ounds of vegetables and two hundred pounds of meat
a year--which means you consume one hundred tons of water in the
vegetables and one thousand tons in the meat--which means that it takes
eleven hundred and one tons of water each year to keep a small woman
like you going."

"Gee!" was all Billy could say.

"You see how population depends upon water," the ax-barkeeper went on.
"Well, we've got the water, immense subterranean supplies, and in not
many years this valley will be populated as thick as Belgium."

Fascinated by the five-inch stream, sluiced out of the earth and back
to the earth by the droning motor, he forgot his discourse and stood and
gazed, rapt and unheeding, while his visitors drove on.

"An' him a drink-slinger!" Billy marveled. "He can sure sling the
temperance dope if anybody should ask you."

"It's lovely to think about--all that water, and all the happy people
that will come here to live--"

"But it ain't the valley of the moon!" Billy laughed.

"No," she responded. "They don't have to irrigate in the valley of
the moon, unless for alfalfa and such crops. What we want is the water
bubbling naturally from the ground, and crossing the farm in little
brooks, and on the boundary a fine big creek--"

"With trout in it!" Billy took her up. "An' willows and trees of all
kinds growing along the edges, and here a riffle where you can flip
out trout, and there a deep pool where you can swim and high-dive. An'
kingfishers, an' rabbits comin' down to drink, an', maybe, a deer."

"And meadowlarks in the pasture," Saxon added. "And mourning doves
in the trees. We must have mourning doves--and the big, gray
tree-squirrels."

"Gee!--that valley of the moon's goin' to be some valley," Billy
meditated, flicking a fly away with his whip from Hattie's side. "Think
we'll ever find it?"

Saxon nodded her head with great certitude.

"Just as the Jews found the promised land, and the Mormons Utah, and the
Pioneers California. You remember the last advice we got when we left
Oakland' ''Tis them that looks that finds.'"

CHAPTER XV

Ever north, through a fat and flourishing rejuvenated land, stopping at
the towns of Willows, Red Bluff and Redding, crossing the counties of
Colusa, Glenn, Tehama, and Shasta, went the spruce wagon drawn by the
dappled chestnuts with cream-colored manes and tails. Billy picked up
only three horses for shipment, although he visited many farms; and
Saxon talked with the women