The roads he chose during those three days lay often through forests. He avoided the open, wide, concrete roads. “If I can get in with the little ranches, that’ll be a cleaner field. Ranch people have boys, I suppose.” The boys did not seem to want culture in the little ranches. Some of the women could hardly speak English. Their replies were given in an accent so exotic that the sense did not penetrate to Edward’s faulty hearing. When he looked at their faces, however, he was generally glad he could not understand. He was not wise in his choice of “clean fields.” Bungalows infest the slopes of the Russian River, yet almost every bungalow at which Edward knocked was apparently uninhabited, except at week-ends. There was no business there—still, there was the Russian River. A rigorous red road sawed up the dark high mountains on the south bank of the river. There were trees everywhere. Young redwoods against the sky were strangely bare and lancelike. The sun made nothing of the inconsiderable branches of the trees—it made clear only their proud back-bones. There were madrones. One would expect to bend a madrone like rubber; its stem has the apparent texture of red rubber. And bent it is, but only by great winds. Its stem and branches are red and rose-red or gold and green-gold; it glows like a pillar of jewels and precious metals. Once a year madrone opens hundreds of little windows in its scarlet and crimson tower, little green square windows are cut in the bark, through which joy in the heart of the madrone looks out at spring. At those times it is as if there was, pouring from the innumerable windows, a most gay green and gold light into the forest—light where sunlight cannot enter—a low, gay light in the forest shadows. But now madrone’s windows were closed, madrone was sealed up in its smooth shadeless red towers. The glazed grape-colored stems of manzanita haunted the shadows below the madrones. There were columbines with their flowers strangely balanced in the air like stage fairies. And most of the world in sight was pricked by pines and firs in all shades of green, ranging from a hot, live green to a green that had almost the sheen of a Blue Persian cat. The Russian River, far down, ran among mauvish tapering islands of sand. It crouched low down beneath the feet of the hills and the trees. The sun-dazzle upon the river dodged behind the shoulders of the hills. Edward tried to “work” the self-conscious summer villages and the concealed and suspicious mountain hamlets. _Milton for Our Boys_ seemed to be a drug in the forest market. Talk of uplift withered in the smell of the sea that came up the Russian River.