to Jim Hazard's. Each day
they boxed and took a long swim through the surf. When Hazard finished
his morning's writing, he would whoop through the pines to Billy, who
dropped whatever work he was doing. After the swim, they would take a
fresh shower at Hazard's house, rub each other down in training camp
style, and be ready for the noon meal. In the afternoon Hazard returned
to his desk, and Billy to his outdoor work, although, still later, they
often met for a few miles' run over the hills. Training was a matter
of habit to both men. Hazard, when he had finished with seven years of
football, knowing the dire death that awaits the big-muscled athlete who
ceases training abruptly, had been compelled to keep it up. Not only was
it a necessity, but he had grown to like it. Billy also liked it, for he
took great delight in the silk of his body.

Often, in the early morning, gun in hand, he was off with Mark Hall, who
taught him to shoot and hunt. Hall had dragged a shotgun around from the
days when he wore knee pants, and his keen observing eyes and knowledge
of the habits of wild life were a revelation to Billy. This part of the
country was too settled for large game, but Billy kept Saxon supplied
with squirrels and quail, cottontails and jackrabbits, snipe and wild
ducks. And they learned to eat roasted mallard and canvasback in the
California style of sixteen minutes in a hot oven. As he became expert
with shotgun and rifle, he began to regret the deer and the mountain
lion he had missed down below the Sur; and to the requirements of the
farm he and Saxon sought he added plenty of game.

But it was not all play in Carmel. That portion of the community which
Saxon and Billy came to know, "the crowd," was hard-working. Some worked
regularly, in the morning or late at night. Others worked spasmodically,
like the wild Irish playwright, who would shut himself up for a week at
a time, then emerge, pale and drawn, to play like a madman against the
time of his next retirement. The pale and youthful father of a family,
with the face of Shelley, who wrote vaudeville turns for a living and
blank verse tragedies and sonnet cycles for the despair of managers and
publishers, hid himself in a concrete cell with three-foot walls, so
piped, that, by turning a lever, the whole structure spouted water upon
the impending intruder. But in the main, they respected each other's
work-time. They drifted into one another's houses as the spirit
p