armhouses in the hollows
and on the levels were grouped about with splendid trees.

"Maybe it sounds funny," Saxon observed; "but I 'm beginning to love
that mountain already. It almost seems as if I d seen it before,
somehow, it's so all-around satisfying--oh!"

Crossing a bridge and rounding a sharp turn, they were suddenly
enveloped in a mysterious coolness and gloom. All about them arose
stately trunks of redwood. The forest floor was a rosy carpet of autumn
fronds. Occasional shafts of sunlight, penetrating the deep shade,
warmed the somberness of the grove. Alluring paths led off among the
trees and into cozy nooks made by circles of red columns growing around
the dust of vanished ancestors--witnessing the titantic dimensions of
those ancestors by the girth of the circles in which they stood.

Out of the grove they pulled to the steep divide, which was no more than
a buttress of Sonoma Mountain. The way led on through rolling uplands
and across small dips and canyons, all well wooded and a-drip with
water. In places the road was muddy from wayside springs.

"The mountain's a sponge," said Billy. "Here it is, the tail-end of dry
summer, an' the ground's just leakin' everywhere."

"I know I've never been here before," Saxon communed aloud. "But it's
all so familiar! So I must have dreamed it. And there's madronos!--a
whole grove! And manzanita! Why, I feel just as if I was coming home...
Oh, Billy, if it should turn out to be our valley."

"Plastered against the side of a mountain?" he queried, with a skeptical
laugh.

"No; I don't mean that. I mean on the way to our valley. Because the
way--all ways--to our valley must be beautiful. And this; I've seen it
all before, dreamed it."

"It's great," he said sympathetically. "I wouldn't trade a square mile
of this kind of country for the whole Sacramento Valley, with the river
islands thrown in and Middle River for good measure. If they ain't deer
up there, I miss my guess. An' where they's springs they's streams, an'
streams means trout."

They passed a large and comfortable farmhouse, surrounded by wandering
barns and cow-sheds, went on under forest arches, and emerged beside a
field with which Saxon was instantly enchanted. It flowed in a gentle
concave from the road up the mountain, its farther boundary an unbroken
line of timber. The field glowed like rough gold in the approaching
sunset, and near the middle of it stood a solitary great redwood, with
blas