way
across the road to a sunny slope where the market garden of three acres
seemed to roll like a river of green rapids to a little "run" or brook,
which, even in the dry season, showed a trickling rill. But here he was
struck by a singular circumstance. The garden rested in a rich, alluvial
soil, and under the quickening Californian sky had developed far beyond
the ability of its late cultivator to restrain or keep it in order.
Everything had grown luxuriantly, and in monstrous size and profusion.
The garden had even trespassed its bounds, and impinged upon the open
road, the deserted claims, and the ruins of the past. Stimulated by the
little cultivation Quincy Wells had found time to give it, it had
leaped its three acres and rioted through the Hollow. There were scarlet
runners crossing the abandoned sluices, peas climbing the court-house
wall, strawberries matting the trail, while the seeds and pollen of
its few homely Eastern flowers had been blown far and wide through the
woods. By a grim satire, Nature seemed to have been the only thing that
still prospered in that settlement of man.

The cabin itself, built of unpainted boards, consisted of a
sitting-room, dining-room, kitchen, and two bedrooms, all plainly
furnished, although one of the bedrooms was better ordered, and
displayed certain signs of feminine decoration, which made Jackson
believe it had been his cousin's room. Luckily, the slight, temporary
structure bore no deep traces of its previous occupancy to disturb him
with its memories, and for the same reason it gained in cleanliness and
freshness. The dry, desiccating summer wind that blew through it had
carried away both the odors and the sense of domesticity; even the adobe
hearth had no fireside tales to tell,--its very ashes had been scattered
by the winds; and the gravestone of its dead owner on the hill was no
more flavorless of his personality than was this plain house in which he
had lived and died. The excessive vegetation produced by the stirred-up
soil had covered and hidden the empty tin cans, broken boxes, and
fragments of clothing which usually heaped and littered the tent-pegs
of the pioneer. Nature's own profusion had thrust them into obscurity.
Jackson Wells smiled as he recalled his sanguine partner's idea of a
treasure-trove concealed and stuffed in the crevices of this tenement,
already so palpably picked clean by those wholesome scavengers of
California, the dry air and burning sun.