n unvarying richness of soil and with only one landmark--Mt.
Diablo, ever to be seen, sleeping in the midday azure, limping its
crinkled mass against the sunset sky, or forming like a dream out of the
silver dawn. Sometimes on foot, often by launch, they cries-crossed and
threaded the river region as far as the peat lands of the Middle River,
down the San Joaquin to Antioch, and up Georgiana Slough to Walnut Grove
on the Sacramento. And it proved a foreign land. The workers of the soil
teemed by thousands, yet Saxon and Billy knew what it was to go a
whole day without finding any one who spoke English. They
encountered--sometimes in whole villages--Chinese, Japanese, Italians,
Portuguese, Swiss, Hindus, Koreans, Norwegians, Danes, French,
Armenians, Slavs, almost every nationality save American. One American
they found on the lower reaches of Georgiana who eked an illicit
existence by fishing with traps. Another American, who spouted blood and
destruction on all political subjects, was an itinerant bee-farmer. At
Walnut Grove, bustling with life, the few Americans consisted of
the storekeeper, the saloonkeeper, the butcher, the keeper of the
drawbridge, and the ferryman. Yet two thriving towns were in Walnut
Grove, one Chinese, one Japanese. Most of the land was owned by
Americans, who lived away from it and were continually selling it to the
foreigners.

A riot, or a merry-making--they could not tell which--was taking place
in the Japanese town, as Saxon and Billy steamed out on the Apache,
bound for Sacramento.

"We're settin' on the stoop," Billy railed. "Pretty soon they'll crowd
us off of that."

"There won't be any stoop in the valley of the moon," Saxon cheered him.

But he was inconsolable, remarking bitterly:

"An' they ain't one of them damn foreigners that can handle four horses
like me.

"But they can everlastingly farm," he added.

And Saxon, looking at his moody face, was suddenly reminded of a
lithograph she had seen in her childhood It was of a Plains Indian, in
paint and feathers, astride his horse and gazing with wondering eye at a
railroad train rushing along a fresh-made track. The Indian had passed,
she remembered, before the tide of new life that brought the railroad.
And were Billy and his kind doomed to pass, she pondered, before this
new tide of life, amazingly industrious, that was flooding in from Asia
and Europe?

At Sacramento they stopped two weeks, where Billy drove team and earn