A Pot Hunter, you understand, is a business man. He is out for what he can get, and regards game laws as an interference with the healthful interactions of competition. Greenhow potted quail in the Temblors where by simply rolling out of his blanket he could bag two score at a shot as they flocked, sleek and stately blue, down the runways to the drinking places. He took pronghorn at Castac with a repeating rifle and a lure of his red necktie held aloft on a cleaning rod, and packed them four to a mule-back down the Tejon to Summerfield. He shot farrow does and fished out of season, and had never heard of the sportsmanly obligation to throw back the fingerlings. Anything that made gunning worth while to the man who came after you was, by Greenhow's reckoning, a menace to pot hunting. There were Indians in those parts who could have told him better--notable hunters who never shot swimming deer nor does with fawn nor any game unaware; who prayed permission of the Wuld before they went to hunt, and left offal for their little brothers of the Wilderness. Indians know. But Greenhow, being a business man, opined that Indians were improvident, and not being even good at his business, fouled the waters where he camped, left man traces in his trails and neglected to put out his fires properly. Whole hillsides where the deer had browsed were burnt off bare as your hand in the wake of the pot hunter. Thus in due course, though Greenhow laid it to the increasing severity of game laws framed in the interests of city sportsmen, who preferred working hard for their venison to buying it comfortably in the open market, pot hunting grew so little profitable that he determined to leave it off altogether an become a Settler. Not however until he had earned the reprisal of the gods, of whom in a dozen years he had not even become aware. In the Spring of the year the Tonkawanda irrigation district was opened, he settled himself on a spur of San Jacinto where it plunges like a great dolphin in the green swell of the camissal, and throws up a lacy foam of chaparral along its sides. Below him, dotted over the flat reach of the mesa, the four square clearings of the Homesteaders showed along the line of the great canal, keen and blue as the cutting edge of civilization. There was a deep-soil level under the nose of San Jacinto--rabbits used to play there until Greenhow took to potting them for his breakfast--and a stream bubbled from under the hill to waste in the meadow. Greenhow built a shack under a live oak there and fancied himself in the character of a proprietor. He reckoned that in the three years before his vineyard came into bearing, he could pot-hunt in the hills behind his clearing for the benefit of the Homesteaders.