hasta ever developing new forms and phases in her summer
snows.

"A moving picture in the sky," said Billy at last.

"Oh,--it is all so beautiful," sighed Saxon. "But there are no
moon-valleys here."

They encountered a plague of butterflies, and for days drove through
untold millions of the fluttering beauties that covered the road with
uniform velvet-brown. And ever the road seemed to rise under the noses
of the snorting mares, filling the air with noiseless flight, drifting
down the breeze in clouds of brown and yellow soft-flaked as snow, and
piling in mounds against the fences, ever driven to float helplessly on
the irrigation ditches along the roadside. Hazel and Hattie soon grew
used to them though Possum never ceased being made frantic.

"Huh!--who ever heard of butterfly-broke horses?" Billy chaffed. "That's
worth fifty bucks more on their price."

"Wait till you get across the Oregon line into the Rogue River
Valley," they were told. "There's God's Paradise--climate, scenery,
and fruit-farming; fruit ranches that yield two hundred per cent. on a
valuation of five hundred dollars an acre."

"Gee!" Billy said, when he had driven on out of hearing; "that's too
rich for our digestion."

And Saxon said, "I don't know about apples in the valley of the moon,
but I do know that the yield is ten thousand per cent. of happiness on a
valuation of one Billy, one Saxon, a Hazel, a Hattie, and a Possum."

Through Siskiyou County and across high mountains, they came to Ashland
and Medford and camped beside the wild Rogue River.

"This is wonderful and glorious," pronounced Saxon; "but it is not the
valley of the moon."

"Nope, it ain't the valley of the moon," agreed Billy, and he said it
on the evening of the day he hooked a monster steelhead, standing to his
neck in the ice-cold water of the Rogue and fighting for forty minutes,
with screaming reel, ere he drew his finny prize to the bank and with
the scalp-yell of a Comanche jumped and clutched it by the gills.

"'Them that looks finds,'" predicted Saxon, as they drew north out of
Grant's Pass, and held north across the mountains and fruitful Oregon
valleys.

One day, in camp by the Umpqua River, Billy bent over to begin skinning
the first deer he had ever shot. He raised his eyes to Saxon and
remarked:

"If I didn't know California, I guess Oregon'd suit me from the ground
up."

In the evening, replete with deer meat, resting on his elbow and smoking
h