dventure followed in
her footsteps. Out there somewhere beyond Bear Valley she stood
beckoning him to come!

He went to bed early, to toss for hours and at last to drop into
fretful, torturing dreams. The scream of a panther awoke him once.

He was up before sunrise, cooking his bacon and coffee and frying
slices of cold biscuit in the bacon grease.

The east was pink when he left the cabin, carrying the rifle, which he
meant to give to Uncle Sebastian. Everything else he left behind. He
took a short cut over Wild-cat Hill. On its crest, between the two
bull pines, he stopped before two graces.

The red sun was peering through the saddle of Signal Hill. Cold mists
rose from the forest. In the air was the breath of the morning.
Weirdly the early wind moaned through the needles of the tall bull
pines. Up from the canon came the roaring of Ripley Creek as it raced
to the sea.

A lump came in Hiram's throat that he could not down. At his feet lay
those who had lived and starved for him through the countless denials
of this wilderness. Below him lay the cabin which he had known as home
for twenty-six long years. About him stretched the grandeur of this
untarnished land. Scalding tears burst from his eyes. Some monstrous
ogre had arisen to crush him. They were driving him from his home,
from the land of his birth, from the spots he loved! No bitterer
period ever came in Hiram's life than when he stood that misty morning
and watched the sun rise on the turning point of his career. Blindly
he stumbled down Wild-cat Hill and took up the long road to Bixler's
store. They were driving him, like Hagar, from all that he held dear,
and there was hatred in his heart.

CHAPTER III

SAN FRANCISCO

The train that carried Hiram Hooker to San Francisco was late. Thirty
miles from the bay it began making up for lost time. Through the
falling dusk it roared toward the metropolis. Slowly the landscape
faded. Vineyards and chicken ranches and orchards and rolling hills
studded with live oaks gave place to the electric-lighted tentacles of
the city. The lights blinked by at Hiram. They helped depress him,
for they were a part of the modernity that he feared. Suburbs grew to
a continuous stretch of lighted streets and houses. Always those
lights blinked on every side. There was witchery in all of it--in the
smell of the city close at hand, in the cold salt air from the bay, in
the _chunk-a-lunk_, _chunk