aw 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"
(_Lycium Andersonii_), maintaining itself hardly among alien shrubs, and
near by, three low rakish trees of hackberry, so far from home that no
prying of mine has been able to find another in any canon east or west.
But the berries of both were food for the Paiutes, eagerly sought and
traded for as far south as Shoshone Land. By the fork of the creek where
the shepherds camp is a single clump of mesquite of the variety called
"screw bean." The seed must have shaken there from some sheep's coat,
for this is not the habitat of mesquite, and except for other single
shrubs at sheep camps, none grows freely for a hundred and fifty miles
south or east.

Naboth has put a fence about the best of the field, but neither the
Indians nor the shepherds can quite forego it. They make camp and build
their wattled huts about the borders of it, and no doubt they have some
sense of home in its familiar aspect.

As I have said, it is a low-lying field, between the mesa and the town,
with no hillocks in it, but a gentle swale where the waste water of the
creek goes down to certain farms, and the hackberry-trees, of which the
tallest might be three times the height of a man, are the tallest things
in it. A mile up from the water gate that turns the creek into supply
pipes for the town, begins a row of long-leaved pines, threading the
watercourse to the foot of Kearsarge. These are the pines that puzzle
the local botanist, not easily determined, and unrelated to other
conifers of the Sierra slope; the same pines of which the Indians relate
a legend mixed of brotherliness and the retribution of God. Once the
pines possessed the field, as the worn stumps of them along the
streamside show, and it would seem their secret purpose to regain their
old footing. Now and then some seedling escapes the devastating sheep a
rod or two down-stream. Since I came to live by the field one of these