WHERE they came from no one knew. Among the farmers near the Bend there was ample ability to conduct researches beset by far more difficulties than was that of the origin of the Pikes; but a charge of buckshot which a good-natured Yankee received one evening, soon after putting questions to a venerable Pike, exerted a depressing influence upon the spirit of investigation. They were not bloodthirsty, these Pikes, but they had good reason to suspect all inquirers of being at least deputy sheriffs, if not worse; and a Pike’s hatred of officers of the law is equaled in intensity only by his hatred for manual labor. But while there was doubt as to the fatherland of the little colony of Pikes at Jagger’s Bend, their every neighbor would willingly make affidavit as to the cause of their locating and remaining at the Bend. When humanitarians and optimists argued that it was because the water was good and convenient, that the Bend itself caught enough drift-wood for fuel, and that the dirt would yield a little gold when manipulated by placer and pan, all farmers and stockowners would freely admit the validity of these reasons; but the admission was made with a countenance whose indignation and sorrow indicated that the greater causes were yet unnamed. With eyes speaking emotions which words could not express, they would point to sections of wheatfields minus the grain-bearing heads—to hides and hoofs of cattle unslaughtered by themselves—to mothers of promising calves, whose tender bleatings answered not the maternal call—to the places which had once known fine horses, but had been untenanted since certain Pikes had gone across the mountains for game. They would accuse no man wrongfully, but in a country where all farmers had wheat and cattle and horses, and where prowling Indians and Mexicans were not, how could these disappearances occur? But to people owning no property in the neighborhood—to tourists and artists—the Pike settlement at the Bend was as interesting and ugly as a skye-terrier. The architecture of the village was of original style, and no duplicate existed. Of the half-dozen residences, one was composed exclusively of sod; another of bark; yet another of poles, roofed with a wagon-cover, and plastered on the outside with mud; the fourth was of slabs, nicely split from logs which had drifted into the Bend; the fifth was of hide stretched over a frame strictly gothic from foundation to ridgepole; while the sixth, burrowed into the hillside, displayed only the barrel which formed its chimney. A more aristocratic community did not exist on the Pacific Coast. Visit the Pikes when you would, you could never see any one working. Of churches, school-houses, stores and other plebeian institutions, there were none; and no Pike demeaned himself by entering trade, or soiled his hands by agriculture.