Treasure and Trouble Therewith | Page 8

in the Golden Nugget Hotel in Placerville
and settled down to farming. He had settled and settled hard, settled
like a barnacle, so firm and fast that he had never been able to pull
himself loose. Peace he had found but also poverty. If the mineral vein
was capricious, so were the elements, insect pests and the fruit market.
Thirty years after he had bought the ranch he was still there and still
poor with his wife Mary Ellen, his daughter Sadie and his son Mark.
Mark's advent had followed the decease of two older boys and his
mother had proclaimed his preciousness by christening him Marquis de
Lafayette. Her other sons had borne the undistinguished appellations of
relatives, but this one, her consolation and her Benjamin, would be
decked with the flower of her fancy. Of the original bearer of the name
she knew nothing. Waiting on table at the Golden Nugget and later
bearing children and helping on the ranch had not left her time for
historical study. When her son, waking to the blight she had so
innocently put upon him, asked her where she had found the name, she
had answered, "In a book," but beyond that could give no data. When,
unable to bear his shame, he had abbreviated it to "Mark D.L." she had
been hurt.
Otherwise he had not disappointed her. When she had crowned him
with a title she had felt that a high destiny awaited him and the event
proved it. After a youth on the ranch, Mark, at sixteen, grew restive, at
seventeen announced that he wanted an education and at eighteen
packed his grip and went to work his way through Stanford University.
Old Man Burrage made himself a bore at the crossroads store and the
county fair telling how his boy was waiting on table down to Stanford

and doing typewriting nights. Some boy, that!
When Mark came home on his vacations it was like the return of
Ulysses after his ten years' wandering--they couldn't look at him
enough, or get enough time to listen. His grammar was straightened out,
his chin smooth, the freckles gone from his hands, and yet he was just
the same--no fancy frills about him, Old Man Burrage bragged to his
cronies. And then came the coping stone--he told them he was going to
be a lawyer. Some of the neighbors laughed but others grew thoughtful
and nodded commendingly. Even on the balconies of the white houses
in the wicker chairs under the awnings Mark and his aspirations drew
forth interested comment. Most of these people had known him since
he was a shock-headed, barefoot kid, and when they saw him in his
store clothes and heard his purified grammar, they realized that for
youth in California belongs the phrase "the world is my oyster."
Now Mark had graduated and was studying in a large law office in San
Francisco. He was paid twenty dollars a week, was twenty-four years
old, rather silent, five-feet-ten and accounted good-looking. At the time
this story opens he was spending his vacation--pushed on to the
summer's end by a pressure of work in the office--on the ranch with his
parents.
It was late afternoon, on the day following the holdup, and he was
sitting in the barn doorway milking the brown cow. The doorway was
shadowed, the blackness of the barn's interior behind it, the scent of
clean hay drifting out and mingling with the scents of baked earth and
tarweed that came from the heated fields. With his cheek against the
cow's side he could see between the lower limbs of the oaks the country
beyond, rust-colored and tan, streaked with blue shadows and the
mottled blackness below the trees. Turning a little further he could look
down the road with the eucalyptus tall on either side, the yellow path
barred by their shade. From the house came a good smell of hot bread
and a sound of voices--Mother and Sadie were getting ready for supper.
At intervals Mother's face, red and round below her sleeked, gray hair,
her spectacles up, her dress turned in at the neck, appeared at the
window to take a refreshing peep at her boy milking the brown cow.

The milk sizzed and foamed in the pail and the milker, his forehead
against the cow's warm pelt, watched it rise on the tin's side. It made a
loud drumming which prevented his hearing a hail from the picket
fence. The hail came again in a husky, dust-choked voice:
"Hello, can you give me a drink?"
This time Mark heard and wheeled on the stool. A tramp was leaning
against the fence looking at him.
Tramps are too familiar in California for curiosity or interest, also they
are unpopular. They have done dreadful things--lonely