There was a large log house that Adam Selden's father had built in the days of '49, in which the Old Man Selden of today had first opened his eyes on life. There were several lesser cabins in the mountainside cup, two of which were occupied by Hurlock Selden and Winthrop Selden and their families. The remaining two boys, Moffat and Bolar, lived in the big house with Jessamy, her mother, and the wicked Old Man of the Hills.
There was an extensive garden, watered by a generous spring that gushed picturesquely from under a gigantic boulder set in the hillside. There were perhaps ten acres of pasture, and a small deciduous orchard. Little more in the way of agricultural land. The Seldens merely made this place their home and headquarters—their cattle ranged the hills outside, and most of their activities toward a livelihood were carried on away from home. Selden owned a thousand acres over in the Clinker Creek Country and a winter range a trifle larger fifty miles below the foothills. He moved his herds three times in a year—from the winter pastures to the Clinker Creek Country for the spring grass, keeping them there till August, when they were driven to government mountain ranges at an altitude of six thousand feet; and from thence, in October, to winter range once more. The Clinker Creek range, however, was comprised of several thousand acres beside the thousand owned by Selden. This represented lands long since deserted by their owners as useless for agricultural purposes, and upon which Selden kept up the taxes, or appropriated without negotiations, as conditions demanded. Oliver Drew's forty had been a part of this until Oliver's inopportune arrival.
Jessamy rode into the rail corral and unsaddled her mare. Then she hurried to the house to help her mother, a tired looking, once comely woman of fifty-eight.
Mrs. Selden had been an Ivison—a sister of Old Tabor Ivison, who had homesteaded Oliver's forty acres thirty years before. As a girl she had married Herman Lomax, a country youth with ambitions for the city. He had done fairly well in the mercantile business in San Francisco, and Jessamy, the only child, was born to them. The girl had been raised to young womanhood and attended the State University. Then her father had died, leaving his business in an involved condition; and in the end the widow and her daughter found there was little left for them.
They returned to the scene of Mrs. Lomax's girlhood, where they tried without success to farm the old home place, to which, in the interim, the widow had fallen heir. Then to the surprise of every one—Jessamy most of all—Mrs. Lomax consented to marry Old Adam Selden, the father of four strapping sons and "the meanest man in the country." At the time Jessamy had not known this last, but she knew it now.
However, such an independent young woman as Jessamy would not consent to suffer a great deal at the hands of a step-father. She stayed on with the family for her mother's sake, but she had her own neat living room and bedroom and went her own way entirely. It must end someday. Old Adam Selden, though hard and tough as a time-battered oak, could not live for ever. Her mother would not divorce him. So Jessamy stayed and waited, and rode over the hills alone, unafraid and independent.
She was helping her mother to get supper in the commodious kitchen, with its black log walls and immense stone fireplace, which room served as dining room and living room as well, when Adam Selden, Bolar, and Moffat rode in from the trail and corraled their horses. Supper was ready as the three clanked to the house in spurs and chaps, and washed noisily in basins under a gigantic liveoak at the cabin door. Then Jessamy took Oliver Drew's letter from her bosom and propped it against old Adam's coffee cup.
Selden's bushy brows came down as he scraped his chair to the table. Mail for any Selden was an unusual occurrence.
"What's this here?" Adam's thick fingers held the envelope before his eyes, and the beetling grey brows strained lower.
"Mail," indifferently answered Jessamy, setting a pan of steaming biscuits, covered with a spotless cloth, on the table.