John got up out of his chair, took the black meerschaum from the mantel and lighted it. Then he returned to his chair. “You've been very quiet about it,” he observed steadily. “Why didn't you tell us?” Bill said nothing. “You say you're going to live in Monterey. Do you mean you aren't going to bring your wife here to live? Aren't you going to live in this house and farm this land?” Bill shook his head. “Are you ashamed of something, Bill?”
“No, sir,” Bill said. “I'm not ashamed of anything. I never did like to talk about my affairs.”
“Don't you think it a little of our affair, Bill?” John asked bitterly. “You are our family. Your children will be our grandchildren.”
“Mae was raised in town,” Bill broke in. “All of her friends live in Monterey, you knowâfriends she went to high school with. She doesn't like it out here where there's nothing doing.”
“I see.”
“So when she said she wanted to live in town I bought a partnership in the Ford agency. I always wanted to get into business.”
John nodded slowly. His first anger was giving way now. “Don't you think she might consent to live in this house, Bill? We have so much room. We can do over any part she wants changed.”
“But she doesn't like it in the country. All of her friends are in Monterey.”
Willa's mouth was set grimly. “Look at your father, Bill!” she ordered. John jerked his head upright and smiled gravely.
“Well, I guess that will be all right. Have you plenty of money?”
“Oh, sure! Plenty. And look here, father. We're getting a pretty big house, pretty big for two, that is. We talked about it, and we thought maybe you and mother would like to come to live with us.”
John continued to smile with courteous gravity. “And then what would become of the house and the farm?”
“Well, we talked about that, too. You could sell the place and get enough for it to live all your lives in town. I could sell this place for you in a week.”
John sighed and sank back against the cushions of his chair.
Willa said, “Bill, if I thought you would squeal, I'd beat you with a stick of wood.”
John lighted his pipe and tamped the tobacco down in it. “You can't go away for long,” he said gently. “Some day you'll get a homesickness you can't resist. This place is in your blood. When you have children you'll know that they can't grow up any place but here. You can go away for a little while, but you can't stay away. While you're in town, Bill, we'll just wait here and keep the house painted and the garden trimmed. You'll come back. Your children will play in the tank house. We'll wait for that. My father died dreaming of children,” he smiled sheepishly. “I'd almost forgotten that.”
“I could beat him with a stick,” Willa muttered.
Bill left the room in embarrassment. “He'll come back,” John repeated, after he had gone.
“Of course,” his wife agreed grimly.
His head jerked up and he glanced at her suspiciously. “You really think that, don't you, Willa? You're not just saying it for me? That would make me feel old.”
“Of course I think it. Do you think I'm wasting my breath?”
Bill was married in the late summer, and immediately afterward moved to his new stucco house in Monterey. In the fall John Whiteside grew restless again just as he had before Bill was born. He painted the house although it did not need it very badly. He mercilessly trimmed the shrubs in the garden.
“The land isn't producing enough,” he told Bert Munroe. “I've let it go for a long time. I could be raising a lot more on it than I am.”
“Yes,” said Bert. “None of us make our land produce enough. I've always wondered why you didn't have a band of sheep. Seems to me your hills would carry quite a flock.”
“We used to have a flock in my father's time. That seems a long time ago. But, as I tell you, I've let the place go. The brush has got thick.”
“Burn it off,” said Bert. “If you burn that brush this fall you'll get fine pasture next spring.”
“That's a good idea. The brush comes down pretty close to the house, though. I'll have to get a good deal of help.”
“Well, I'll help you, and I'll bring Jimmie. You have two men, and counting yourself, that'll be five. If we start in the morning when there's no wind, and wait for a little rain first, there won't be any danger.”
The fall set in early. By October the willows along the creeks of the Pastures of Heaven were yellow as flames. Almost out of sight in the air, great squadrons of ducks flew southward, and in the barnyard the tame mallards flapped their wings and stretched their necks and honked yearningly. The blackbirds wheeled over the fields, uniting under a leader. There was a little early frost in the air. John Whiteside fretted against the winter. All day he worked in the orchard, helping to prune the trees.
One night he awakened to hear a light rain whispering on the slates and plashing softly in the garden.
“Are you awake, Willa?” he asked quietly.
“Of course.”
“It's the first rain. I wanted you to hear it.”
“I was awake when it started,” she said complacently. “You missed the best part of it, the gusty part. You were snoring.”
“Well, it won't last long. It's just a little first rain to wash off the dust.”
In the morning, the sun shone through an atmosphere glistening with water. There was a crystalline quality in the sunlight. Breakfast was just over when Bert Munroe and his son Jimmie tramped up the back steps and into the kitchen.
“ âMorning, Mrs. Whiteside! 'Morning, John! I thought it was a good time to burn off that brush today. It was a nice little rain we had last night.”
“That's a good idea. Sit down and have a cup of coffee.”
“We just got up from breakfast, John. Couldn't swallow another thing.”
“You, Jimmie? Cup of coffee?”
“Couldn't swallow another thing,” said Jimmie.
“Well, then, let's get started before the grass dries out.”
John went into the large basement which opened its sloping door beside the kitchen steps. In a moment he brought out a can of kerosene. When the two hired men had come in from the orchard, John provided all the men with wet gunny sacks.
“No wind,” said Bert. “This is a good time for it. Start it right here, John! We'll stay between the fire and the house until we get a big strip burned off. It don't pay to take chances.”
John plunged a kerosene torch into the thick brush and drew a line of fire along its edge. The brush crackled and snapped fiercely. The flame ran along the ground among the resinous stems. Slowly the men worked along behind the fire, up the sharp little hill.
