Adelle could see that the stone mason had very slight intercourse with any of his cousins. Like most working-people he was necessarily limited in his social relations to his immediate neighbors, the relatives he could get at easily in his free hours--holidays and Sundays and after his eight hours of work was done. The mason's hands were not formed for much penmanship! Adelle also realized that the stone mason, like more prosperous people, did not love the members of his family just because they were Clarks. There was no close family bond of any sort. The mason knew less about his immediate relatives than he did about many other people in the world, and felt less close to them; and of course she knew them not even by name. She felt no great incentive to bequeath small portions of Clark's Field to these unknown little people who happened to bear the name of Clark--now that the law no longer demanded a distribution of the estate, in fact prohibited it! Thus Adelle realized the absurdity of the family inheritance scheme by which property is preserved for the use of blood descendants of its owner, irrespective of their fitness to use it. She saw that inheritance was a mere survival of an archaic system of tribal bond, which society, through its customary inertia and timidity and general dislike for change, had preserved,--indeed, had made infinitely complex and precise by a code of property laws. She sat back in her chair, silent, puzzled and baffled by the situation. The only way, it seemed, in which she could give the stone mason his share of his grandfather's property was by stripping herself of all her possessions for the tribe of California Clarks, which she felt no inclination to do. Her cousin, apparently, had been following the same course of reflection in part. He observed dispassionately,-- "I don't know much about 'em, and you don't know anything at all, of course. Mos' likely they 're no better and no worse than any average bunch of human beings. It's curious to think that if grandfather had kept his folks back East informed of his post-office address, all these Clarks big and little would have come in for a slice of the pie!" "It might not have been such a big pie, then," Adelle remarked. She remembered quite well what the judge had said about the accumulation of her fortune. It was just because these California Clarks had been lost to sight that there was any "pie" at all. If Edward S. had left his post-office address, there was no doubt that long before this Clark's Field would have been eaten up: there would have been no Adelle Clark--and no book about her and Clark's Field! The mason tossed his hat in the air and caught it dexterously on the point of his thumb. He mused,-- "All the same they'd open their eyes some, I guess, if they knew what we know. My, wouldn't it make 'em mad to think how near they'd come to some easy money!"