into fragrant plumes on the bare branches of her dooryard trees;
spring flushed the whole world with loveliness, and she was young,
and healthy, and too busy to be homesick.

Martin left the house at eight and was usually at home at five. He
would sometimes come into her kitchen while she finished dinner,
and tell her about the day, and then suggested that they go to the
"pictures" at night. But although Cherry and Alix often had coaxed
their father into this dissipation in Mill Valley, it was
different there, she found. That was a small colony of city
people, the theatre was small, and the films carefully selected.
One sat with one's neighbours and friends. But here in Red Creek
the theatre was a draughty barn, and the farm workers, big men
odorous of warm, acid perspiration, pushed in laughing and noisy;
the films were of a different character, too, and advertised by
frightful coloured posters at the doors. Martin himself did not
like them; indeed, he and Cherry found little to like in either
the people or the town.

It was a typical railroad town of California. It was flat, dusty,
all its buildings of wood. There were some two thousand souls in
Red Creek; two or three stores, a bakery from which the crude
odour of baking bread burst every night; saloons, warehouses, a
smithy, a butcher shop open only two days a week, a Chinese
laundry from which opium-tainted steam issued all day and all
night; cattle sheds, pepper trees, wheat barns, and a hotel of raw
pine, with a narrow bedroom represented by every one of the forty
narrow windows in its upper stories, and a lower floor decorated
with spittoons. Back of the crowded main street was another
street, beside which Main Street's muddy ugliness was beautiful.