“That's about enough here,” Bert called. “There's plenty of distance from the house now. I think two of us better fire it from the upper side now.” He started walking up around the brush patch, followed by Jimmie. At that moment a little autumn whirlwind danced down the hill, twisting and careening as it came. It made a coquettish dash into the fire, picked up sparks and embers and flung them against the white house. Then, as though tired of the game, the little column of air collapsed. Bert and Jimmy were running back. The five men searched the ground and stamped out every spark. “It's lucky we saw that,” said John. “Silly little thing like that might burn the house down.”
Bert and Jimmy circled the patch and fired it from the upper side. John and his two men worked up the hill, keeping between the flames and the house. The air was dense and blue with smoke. In a quarter of an hour the brush patch was nearly burned off.
Suddenly they heard a scream from the direction of the house. The house itself was barely visible through the smoke from the burning brush. All five of the men turned about and broke into a run. As the smoke grew thinner, they could see a thick, grey eddy gushing from one of the upper windows.
Willa was running distractedly toward them over the burned ground. John stopped when he came to her.
“I heard a noise in the basement,” she cried. “I opened the door in the kitchen that leads to the basement, and the thing just swooped past me. It's all over the house now.”
Bert and Jimmie charged up to them. “Are the hoses by the tank house?” Bert shouted.
John tore his gaze from the burning house. “I don't know,” he said uncertainly.
Bert took him by the arm. “Come on! What are you waiting for? We can save some of it. We can get some of the furniture out anyway.”
John disengaged his arm and started to saunter down the hill toward the house. “I don't think I want to save any of it,” he said.
“You're crazy,” Bert cried. He ran on and plunged about the tank house, looking for the hoses.
Now the smoke and flame were pouring from the window. From inside the house came a noise of furious commotion; the old building was fighting for its life.
One of the hired men walked up beside John. “If only that window was closed, we'd have a chance,” he said in a tone of apology. “It's so dry, that house. And it's got a draft like a chimbley.”
John walked to the wood-pile and sat in the sawbuck. Willa looked at his face for a moment and then stood quietly beside him. The outside walls were smoking now, and the house roared with the noise of a great wind.
Then a very strange and a very cruel thing happened. The side wall fell outward like a stage set, and there, twelve feet above the ground, was the sitting room untouched as yet by the fire. As they watched the long tongues lashed into the room. The leather chairs shivered and shrank like live things from the heat. The glass on the pictures shattered and the steel engravings shriveled to black rags. They could see the big black meerschaum pipe hanging over the mantel. Then the flame covered the square of the room and blotted it out. The heavy slate roof crashed down, crushing walls and floors under its weight, and the house became a huge bonfire without shape.
Bert had come back and was standing helplessly beside John. “It must of been that whirlwind,” he explained. “A spark must of gone down the cellar and got into the coal oil. Yes, sir, it must of been that coal oil.”
John looked up at him and smiled with a kind of horrified amusement. “Yes, sir, it must have been that coal oil,” he echoed.
The fire burned smoothly now that its victory was gained; a field of growing flame rose high in the air. It no longer resembled a house at all. John Whiteside stood up from the saw-buck and straightened his shoulders and sighed. His eyes rested for a moment on a place in the flame fifteen feet from the ground where the sitting room had been. “Well, that's over,” he said. “And I think I know how a soul feels when it sees its body buried in the ground and lost. Let's go to your house, Bert. I want to telephone Bill. He will probably have a room for us.”
“Why don't you stay with us? We have plenty of room.”
“No, we'll go to Bill.” John looked around once more at the burning pile. Willa put out her hand to take his arm, but withdrew it before she had touched him. He saw the gesture and smiled at her. “I wish I could have saved my pipe,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” Bert broke in effusively. “That was the best colored meerschaum I ever saw. They have pipes in museums that aren't colored any better than that. That pipe must have been smoked a long time.”
“It was,” John agreed. “A very long time. And you know, it had a good taste, too.”
XII
At two o'clock in the afternoon the sightseeing bus left its station in Monterey for a tour of the peninsula. As it moved along over the roads of the publicized Seventeen Mile Drive, the travelers peered out at the spectacular houses of very rich people. The sightseers felt a little shy as they looked out of the dusty windows, a little like eavesdroppers, but privileged, too. The bus crawled through the town of Carmel and over a hill to the brown Mission Carmelo with its crooked dome, and there the young driver pulled to the side of the road and put his feet on the dashboard while his passengers were led through the dark old church.
When they returned to their seats some of the barriers traveling people build about themselves were down.
“Did you hear?” said the prosperous man. “The guide said the church is built like a ship with a stone keel and hull deep in the ground under it. That's for the earthquakesâlike a ship in a storm, you see. But it wouldn't work.”
A young priest with a clean rosy face and a pride in his new serge cassock answered from two seats behind: “But it has worked. There have been earthquakes, and the mission still stands; built of mud and it still stands.”
An old man broke in, an old and healthy man with eager eyes. “Funny things happen,” he said. “I lost my wife last year. Been married over fifty years.” He looked smilingly about for some comment, and forgot the funny things that happen.
A honeymooning couple sat arm in arm. The girl squeezed tightly. “Ask the driver where we're going now.”
The bus moved slowly on, up the Carmel Valleyâpast orchards and past fields of artichokes, and past a red cliff, veined with green creepers. The afternoon was waning now, and the sun sank toward the seaward mouth of the valley. The road left the Carmel River and climbed up a hillside until it ran along the top of a narrow ridge. Here the driver cut his bus sharply to the roadside and backed and pulled ahead four times before he had faced around. Then he shut off the motor and turned to his passengers. “This is as far as we go, folks. I always like to stretch my legs before we start back. Maybe some of you folks would like to get out and walk around.”