You lean from your window and watch life's column
Trampling and struggling through dust and dew,
Filled with its purposes grave and solemn;
An act, a gesture, a face - who knows?
And you pluck from your bosom the verse that grows,
And down it flies like my red, red rose,
And you sit and dream as away it goes,
And think that your duty is done - now, don't you?"

- Bret Harte.



In the early days it was called the Mountaineer House. Now it is
colloquially known as the "stone house," and has for sixty years been
the home of the Owen King family. It is surrounded today by one of the
most beautiful orchards in the foothills. Wide verandahs of the native
gray granite to match the old house itself have been added. It is
electrically lighted and furnace heated, modern in every way, yet still
the romance of former times seems to cling to its sturdy old walls.

All that remain unchanged are three huge trees flanking the highway in
front. What tales they could tell, if they would, of what passed by the
junction of two roads beneath them. Of the long and weary caravans from
across the plains crawling up from the bridge at Whiskey Bar, below
Rattlesnake, glad that their six months' struggle was nearly over: of
horsemen on beautiful Spanish horses riding furiously, whither no one
knew nor dared ask; of dark deeds in the old stone house below, that was
so inscrutably quiet by day and so mysteriously alive by night; of
ghastly doings by the Tom Bell gang which ranged all the way from the