Mrs. Cyrus Austin Phelps, of
Boston, arrived unexpectedly at the Yerba Buena rancho in California.
She was the only passenger to leave the train at the little sun-burned
platform that served as a station, and found not even a freight agent
there, of whom to ask the way to Miss Manzanita Boone's residence.
There were a few glittering lizards whisking about on the dusty boards,
and a few buzzards hanging motionless against the cloudless pale blue
of the sky overhead. Otherwise nothing living was in sight.

The train roared on down the valley, and disappeared. Its last echo
died away. All about was the utter silence of the foot-hills. The even
spires of motionless redwood trees rose, dense and steep, to meet the
sky-line with a shimmer of heat. The sun beat down mercilessly, there
was no shadow anywhere.

Mrs. Phelps, trim, middle-aged, richly and simply dressed, typical of
her native city, was not a woman to be easily disconcerted, but she
felt quite at a loss now. She was already sorry that she had come at
all to Yerba Buena, sorry that, in coming, she had not written Austin
to meet her. She already disliked this wide, silent, half-savage
valley, and already felt out of place here. How could she possibly
imagine that there would not be shops, stables, hotels at the station?
What did other people do when they arrived here? Mrs. Phelps crisply
asked these questions of the unanswering woods and hills.

After a while she sat down on her trunk, though with her small back
erect, and her expression uncompromisingly stern. She was sitting there
when Joe Bettancourt, a Portuguese milkman, happened to come by with
his shabby milk wagon, and his lean, shaggy horses, and--more because
Joe, not understanding English, took it calmly for granted that she
wished to drive with him, than because she liked the arrangement--Mrs.
Phelps got him to take her trunk and herself upon their way. They drove
steadily upward, through apple orchards that stretched in hot zigzag
lines, like the spokes of a great wheel, about them, and through strips
of forest, where the corduroy road was springy beneath the wagon
wheels, and past ugly low cow sheds, where the red-brown cattle were
already gathering for the milking.

"You are taking me to Mr. Boone's residence?" Mrs. Phelps would ask, at
two-minute intervals. And Joe, hunched lazily over the reins, would
respond huskily:

"Sure. Thaz th' ole man."

And presently they did turn a corner, and find,