ack-eyed, foreign. As they proceeded up the river, they
began to encounter dredges at work, biting out mouthfuls of the sandy
river bottom and heaping it on top of the huge levees. Great mats of
willow brush, hundreds of yards in length, were laid on top of the
river-slope of the levees and held in place by steel cables and
thousands of cubes of cement. The willows soon sprouted, Hastings told
them, and by the time the mats were rotted away the sand was held in
place by the roots of the trees.

"It must cost like Sam Hill," Billy observed.

"But the land is worth it," Hastings explained. "This island land is
the most productive in the world. This section of California is like
Holland. You wouldn't think it, but this water we're sailing on
is higher than the surface of the islands. They're like leaky
boats--calking, patching, pumping, night and day and all the time. But
it pays. It pays."

Except for the dredgers, the fresh-piled sand, the dense willow
thickets, and always Mt. Diablo to the south, nothing was to be seen.
Occasionally a river steamboat passed, and blue herons flew into the
trees.

"It must be very lonely," Saxon remarked.

Hastings laughed and told her she would change her mind later. Much
he related to them of the river lands, and after a while he got on the
subject of tenant farming. Saxon had started him by speaking of the
land-hungry Anglo-Saxons.

"Land-hogs," he snapped. "That's our record in this country. As one old
Reuben told a professor of an agricultural experiment station: 'They
ain't no sense in tryin' to teach me farmin'. I know all about it. Ain't
I worked out three farms?' It was his kind that destroyed New England.
Back there great sections are relapsing to wilderness. In one state,
at least, the deer have increased until they are a nuisance. There are
abandoned farms by the tens of thousands. I've gone over the lists of
them--farms in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut.
Offered for sale on easy payment. The prices asked wouldn't pay for the
improvements, while the land, of course, is thrown in for nothing.

"And the same thing is going on, in one way or another, the same
land-robbing and hogging, over the rest of the country--down in Texas,
in Missouri, and Kansas, out here in California. Take tenant farming.
I know a ranch in my county where the land was worth a hundred and
twenty-five an acre. And it gave its return at that valuation. When the
old man died, the s