iles."

"Then this will bring you back to it," Saxon said, opening Bud's letter
and reading it aloud.

Bud had taken it for granted that Billy knew the wind-up of the strike;
so he devoted himself to the details as to which men had got back their
jobs, and which had been blacklisted. To his own amazement he had been
taken back, and was now driving Billy's horses. Still more amazing was
the further information he had to impart. The old foreman of the West
Oakland stables had died, and since then two other foremen had done
nothing but make messes of everything. The point of all which was that
the Boss had spoken that day to Bud, regretting the disappearance of
Billy.

"Don't make no mistake," Bud wrote. "The Boss is onto all your curves.
I bet he knows every scab you slugged. Just the same he says to
me--Strothers, if you ain't at liberty to give me his address, just
write yourself and tell him for me to come a running. I'll give him a
hundred and twenty-five a month to take hold the stables."

Saxon waited with well-concealed anxiety when the letter was finished.
Billy, stretched out, leaning on one elbow, blew a meditative ring of
smoke. His cheap workshirt, incongruously brilliant with the gold of
the medals that flashed in the firelight, was open in front, showing
the smooth skin and splendid swell of chest. He glanced around--at the
blankets bowered in a green screen and waiting, at the campfire and the
blackened, battered coffee pot, at the well-worn hatchet, half buried in
a tree trunk, and lastly at Saxon. His eyes embraced her; then into them
came a slow expression of inquiry. But she offered no help.

"Well," he uttered finally, "all you gotta do is write Bud Strothers,
an' tell 'm not on the Boss's ugly tintype.--An' while you're about it,
I'll send 'm the money to get my watch out. You work out the interest.
The overcoat can stay there an' rot."

But they did not prosper in the interior heat. They lost weight. The
resilience went out of their minds and bodies. As Billy expressed it,
their silk was frazzled. So they shouldered their packs and headed west
across the wild mountains. In the Berryessa Valley, the shimmering heat
waves made their eyes ache, and their heads; so that they traveled on in
the early morning and late afternoon. Still west they headed, over more
mountains, to beautiful Napa Valley. The next valley beyond was Sonoma,
where Hastings had invited them to his ranch. And here they would ha