rosion, the hole had been scooped out in
the course of centuries by the wash of water. Nowhere did the raw earth
appear. All was garmented by vegetation, from tiny maiden-hair and
gold-back ferns to mighty redwood and Douglas spruces. These great trees
even sprang out from the walls of the hole. Some leaned over at angles
as great as forty-five degrees, though the majority towered straight up
from the soft and almost perpendicular earth walls.

It was a perfect hiding-place. No one ever came there, not even the
village boys of Glen Ellen. Had this hole existed in the bed of a canyon
a mile long, or several miles long, it would have been well known. But
this was no canyon. From beginning to end the length of the stream was
no more than five hundred yards. Three hundred yards above the hole the
stream took its rise in a spring at the foot of a flat meadow. A hundred
yards below the hole the stream ran out into open country, joining the
main stream and flowing across rolling and grass-covered land.

My companion took a turn of the rope around a tree, and with me fast on
the other end lowered away. In no time I was on the bottom. And in but
a short while he had carried all the articles from the cache and lowered
them down to me. He hauled the rope up and hid it, and before he went
away called down to me a cheerful parting.

Before I go on I want to say a word for this comrade, John Carlson, a
humble figure of the Revolution, one of the countless faithful ones in
the ranks. He worked for Wickson, in the stables near the hunting lodge.
In fact, it was on Wickson's horses that we had ridden over Sonoma
Mountain. For nearly twenty years now John Carlson has been custodian
of the refuge. No thought of disloyalty, I am sure, has ever entered his
mind during all that time. To betray his trust would have been in his
mind a thing undreamed. He was phlegmatic, stolid to such a degree that
one could not but wonder how the Revolution had any meaning to him at
all. And yet love of freedom glowed sombrely and steadily in his
dim soul. In ways it was indeed good that he was not flighty and
imaginative. He never lost his head. He could obey orders, and he was
neither curious nor garrulous. Once I asked how it was that he was a
revolutionist.

"When I was a young man I was a soldier," was his answer. "It was in
Germany. There all young men must be in the army. So I was in the army.
There was another soldier there, a young man, too. His f