gh here only once," repeated the driver,--"going the other
way.--Then I drew a corpse." He spat, and added as an afterthought,
"BEAU-ti-ful Cal-if-or-nia!"

We stared at the mountains that hemmed us in. They rose above us sheer
and forbidding. In the bright moonlight plainly were to be descried
the brush of the foothills, the timber, the fissures, the canons, the
granites, and the everlasting snows. Almost we thought to make out a
thread of a waterfall high up where the clouds would be if the night
had not been clear.

"We got off the trail somewhere," hazarded the Tenderfoot.

"Well, we're on a road, anyway," I pointed out. "It's bound to go
somewhere. We might as well give up the railroad and find a place to
turn-in."

"It can't be far," encouraged the Tenderfoot; "this valley can't be
more than a few miles across."

"Gi dap!" remarked the driver.

We moved forward down the white wagon trail approaching the mountains.
And then we were witnesses of the most marvelous transformation. For
as we neared them, those impregnable mountains, as though
panic-stricken by our advance, shrunk back, dissolved, dwindled, went
to pieces. Where had towered ten-thousand-foot peaks, perfect in the
regular succession from timber to snow, now were little flat hills on
which grew tiny bushes of sage. A passage opened between them. In a
hundred yards we had gained the open country, leaving behind us the
mighty but unreal necromancies of the moon.

Before us gleamed red and green lights. The mass of houses showed half
distinguishable. A feeble glimmer illuminated part of a white sign
above the depot. That which remained invisible was evidently the name
of the town. That which was revealed was the supplementary information
which the Southern Pacific furnishes to its patrons. It read:
"Elevation 482 feet." We were definitely out of the mountains.

XXII

THE LURE OF THE TRAIL

The trail's call depends not at all on your common sense. You know you
are a fool for answering it; and yet you go. The comforts of
civilization, to put the case on its lowest plane, are not lightly to
be renounced: the ease of having your physical labor done for you; the
joy of cultivated minds, of theatres, of books, of participation in the
world's progress; these you leave behind you. And in exchange you
enter a life where there is much long hard work of the hands--work that
is really hard and long, so that no man paid to labor would co