ed
the money to put them along on their travels. Also, life in Oakland and
Carmel, close to the salt edge of the coast, had spoiled them for the
interior. Too warm, was their verdict of Sacramento and they followed
the railroad west, through a region of swamp-land, to Davisville. Here
they were lured aside and to the north to pretty Woodland, where Billy
drove team for a fruit farm, and where Saxon wrung from him a reluctant
consent for her to work a few days in the fruit harvest. She made an
important and mystifying secret of what she intended doing with her
earnings, and Billy teased her about it until the matter passed from his
mind. Nor did she tell him of a money order inclosed with a certain blue
slip of paper in a letter to Bud Strothers.

They began to suffer from the heat. Billy declared they had strayed out
of the blanket climate.

"There are no redwoods here," Saxon said. "We must go west toward the
coast. It is there we'll find the valley of the moon."

From Woodland they swung west and south along the county roads to the
fruit paradise of Vacaville. Here Billy picked fruit, then drove team;
and here Saxon received a letter and a tiny express package from Bud
Strothers. When Billy came into camp from the day's work, she bade him
stand still and shut his eyes. For a few seconds she fumbled and did
something to the breast of his cotton work-shirt. Once, he felt a slight
prick, as of a pin point, and grunted, while she laughed and bullied him
to continue keeping his eyes shut.

"Close your eyes and give me a kiss," she sang, "and then I'll show you
what iss."

She kissed him and when he looked down he saw, pinned to his shirt, the
gold medals he had pawned the day they had gone to the moving picture
show and received their inspiration to return to the land.

"You darned kid!" he exclaimed, as he caught her to him. "So that's
what you blew your fruit money in on? An' I never guessed!--Come here to
you."

And thereupon she suffered the pleasant mastery of his brawn, and was
hugged and wrestled with until the coffee pot boiled over and she darted
from him to the rescue.

"I kinda always been a mite proud of 'em," he confessed, as he rolled
his after-supper cigarette. "They take me back to my kid days when I
amateured it to beat the band. I was some kid in them days, believe
muh.--But say, d'ye know, they'd clean slipped my recollection.
Oakland's a thousan' years away from you an' me, an' ten thousan'
m