s with a red globe suspended aloft. Isabel struck a match and
answered the captain's familiar greeting from his high perch in the
pilot-house; then went within, for the fog was rolling over Tamalpais,
dropping down the mountains in great sea waves. But even then she would
not go to bed, and lose her knowledge of recovered treasure. After a
time, however, she fell asleep in her chair before the fire. She awoke
suddenly, but drowsily surprised and disappointed not to find Gwynne in
the chair opposite. Then she became aware of the cause of her
interrupted slumbers. There was the sound of fire-arms and of barking
dogs on the hills sacred to the Leghorn. In three minutes she had her
skirts off, her high boots on, and was running, pistol in hand, to the
colony, announcing her coming by a preliminary discharge. Then for the
next hour she and her men fought one of those hordes of migratory rats
that suddenly steal upon chicken-ranches and leave ruin behind them.
Isabel had a genuine horror of rats. She would far rather have faced an
army of snakes; but with her rubber boots, the well-trained dogs, and
her accuracy of aim, she had nothing to fear. Those that were not
slaughtered were finally driven off, and Isabel, content even in this
phase of her strictly personal life, went to bed and slept the sleep of
youth and health and an easy conscience.

The next day began the torrential rains that lasted for three weeks,
almost without an hour's intermission; that wiped out the marsh, and
threatened floods for all the valleys of the north. The boats no longer
looked as if cutting their way through the lands, but adrift on a great
lake. Tamalpais and the mountains below it had disappeared, as if
hibernating, and the winds raged up and down the long valley, shaking
old houses like Isabel's to their foundations, and leaving not a leaf
on the trees. Nothing could be wilder or more desolate than the scene
from Isabel's piazza, where, encased in rubber, she took her exercise,
often battling every inch of one way against a driving wall of rain.
Rosewater, or any sort of house except her own, she did not see for days
at a time, nothing but that gray foaming muttering expanse of water, its
flood and fall no longer distinguishable. At first she was more than
content to be so isolated. Her practical life occupied little of her
time; only a daily, and always unexpected, dash up the slopes to see
that her men were not shirking their duties, and a w