he had made the shakes
for the roof. A blanket, stretched across a corner, gave Saxon privacy.
The poet was on the verge of departing for San Francisco and New York,
but remained a day over with them to explain the country and run over
the government land with Billy. Saxon had wanted to go along that
morning, but Hafler scornfully rejected her, telling her that her legs
were too short. That night, when the men returned, Billy was played out
to exhaustion. He frankly acknowledged that Hafler had walked him into
the ground, and that his tongue had been hanging out from the first
hour. Hafler estimated that they had covered fifty-five miles.

"But such miles!" Billy enlarged. "Half the time up or down, an' 'most
all the time without trails. An' such a pace. He was dead right about
your short legs, Saxon. You wouldn't a-lasted the first mile. An' such
country! We ain't seen anything like it yet."

Hafler left the next day to catch the train at Monterey. He gave them
the freedom of the Marble House, and told them to stay the whole winter
if they wanted. Billy elected to loaf around and rest up that day.
He was stiff and sore. Moreover, he was stunned by the exhibition of
walking prowess on the part of the poet.

"Everybody can do something top-notch down in this country," he
marveled. "Now take that Hafler. He's a bigger man than me, an' a
heavier. An' weight's against walkin', too. But not with him. He's done
eighty miles inside twenty-four hours, he told me, an' once a hundred
an' seventy in three days. Why, he made a show outa me. I felt ashamed
as a little kid."

"Remember, Billy," Saxon soothed him, "every man to his own game. And
down here you're a top-notcher at your own game. There isn't one you're
not the master of with the gloves."

"I guess that's right," he conceded. "But just the same it goes against
the grain to be walked off my legs by a poet--by a poet, mind you."

They spent days in going over the government land, and in the end
reluctantly decided against taking it up. The redwood canyons and great
cliffs of the Santa Lucia Mountains fascinated Saxon; but she remembered
what Hafler had told her of the summer fogs which hid the sun sometimes
for a week or two at a time, and which lingered for months. Then, too,
there was no access to market. It was many miles to where the nearest
wagon road began, at Post's, and from there on, past Point Sur to
Carmel, it was a weary and perilous way. Billy, with his