The old man's voice trembled, and he walked into the house and shut the door; and Job knew the talk was over for that night. Whistling to Shot, he and the dog stole upstairs to Job's little bare room, where a few wood-cuts hung on the wall, and a long, narrow bedstead, a chair, and a box that served for table, were the only furniture. He took the little Testament from under his pillow and lovingly kissed it; then turning, he read for his good-night lesson from his new-found divine Friend: "Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid. Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world." Kneeling a moment for a good-night prayer, he was soon in bed and asleep, with Shot curled up on the covers at his feet, while through the open window the sound of a guitar came where one of the mill hands was playing the tune of "Hush, my child, lie still and slumber, Holy angels guard thy bed." CHAPTER VIII. OFF TO THE BIG TREES. The radical change that had come into Job's life cut him off from the companions of other days and left him without a chum. It showed the manliness of his nature that as he started out in the new life, seeing quickly that he must part company with the old companions who had nearly wrecked his life, he acted on the conviction at once. Perhaps it was this, perhaps the fact that his life was now almost altogether on the ranch, that made Job and Bess boon companions. Many a mountain trip they took together. It was on one of these that they went to the Big Trees. That bright September morning, gayly attired with new sombrero and red bandanna above his white outing-shirt, astride Bess, Job rode slowly up the Chichilla mountain on his way to visit those giant trees. Up by "Doc" Trainer's place, over the smooth, hard county turnpike, where the toll-road, ever winding round and round the mountain-side, climbs on through the passes of the live-oak belt to the scraggly pines of the low hills, on to the endless giant forests of the cloud-kissed summits, the young horseman made his way. Now and then the road descended to a little ravine, where a mountain torrent had torn a path to the deep canyons below: again it stretched through a dim, royal archway of green where the great trees linked branches as over a king's pathway; and then it turned a bend where the steep sides sank so suddenly that even the trees had no foothold and the bare space disclosed a view over boundless forests of dark green, and the vast, yawning canyons and distant rolling hills, to where, far-off, like some dream of the past, one caught glimpses of the endless plains covered with the autumn haze and golden in the morning sunlight.