pastures greatly to their advantage; and bands of blethering flocks
shepherded by wild, hairy men of little speech, who attested their
rights to the feeding ground with their long staves upon each
other's skulls. Edswick homesteaded the field about the time the
wild tide of mining life was roaring and rioting up Kearsarge, and
where the village now stands built a stone hut, with loopholes to
make good his claim against cattlemen or Indians. But Edswick died
and Roeder became master of the field. Roeder owned cattle on a
thousand hills, and made it a recruiting ground for his bellowing
herds before beginning the long drive to market across a shifty
desert. He kept the field fifteen years, and afterward falling
into difficulties, put it out as security against certain sums.
Connor, who held the securities, was cleverer than Roeder and not
so busy. The money fell due the winter of the Big Snow, when all
the trails were forty feet under drifts, and Roeder was away in San
Francisco selling his cattle. At the set time Connor took the law
by the forelock and was adjudged possession of the field. Eighteen
days later Roeder arrived on snowshoes, both feet frozen,
and the money in his pack. In the long suit at law ensuing, the
field fell to Ruffin, that clever one-armed lawyer with the tongue
to wile a bird out of the bush, Connor's counsel, and was sold by
him to my neighbor, whom from envying his possession I call Naboth.

Curiously, all this human occupancy of greed and mischief left
no mark on the field, but the Indians did, and the unthinking
sheep. Round its corners children pick up chipped arrow points of
obsidian, scattered through it are kitchen middens and pits of old
sweat-houses. By the south corner, where the campoodie stood, is
a single shrub of "hoopee" (Lycium andersonii), maintaining
itself hardly among alien shrubs, and near by, three low rakish