CHAPTER I

HANDS UP


The time was late August some eleven years ago. The place that part of
central California where, on one side, the plain unrolls in golden
levels, and on the other swells upward toward the rounded undulations of
the foothills.

It was very hot; the sky a fathomless blue vault, the land dreaming in
the afternoon glare, its brightness blurred here and there by shimmering
heat veils. Checkered by green and yellow patches, dotted with the black
domes of oaks, it brooded sleepily, showing few signs of life. At long
intervals ranch houses rose above embowering foliage, a green core in the
midst of fields where the brown earth was striped with lines of fruit
trees or hidden under carpets of alfalfa. To the west the foothills rose
in indolent curves, tan-colored, as if clothed with a leathern hide.
Their hollows were filled with the darkness of trees huddled about hidden
streams, ribbons of verdure that wound from the mountains to the plain.
Farther still, vision faint, remote and immaculate, the white peaks of
the Sierra hung, a painting on the drop curtain of the sky.

Across the landscape a parent stem of road wound, branches breaking from
it and meandering thread-small to ranch and village. It was white-dusted
here, but later would turn red and crawl upward under the resinous
dimness of pine woods to where the mining camps clung on the lower wall
of the Sierra. Already it had left behind the region of farms in