Ex-Sea-Captain Schulz, now prune-grower in the mountain boundary west of Santa Clara Valley, turned in at the kitchen door. "I don't know what to do wit' the boy. Go, mine Anna, get the lad a clean shirt, and take it down to the creek." On Anna's return from the bathing pool she said softly to her mother, "Willie isn't at the creek. Perhaps he has run off." "O child, don't bother me about Willie! He'll run back again fast enough, he's that scared of the mountains and the trees." Anna was conscious of an undercurrent of sympathy with the forlorn waif her father had brought from the city some months before. The very love and awe with which the mountains filled her imaginative soul gave her comprehension of the fear with which they imbued the dull-witted offspring of San Francisco gutters. Willie did not return all that long, August day. The captain and his American wife spread and dipped prunes busily on the hot south slope. The box-laden wagon rolled by at intervals. Household duties went helter-skelter under Anna's management. At six o'clock Mrs. Schulz, hot and tired, wakened her lazy little daughter, outstretched beneath the hollyhocks and poppies in the small front garden. "For gracious sake, Anna! Hurry! You've not done the dinner dishes!" "Have the cows come?" Anna asked, resourcefully. "Land! If I hadn't forgotten about Willie! Come--hurry! You'll have to go for the cows. I'll wash the dishes." Anna felt quite in the mood to go for the cows. It meant an hour or so of patting barefooted and bare headed along the soft dust of the road, or over the slippery brown grass of the mountain pastures, with tall pines on every hand and a gold-blue sky above. She mused about the missing Willie. Had he carried out his occasional threat to run away? "The road is open, go when you like," was her father's one reply to such futile outbursts. But they well knew the road was not open to Willie. The six mountain miles intervening between their ranch and the station formed an impassable barrier to his timorous soul. "I guess he's afraid of the bigness of things," Anna concluded. "And he's got no call to run away. Papa threatens him, but he's never laid hand on him yet. I s'pose it's on account of the bath he ran away." There was no Willie at the bathing-pool. The checked gingham shirt fluttered lonesomely where she had that morning placed it. Some minutes later, shuffling deliciously among the dappled leaves of a hill trail, she sprang aside in quick dismay. "Goodness!" What had seemed to be a bunch of dry leaves and grass coiled swiftly, with the rattling whir that goes straight to the fear center of the human heart. In a flash Anna's hands were full of rocks. The first article in every California mountain child's education is to destroy every rattlesnake that comes in sight. Anna dodged the first strike of the snake, and before he could get nearer she began a fusillade of such efficiency that the reptile enemy sought retreat.