CHAPTER XVIII
SPIES
Smith, the shaggy, mouse-coloured burro, lifted his voice in that sobbing wail of welcome which has caused his kind to be designated as desert canaries, as Oliver rode into the pasture. Smith's was a gregarious soul. To be left entirely alone was torture. His ears were twelve inches long, and the protuberances over his eyes were so craggy that Oliver had hesitated between the names of Smith and William Cullen Bryant. On the whole, though, "Smith" had seemed more companionable.
Oliver loosed Poche to console the lonesome heart of Smith and went at the irrigating of his garden. When a stream of water was trickling along every hoed furrow he put on heavy hobnailed laced-boots and went into the hills in search of his third bee tree.
It seems illogical to set down that one could live for nearly two months on forty acres of land without having explored every square foot of it. But Oliver had not trod upon at least two thirds of his property. Locked chaparral presents many difficulties. Farmers detest it, and artists go wild over it. But farmers are obliged to sprawl flat and crawl through it occasionally, while artists sit on their stools at a distance from it that brings out all the alluring browns and yellows and greens and olives of which it is capable under the magic of the changing sunlight.
Oliver had seen bees darting like arrows from the flowers in the creekbed in a westerly direction, up over the thickest of the chaparral. Up there somewhere was another colony of winged misers and their hoarded wealth of honey. Honey was bringing a good price just then, and a merchant at Halfmoon Flat would buy it. So now the beeman climbed the hill and crawled into the chaparral in the direction the insects had flown.
Scattered here and there through the dense thicket were pines and spruce and black oak. In one of these trees the bees must have their home; and his task of finding it was not entirely a haphazard quest. When he crawled to an opening in the bushes he would climb into the crotch of one of them and locate the nearest tree. Then, flattening himself once more, he would crawl to this tree and look for a hollow for the bees. Finding none, he would locate another tree and crawl to it.
Thus wearisomely engaged he crawled into a depression three feet deep in the earth beneath him. This allowed him to sit erect for the first time in minutes, and he availed himself of the chance, industriously mopping his brow.
Now, Oliver Drew was not a miner, but he was a son of the outdoor West and knew at once that he was seated in an ancient prospect hole. About the excavation were piled the dirt and stones that had been shovelled out.
He speculated over it. For all he knew, it might date back to the fascinating days of '49. A great forest of pines might have stood here then. Or maybe the pines had been burned away, and a forest of gigantic oaks had followed the conifers, to rear themselves majestically above the pigmies that delved, oftimes impotently, for the glittering yellow treasure at their roots. Or, again, the prospect hole might have been dug years later, after the oaks had disappeared and the chaparral had claimed the land. There was no way of telling, for every decade or so forest fires swept the country almost clean, and some new growth superseded the old in Nature's endless cycle.