difference. I'm a work of art. He's a cave bear. Come along.
I'll show you around now. You'd better get your clothes off. Keep on
only your shoes and pants, unless you've got a pair of trunks."

"My mother was a poet," Saxon said, while Billy was getting himself
ready in the thicket. She had noted Hall's reference to himself.

He seemed incurious, and she ventured further.

"Some of it was printed."

"What was her name?" he asked idly.

"Dayelle Wiley Brown. She wrote: 'The Viking's Quest'; 'Days of Gold';
'Constancy'; 'The Caballero'; 'Graves at Little Meadow'; and a lot more.
Ten of them are in 'The Story of the Files.'"

"I've the book at home," he remarked, for the first time showing real
interest. "She was a pioneer, of course--before my time. I'll look her
up when I get back to the house. My people were pioneers. They came by
Panama, in the Fifties, from Long Island. My father was a doctor, but
he went into business in San Francisco and robbed his fellow men out of
enough to keep me and the rest of a large family going ever since.--Say,
where are you and your husband bound?"

When Saxon had told him of their attempt to get away from Oakland and of
their quest for land, he sympathized with the first and shook his head
over the second.

"It's beautiful down beyond the Sur," he told her. "I've been all over
those redwood canyons, and the place is alive with game. The government
land is there, too. But you'd be foolish to settle. It's too remote. And
it isn't good farming land, except in patches in the canyons. I know
a Mexican there who is wild to sell his five hundred acres for fifteen
hundred dollars. Three dollars an acre! And what does that mean? That
it isn't worth more. That it isn't worth so much; because he can find no
takers. Land, you know, is worth what they buy and sell it for."

Billy, emerging from the thicket, only in shoes and in pants rolled to
the knees, put an end to the conversation; and Saxon watched the two
men, physically so dissimilar, climb the rocks and start out the south
side of the cove. At first her eyes followed them lazily, but soon she
grew interested and worried. Hall was leading Billy up what seemed a
perpendicular wa