a
magnificent deer-park, where, over thousands of acres of sweet slopes
and glades and canyons, the deer ran almost in primitive wildness. The
people who had owned the soil had been driven away. A state home for the
feeble-minded had also been demolished to make room for the deer.

To cap it all, Wickson's hunting lodge was a quarter of a mile from my
hiding-place. This, instead of being a danger, was an added security.
We were sheltered under the very aegis of one of the minor oligarchs.
Suspicion, by the nature of the situation, was turned aside. The last
place in the world the spies of the Iron Heel would dream of looking for
me, and for Ernest when he joined me, was Wickson's deer-park.

We tied our horses among the redwoods at the pool. From a cache behind
a hollow rotting log my companion brought out a variety of things,--a
fifty-pound sack of flour, tinned foods of all sorts, cooking utensils,
blankets, a canvas tarpaulin, books and writing material, a great bundle
of letters, a five-gallon can of kerosene, an oil stove, and, last and
most important, a large coil of stout rope. So large was the supply of
things that a number of trips would be necessary to carry them to the
refuge.

But the refuge was very near. Taking the rope and leading the way, I
passed through a glade of tangled vines and bushes that ran between two
wooded knolls. The glade ended abruptly at the steep bank of a stream.
It was a little stream, rising from springs, and the hottest summer
never dried it up. On every hand were tall wooded knolls, a group of
them, with all the seeming of having been flung there from some careless
Titan's hand. There was no bed-rock in them. They rose from their bases
hundreds of feet, and they were composed of red volcanic earth, the
famous wine-soil of Sonoma. Through these the tiny stream had cut its
deep and precipitous channel.

It was quite a scramble down to the stream bed, and, once on the bed,
we went down stream perhaps for a hundred feet. And then we came to the
great hole. There was no warning of the existence of the hole, nor
was it a hole in the common sense of the word. One crawled through
tight-locked briers and branches, and found oneself on the very edge,
peering out and down through a green screen. A couple of hundred feet in
length and width, it was half of that in depth. Possibly because of
some fault that had occurred when the knolls were flung together, and
certainly helped by freakish e