Defenders of Democracy: Contributions from representative men and women of letters and other arts from our allies and our own country, edited by the Gift book committee of the Militia of MercyMilitia of Mercy (U.S.). Gift Book Committee
History
Defenders of Democracy: Contributions from representative men and women of letters and other arts from our allies and our own country, edited by the Gift book committee of the Militia of Mercy
Militia of Mercy (U.S.). Gift Book Committee
Gift books; World War, 1914-1918; World War, 1914-1918 -- Gift books
It was altogether a lovely habitation. Camise grew flush with the
meadow and the flanks of San Jacinto shivered and sparkled with
the wind that turned the thousand leaves of the chaparral. Under
the wind one caught at times the slow deep chuckle of the water.
Greenhow should have been warned by that. In just such tones the
ancient Greeks had heard the great god Pan laughing in the woods
under Parnassus,--which was Greek indeed to the Pot Hunter.
Greenhow was thirty-four when he took out his preemption papers
and planted his first acre of vines. For reasons best known to
the gods, the deer kept well away from that side of the San Jacinto
that year. Greenhow enlarged the meadow and turned up ground for
a garden; he became acquainted with his neighbors and learned that
they had prejudices in favor of game regulations, also that one of
them had a daughter. She had white, even teeth that flashed when
she laughed; the whole effect of her was as sound and as appetizing
as a piece of ripe fruit. Greenhow told her that the prospect of
having a home of his own was an incentive such as pot-hunting held
out to no man. He looked as he said it, a very brother to Nimrod,
for as yet the Pot had not marked him.
He stood straight; his eyes had the deep, varying blueness of lake
water. Little wisps and burrs, odors of the forest clung about
his clothing; a beard covered his slack, formless mouth. When he
told the Homesteader's daughter how the stars went by on heather
planted headlands and how the bucks belled the does at the bottom
of deep canons in October, she heard in it the call of the trail
and young Adventure. Times when she would see from the level of
her father's quarter section the smoke of the Pot Hunter's cabin
rising blue against the glistening green of the live oak, she thought
that life might have a wilder, sweeter tang there about the roots
of the mountain.
In his second Spring when the camissal foamed all white with bloom
and the welter of yellow violets ran in the grass under it like
fire, Greenhow built a lean-to to his house and made the discovery
that the oak which jutted out from the barranca behind it was of
just the right height from the ground to make a swing for a child,
which caused him a strange pleasant embarrassment.
"Look kind o' nice to see a little feller playin' round," he
admitted to himself, and the same evening went down to call on the
Homesteader's daughter.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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