I could see that the man was capable of anything desperate--I excused myself for a moment to get my luggage, slipped down stairs to the waiting room, took the small handbag that contained my personal belongings, went out the rear door and took the road toward Gilroy on foot. I hadn’t any plan in view--just walked on well into the night until I was exhausted with fatigue and lack of food. “Youth will not be denied,” is an old saying. I passed a house where the lights were still burning and determined to seek a place of shelter. I knocked at the door. To my astonishment and joy, it was opened by a man called Clark, of Southern birth, whom I had met several times in San Francisco. Clark received me like a long-lost brother, roused the household, had an old-fashioned Southern meal prepared that made me think of home, and an hour later I was sound asleep in a comfortable bed, safe among friends. The next evening Mr. Clark accompanied me to Gilroy, where I was concealed in the hotel of a mutual friend for two days, waiting for a southbound stage that journeyed across the mountains to the San Joaquin Valley and thence to Visalia in Tulare County. There were two passengers on the stage when I boarded it, a gentleman called Byington and his friend, Thomas Staples. Byington’s son was afterward District Attorney of San Francisco for several years. The gentleman recognized me at once and as we traveled along I found that he wasn’t a half-bad secessionist himself. He told me that he and his friend were bound to inspect a mine in which they were interested at a place called Kernville, about 125 miles southeast of Visalia. He advised me that it was a notable locality to “hole up” and avoid observation indefinitely; that the “ville,” in fact, comprised only a few shacks, appurtenant to the mine, which was just in the early stages of development. It was in the winter of 1864--the winter of the awful drought when scarce a drop of rain fell in California. The weather was like midsummer. The great valley then only had a few straggling settlements. The vast prospect was unbroken save when here and there a miniature whirlwind in the distance raised a spiral of sand skyward from the parched ground, or where a band of dust-laden, half-famished sheep, staggered on toward the mountains to escape from a universal desolation. What a different prospect now. To one who saw those unbroken solitudes, that are to-day among the busiest haunts of men, with fine cities, railroads, power lines, immense systems of irrigation, intensive agriculture, oil fields--everything in short that goes to make prosperity and a high civilization,--nothing is more impressive of what a few brief decades of enterprise can bring forth.