all across the field. In
September young linnets grow out of the rabbit-brush in the night. All
the nests discoverable in the neighboring orchards will not account for
the numbers of them. Somewhere, by the same secret process by which the
field matures a million more seeds than it needs, it is maturing
red-hooded linnets for their devouring. All the purlieus of bigelovia
and artemisia are noisy with them for a month. Suddenly as they come as
suddenly go the fly-by-nights, that pitch and toss on dusky barred wings
above the field of summer twilights. Never one of these nighthawks will
you see after linnet time, though the hurtle of their wings makes a
pleasant sound across the dusk in their season.

For two summers a great red-tailed hawk has visited the field every
afternoon between three and four o'clock, swooping and soaring with the
airs of a gentleman adventurer. What he finds there is chiefly
conjectured, so secretive are the little people of Naboth's field. Only
when leaves fall and the light is low and slant, one sees the long clean
flanks of the jackrabbits, leaping like small deer, and of late
afternoons little cotton-tails scamper in the runways. But the most one
sees of the burrowers, gophers, and mice is the fresh earthwork of their
newly opened doors, or the pitiful small shreds the butcher-bird hangs
on spiny shrubs.

It is a still field, this of my neighbor's, though so busy, and
admirably compounded for variety and pleasantness,--a little sand, a
little loam, a grassy plot, a stony rise or two, a full brown stream, a
little touch of humanness, a footpath trodden out by moccasins. Naboth
expects to make town lots of it and his fortune in one and the same day;
but when I take the trail to talk with old Seyavi at the campoodie, it
occurs to me that though the field may serve a good turn in those days
it will hardly be happier. No, certainly not happier.

THE MESA TRAIL

The mesa trail begins in the campoodie at the corner of Naboth's field,
though one may drop into it from the wood road toward the canon, or from
any of the cattle paths that go up along the streamside; a clean, pale,
smooth-trodden way between spiny shrubs, comfortably wide for a horse or
an Indian. It begins, I say, at the campoodie, and goes on toward the
twilight hills and the borders of Shoshone Land. It strikes diagonally
across the foot of the hill-slope from the field until it reaches the
larkspur level, and holds south along