That night the watchful guardians of the Wild sent the mule-deer to Harry the man who had been a pot-hunter. A buck of three years came down the draw by the watercourse and nibbled the young shoots of the vines where he could reach them across the rabbit proof fencing that the settler had drawn about his planted acres. Not that the wire netting would have stopped him; this was merely the opening of the game. Three days later he spent the night in the kitchen garden and cropped the tips of the newly planted orchard. After that the two of them put in nearly the whole of the growing season dodging one another through the close twigged manzanita, lilac, laurel and mahogany that broke upward along the shining bouldered coasts of San Jacinto. the chaparral at this season took all the changes of the incoming surf, blue in the shadows, darkling green about the heads of the gulches, or riffling with the white under side of wind-lifted leaves. Once its murmurous swell had closed over them, the mule-deer would have his own way with the Pot Hunter. Often after laborious hours spent in repairing the garden, the man would hear his enemy coughing in the gully behind the house, and take up his rifle to put in the rest of the day snaking through the breathless fifteen foot cover, only to have a glimpse of the buck at last dashing back the late light from glittering antlers as he bounded up inaccessible rocky stairs. This was the more exasperating since Greenhow had promised the antlers to the Homesteader's daughter. When the surface of the camissal had taken on the brown tones of weed under sea water and the young clusters of the grapes were set--for this was the year the vineyard was expected to come into bearing--the mule-deer disappeared altogether from that district, and Greenhow went back hopefully to rooting the joint grass out of the garden. But about the time he should have been rubbing the velvet off his horns among the junipers of the high ridges, the mule-deer came back with two of his companions and fattened on the fruit of the vineyard. They went up and down the rows ruining with selective bites the finest clusters. During the day they lay up like cattle under the quaking aspens beyond the highest, wind-whitened spay of the chaparral, and came down to feast day by day as the sun ripened the swelling amber globules. They slipped between the barbs of the fine wired fence without so much as changing a leg or altering their long, loping stride; and what they left the quail took.