he said with a
certain pride. "And they tell me he's as much of a crook as they make
'em! Then there's a brother of Stan--Sol Clark. He runs a newspaper up
in Fresno County, and I guess he's another little crook. There's a bunch
of Clarks down in Los Angeles, in the fruit commission business--I don't
know nothing about them. Oh, there's Clarks enough of our sort!" he
concluded grimly.

Adelle could see that the stone mason had very slight intercourse with
any of his cousins. Like most working-people he was necessarily limited
in his social relations to his immediate neighbors, the relatives he
could get at easily in his free hours--holidays and Sundays and after
his eight hours of work was done. The mason's hands were not formed for
much penmanship! Adelle also realized that the stone mason, like more
prosperous people, did not love the members of his family just because
they were Clarks. There was no close family bond of any sort. The mason
knew less about his immediate relatives than he did about many other
people in the world, and felt less close to them; and of course she knew
them not even by name. She felt no great incentive to bequeath small
portions of Clark's Field to these unknown little people who happened to
bear the name of Clark--now that the law no longer demanded a
distribution of the estate, in fact prohibited it!

Thus Adelle realized the absurdity of the family inheritance scheme by
which property is preserved for the use of blood descendants of its
owner, irrespective of their fitness to use it. She saw that inheritance
was a mere survival of an archaic system of tribal bond, which society,
through its customary inertia and timidity and general dislike for
change, had preserved,--indeed, had made infinitely complex and precise
by a code of property laws. She sat back in her chair, silent, puzzled
and baffled by the situation. The only way, it seemed, in which she
could give the stone mason his share of his grandfather's property was
by stripping herself of all her possessions for the tribe of California
Clarks, which she felt no inclination to do.

Her cousin, apparently, had been following the same course of reflection
in part. He observed dispassionately,--

"I don't know much about 'em, and you don't know anything at all, of
course. Mos' likely they 're no better and no worse than any average
bunch of human beings. It's curious to think that if grandfather had
kept his folks back East informe