stopped.
Confronting them, a dozen paces away, was a half-grown red fox. For half
a minute, with beady eyes, the wild thing studied them, with twitching
sensitive nose reading the messages of the air. Then, velvet-footed, it
leapt aside and was gone among the trees.

"The son-of-a-gun!" Billy ejaculated.

As they approached Wild Water; they rode out into a long narrow meadow.
In the middle was a pond.

"Natural reservoir, when Glen Ellen begins to buy water," Billy said.
"See, down at the lower end there?--wouldn't cost anything hardly
to throw a dam across. An' I can pipe in all kinds of hill-drip. An'
water's goin' to be money in this valley not a thousan' years from
now.--An' all the ginks, an' boobs, an' dubs, an' gazabos poundin' their
ear deado an' not seein' it comin.--An' surveyors workin' up the valley
for an electric road from Sausalito with a branch up Napa Valley."

They came to the rim of Wild Water canyon. Leaning far back in their
saddles, they slid the horses down a steep declivity, through big spruce
woods, to an ancient and all but obliterated trail.

"They cut this trail 'way back in the Fifties," Billy explained. "I only
found it by accident. Then I asked Poppe yesterday. He was born in the
valley. He said it was a fake minin' rush across from Petaluma. The
gamblers got it up, an' they must a-drawn a thousan' suckers. You see
that flat there, an' the old stumps. That's where the camp was. They
set the tables up under the trees. The flat used to be bigger, but the
creek's eaten into it. Poppe said they was a couple of killin's an' one
lynchin'."

Lying low against their horses' necks, they scrambled up a steep cattle
trail out of the canyon, and began to work across rough country toward
the knolls.

"Say, Saxon, you're always lookin' for something pretty. I'll show
you what'll make your hair stand up... soon as we get through this
manzanita."

Never, in all their travels, had Saxon seen so lovely a vista as the one
that greeted them when they emerged. The dim trail lay like a rambling
red shadow cast on the soft forest floor by the great redwoods and
over-arching oaks. It seemed as if all local varieties of trees and
vines had conspired to weave the leafy roof--maples, big madronos and
laurels, and lofty tan-bark oaks, scaled and wrapped and interwound with
wild grape and flaming poison oak. Saxon drew Billy's eyes to a mossy
bank of five-finger ferns. All slopes seemed to meet to form this