g put to the
plough nor affording firewood, but breeding all manner of wild seeds
that go down in the irrigating ditches to come up as weeds in the
gardens and grass plots. But when I had no more than seen it in the
charm of its spring smiling, I knew I should have no peace until I had
bought ground and built me a house beside it, with a little wicket to go
in and out at all hours, as afterward came about.

Edswick, Roeder, Connor, and Ruffin owned the field before it fell to my
neighbor. But before that the Paiutes, mesne lords of the soil, made a
campoodie by the rill of Pine Creek; and after, contesting the soil
with them, cattle-men, who found its foodful pastures greatly to their
advantage; and bands of blethering flocks shepherded by wild, hairy men
of little speech, who attested their rights to the feeding ground with
their long staves upon each other's skulls. Edswick homesteaded the
field about the time the wild tide of mining life was roaring and
rioting up Kearsarge, and where the village now stands built a stone
hut, with loopholes to make good his claim against cattlemen or Indians.
But Edswick died and Roeder became master of the field. Roeder owned
cattle on a thousand hills, and made it a recruiting ground for his
bellowing herds before beginning the long drive to market across a
shifty desert. He kept the field fifteen years, and afterward falling
into difficulties, put it out as security against certain sums. Connor,
who held the securities, was cleverer than Roeder and not so busy. The
money fell due the winter of the Big Snow, when all the trails were
forty feet under drifts, and Roeder was away in San Francisco selling
his cattle. At the set time Connor took the law by the forelock and was
adjudged possession of the field. Eighteen days later Roeder arrived on
snowshoes, both feet frozen, and the money in his pack. In the long suit
at law ensuing, the field fell to Ruffin, that clever one-armed lawyer
with the tongue to wile a bird out of the bush, Connor's counsel, and
was sold by him to my neighbor, whom from envying his possession I call
Naboth.

Curiously, all this human occupancy of greed and mischief left no mark
on the field, but the Indians did, and the unthinking sheep. Round its
corners children pick up chipped arrow points of obsidian, scattered
through it are kitchen middens and pits of old sweat-houses. By the
south corner, where the campoodie stood, is a single shrub of "hoopee"
(Lyc